In the history of Rocket League, few names connect as many eras as Francesco “Kuxir97” Cinquemani. He crossed from Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars into Rocket League’s alpha and early release, helped define the European metagame with FlipSid3 Tactics, and attached his own handle to one of the game’s most iconic mechanics, the “Kuxir pinch.” A world champion, a Guinness World Record holder, and a long serving veteran of the RLCS ecosystem, his career is one of risk, reinvention, and mechanical obsession.
SARPBC Roots and the Leap into Rocket League
Kuxir’s story starts long before Rocket League. At Christmas in 2008 he received a PlayStation 3, and a few months later a new game on the store front page caught his eye: Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. He bought it on impulse and quickly became part of a tiny but fiercely competitive community. The pace, freedom of movement, and light ball made SARPBC feel like an extension of his own body, and he poured himself into one versus one duels until he was facing and beating the best players on the European ladders.
In that small scene he joined lobbies and chats with veterans who treated the game like a familiar town rather than a faceless ladder. Those years gave him both mechanics and a sense of community that he would later say he never fully recaptured. Even when Rocket League’s alpha arrived in 2014, he approached it as a sceptical SARPBC loyalist. Sources from the Rocket League Esports Wiki and Psyonix’s own profile agree that he joined the alpha, played all through beta, and still believed the older game felt better in many ways, yet he also recognised that Rocket League would be the future of car football and followed it into release.
When Rocket League launched in 2015 he immediately teamed with Mark “Markydooda” Exton and Michael “M1k3Rules” Costello. That trio would become the core of his early career. In interviews he has said that he committed his life to competitive Rocket League at this point, leaving high school to focus on practice and accepting that his career would depend on tournament results.
FlipSid3 Tactics and the First RLCS Era
The FlipSid3 Tactics era defined Kuxir’s prime and most of his public legacy. Shortly after launch, he, Markydooda, and M1k3Rules began winning online events on a regular basis. Contemporary retrospectives on the “Kuxir pinch” mechanic recall FlipSid3’s run of dominance in the Rocket Royale era, a sign of how far ahead they were of the developing European field.
In 2016 the Rocket League Championship Series arrived and FlipSid3 carried their online dominance into the official circuit. In Season 1 they finished second in the European group stage, then won the European online final, and advanced through the inaugural RLCS World Championship all the way to the grand final before falling 4 to 2 to iBUYPOWER Cosmic. Kuxir later called that loss “extremely heartbreaking,” not only because it denied him a title but because it was his last tournament with M1k3Rules.
That first RLCS season also produced one of his most remarkable personal records. On 10 July 2016, in an 8 to 0 win over Supersonic Avengers during the Season 1 European online finals, he scored seven goals himself, which Guinness World Records recognised as the most goals by a single player in a Rocket League Championship Series game at that time.
The heartbreak of Season 1 became the fuel for Season 2. According to Psyonix’s profile, he spent months grinding fifteen to twenty hour days in Free Play, refining his camera settings, studying one versus one duels, and honing his positioning as a third man while also logging countless two versus two matches with Marius “gReazymeister” Ranheim to build synergy.
The results were immediate. FlipSid3 entered Amsterdam as Europe’s top seed, but the title run was not a simple sweep. They were bumped to the lower bracket on day one, then caught fire, going 18 games to 3 the rest of the way and winning the RLCS Season 2 World Championship by defeating Mockit Aces in back to back best of seven sets in the grand finals. Kuxir would later describe RLCS Season 2 not only as his peak as a player but as the best moment of his life, proof in his eyes that years of obsessive practice and the gamble of leaving school had meant something.
From World Title to Rebuilds
The seasons that followed show how thin the line is between dominance and doubt in a young esport. Season 3 league play went well for FlipSid3, and they finished third in Europe, but at the World Championship they exited in a 3 to 1 loss to The Leftovers. The following season was worse. In Season 4 the team failed to reach the World Championship at all, their first miss, and Kuxir later admitted that watching from home made him question whether his time at the top was over.
That slump also broke up one of Rocket League’s most beloved duos. After missing LAN in Season 4, FlipSid3 made the decision to drop Markydooda, a move both players have described as painful but necessary. Kuxir has said that Markydooda himself felt he was no longer putting in the required effort and encouraged the team to bring in a newer player with more drive.
FlipSid3’s answer was Maurice “Yukeo” Weihs, joining a roster that now featured Kuxir, Miztik, and Yukeo. Season 5 was still a rebuilding year that ended outside World Championship qualification, but by Season 6 the changes paid off. In European league play Kuxir was the standout, earning MVP honours as FlipSid3 finished third in the standings and secured a spot at the RLCS Season 6 World Championship. Although they exited early at LAN after losing to eventual champions Cloud9, he considered the league phase one of his strongest seasons and treated the LAN disappointment as a lesson in consistency rather than a final verdict.
WSOE 4, The Bricks, and the Last FlipSid3 Chapter
The end of the FlipSid3 era came in stages. After Season 6, Yukeo left to join Dignitas, one of Europe’s super teams, leaving FlipSid3 with a vacancy and only a short window before a new invitational, WSOE 4: The Rocket League Showdown, in Las Vegas. To fill that gap they brought in Jack “Speed” Packwood-Clarke as a stand in and de facto tryout.
What followed was one of the most surprising runs of Kuxir’s career. WSOE 4 featured many of the best teams in the world. Psyonix previews and contemporary analyses listed FlipSid3 as underdogs, yet the roster of Kuxir, Miztik, and Speed caught fire on stage. They swept aside Dignitas, took series over North American favourites, and defeated NRG Esports in the grand finals. Forbes reported that the trio claimed the fifty thousand dollar first prize and custom gold WSOE chains, while community sites still point to the upset win as a classic example of experienced veterans meshing with a rising talent at exactly the right moment.
By early 2019 FlipSid3’s long run in Rocket League was ending. On 28 February 2019 the organisation announced it was leaving the scene after failing to reach new contract terms with players, closing a chapter for both the team and its longest serving player. Kuxir, Speed, and Miztik continued together as The Bricks, carrying their chemistry into RLCS Season 7. By the time DreamHack Valencia arrived later that year, The Bricks were playing with Linus “al0t” Möllergren, and that lineup reached the top four.
The Psyonix Pro File on Kuxir, published during this period, highlighted how difficult Season 7 felt for him despite winning the league’s Golden Striker award. He spoke about thinking of the game even in his sleep and still feeling that the results did not match his effort, a glimpse of the psychological toll that long careers can take even on players who once looked unstoppable.
Mousesports, Team Liquid, and the Veteran Era
After The Bricks, stability became harder to find. In September 2019 mousesports entered Rocket League by signing Kuxir, Speed, and Linus “al0t” Möllergren. With mousesports the trio finished fourth in RLCS Season 8 European league play and achieved a top eight at DreamHack Pro Circuit Montreal, while Esports Earnings lists RLCS Season 9 Europe and RLCS Season 8 as two of the highest paying stretches of Kuxir’s later career.
In mid 2020 mousesports withdrew from Rocket League. Team Liquid seized the opportunity and on 4 July 2020 announced their entry into the game by signing the ex mousesports roster of Speed, Kuxir, and Emil “Fruity” Moselund. For a short span that lineup carried the aura of a legendary veteran paired with two ambitious younger teammates, and Liquid’s own announcement material and later retrospective interviews make clear that players like Fruity were both star struck and eager to learn from someone with Kuxir’s history.
Results in the newly structured RLCS X era were mixed, and by late 2020 the team had changed direction, with Kuxir moving on to shorter stints with a series of European lineups under banners such as SWAG, FlipFlop Tactics, and later Wolves Esports. The Rocket League Esports Wiki lists him as joining Wolves in March 2021 and continuing to appear in RLCS Season X European regional events, while Esports Earnings shows that he kept entering both RLCS qualifiers and regional tournaments into the mid 2020s, including the Italian Rocket Championship and European open qualifiers for the 2024 and 2025 Majors.
These later years show a different side of his legacy. Instead of anchoring a perennial title threat, he became the veteran still chasing form in a field where younger mechanical prodigies kept arriving. Yet his willingness to compete through multiple structural overhauls of RLCS and to represent smaller organisations and national scenes, especially in Italy, underlines how rooted he remains in the game that defined his adult life.
Playstyle, Mechanics, and the “Kuxir Pinch”
Throughout this long career, two things stand out most in the way players and analysts talk about Kuxir: his mechanical creativity and his obsessive work ethic. Psyonix’s profile describes days of fifteen to twenty hours in Free Play chasing the ball, adjusting camera settings, grinding duels, and fine tuning third man reads until he felt that nothing could stop him.
Community writers and mechanics guides go further and frame him as one of the game’s first true innovators. A detailed tutorial on the “Kuxir pinch” credits him as the inventor of the wall pinch shot that now bears his name and calls him arguably the most noteworthy legend to have played on the RLCS circuit. That same piece notes his reputation as an early player to make tornado spins a real threat in competition, an early adopter of air dribbles, and a player seen pulling off backflip flick variations years before they became widely standardised in the mechanical vocabulary of the scene.
The pinch itself symbolises how he approached the game. Rather than treating the walls and corners as awkward spaces, he learned to use the corner of his car’s hitbox to drive the ball sharply into the wall at a precise angle, converting defensive recoveries into blistering counterattacks that could cross an entire field in a single touch. Over time other players refined and adapted the technique, but the name stuck, a rare case of a community mechanic carrying an individual player’s tag long after his peak.
His playstyle in three versus three was never just about flash. Interviews describe him training to be the best third man on the field, mixing deep defensive positioning and last second saves with sudden solo pushes, and then using one versus one and two versus two queues to sharpen his shooting and dribbling. Match footage and highlight compilations of his prime show long stretches of patient back line coverage punctuated by impossible angle shots, delayed flicks, and, of course, pinches that punished defenders who misread wall bounces.
All of this sits on top of a mental approach shaped by risk. In his own words he does not recommend leaving school to become a professional gamer unless a player is willing to commit everything and accept that a few bad seasons could end their career. He has talked about using frustration after losses as fuel to practise harder, about refusing to give up regardless of cost, and about deliberately avoiding social media to keep his ego in check and his focus on competition rather than fame.
Results, Records, and Career Scale
Measured by trophies and prize money, Kuxir’s career sits near the top of Rocket League’s first generation. Esports Earnings lists 163 tournaments and $149,894 in prize winnings through 2025, almost entirely from Rocket League.
His major results include an RLCS Season 2 World Championship title with FlipSid3 Tactics, an RLCS Season 1 World Championship runner up finish, and multiple RLCS league podiums in Europe, including third place finishes in Seasons 3 and 6 and a top four in Season 9. Outside RLCS he added an offline title at DreamHack Summer 2017 and WSOE 4: The Rocket League Showdown, both against stacked international fields.
Individually he earned the EU RLCS Season 6 MVP award for league play and the Golden Striker award in Season 7, recognition that he remained one of the region’s most productive attackers even as new generations of players arrived. The Guinness World Record entry for his seven goal game against Supersonic Avengers preserves another piece of his prime in unusual form, a statistical marker from the earliest days of the RLCS era.
Legacy and GOAT Tier
From the perspective of an esports historian, Kuxir’s legacy rests on three pillars. First is his role as a bridge between eras. He is one of the few players whose competitive story begins in SARPBC, passes through Rocket League’s alpha and launch, peaks with an RLCS world title, and continues into the franchise era of RLCS X and beyond.
Second is his mechanical imprint. The fact that “Kuxir pinch” remains standard vocabulary years after his peak speaks for itself, and community writers still describe him as one of the most important mechanical pioneers the game has seen.
Third is his sustained presence at the top of Europe. Across more than a decade he has been a champion, a league MVP, a world finalist, a veteran fighting relegation, and a national representative in Italian events. Many of his peers and successors grew up watching his POVs from Amsterdam, DreamHack, and RLCS broadcasts, and the Psyonix Pro File published in 2019 already treated him as a legend even while he was still battling for top eight finishes.
Within a cross game Esports Legacy Profile framework that values world titles, mechanical influence, longevity, and cross era relevance, Kuxir belongs in the highest Rocket League tier. He is a world champion with defining plays on the biggest stages, a named mechanic in the metagame, and one of the core figures who turned car football from a cult favourite into a structured esport. However future results unfold, his name is already carved into the history of Rocket League in the way he always hoped it would be.