Sorare Review: NFT Fantasy Football Platform

How does Sorare work?

Sorare is a fantasy football platform built on the Ethereum cryptocurrency blockchain, based on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Every digital player card is registered as a unique token, with a limited supply of cards released each season.

To be able to buy cards, you need to purchase some Ethereum, which can be done easily through Sorare using Ramp or by using an ETH wallet such as Coinbase Wallet.

Cards can be bought at auction when new cards are released by Sorare, or they can be bought, sold or traded with other managers. They never expire, so cards from previous seasons can still be traded or used to enter the tournaments.

The idea is to sell them on for a profit at a later date when the value of the has increased, or enter into tournaments for the chance to win prizes, or both.

The tournaments are free entry and you just need five player cards to be able to compete. The prizes depend on how many points your team finishes with collectively and they are either Ethereum or new cards.

Sorare sign up bonus - Free Limited Card

You can get started on Sorare without entering any payment details or going through any checks. Through the link below, you will be given up to 12 free Common cards to try the platform out and enter the Rookie tournaments.

If you want to go beyond that though, you will need to buy some cards of more scarcity.

Purchasing 5 cards on the Primary market / New Card Auctions will get you a free Limited card.

This could be end up being a top player or bench warmer, it's totally random. You then have ther choice to use it to enter tournaments with the rest of your team or simply sell it on for an easy profit.

How to play Sorare

When you first join Sorare you will be given some free Common rated cards that you can use for entering into Casual/Rookie tournaments. This gives you a chance to learn how the process works and whilst still being able to compete for prizes.

You can compete in the Casual tournaments for as long as you like whilst you are getting a feel for the platform, but chances of winning prizes of value here are slim. Realistically, you will need to be willing to invest some cash to compete in the higher leagues.

All tournaments are free to enter, regardless of what league and they all have different prize pools where you can win cards of various rarity and/or ETH prizes. The players you enter also gain XP (experience points), which build up to give the player an increased percentage points bonus from tournaments.

There is also a training league where you can enter any spare players to gain XP if they are not being used for other tournaments.

In each tournament, you need to select five players and they will each earn points from 0 to 100 based on their real-life performance in matches.

Each team is made up of a:

One player of your team must be nominated as captain and they will earn a 20% points bonus.

Tournaments run twice each week to cover both midweek and weekend matches. 

The points system is similar to most other fantasy football games, where players will get points for goals, assists, passes etc. and will lose points for things like cards and missed chances.

There are currently four levels of card scarcity aside from the Common cards on Sorare:

The scarcity of the card determines which tournaments they can be entered in, as demonstated below. There is also a new D5 (fifth division) where you can play with the more recently added Limited scarcity cards.

During the next part of my review, I will go into a bit more detail on how to buy players and build a team to win prizes on the Sorare platform.

How to make money on Sorare

After you have signed up and received your free Common cards, the next step will be to form a team with higher scarcity cards to start winning regular prizes from tournaments.

As I mentioned earlier, when you sign up through our link you will receive a free Limited card after you make five purchases at the New Card Auctions.

You could use this to start up a team with Limited cards, or you could sell it off for an easy profit and build a team with Rare cards. The latter option is the best way if you want to start winning those ETH prizes each week.

The tournament that I feel is the best to target is the All Star tournament in the Rare competitions.

At the time of writing, the prize pool for this tournament is:

The aim is for your team to finish with at least 205 points from the tournament and then you are guaranteed to win a minimum of 0.01 ETH.

This isn't too difficult to achieve, as long as you have taken some time to research your players.

The main thing to try and avoid is DNP's (Did Not Play), as of course, you won't get any points if your player didn't feature in the match at all.

I have been able to comfortably achieve more than 205 points in most of my tournament entries and that was using only four Rare cards and one Common card.

The reason for playing with only four Rare cards at first was because Goalkeepers are generally quite expensive, so you can do without buying one at first until you build your pot up a bit.

Once you have a full team of Rare cards though, it will become much easier to achieve the next prize level of more than 250 points and collect that 0.02 ETH each week.

The other way to make money on Sorare is to flip cards, which is to buy them cheap and sell on later for a profit. This takes a little bit of practice, getting used to the buy/sell process and knowing when to do it.

One tip is to buy players when their team's season has finished. They will generally be cheaper at that time and you will be able to pick them up at a good price ready to sell once the season restarts.

What players to buy on Sorare

One of the best ways to go about putting your team together is to focus on certain leagues, for example, just targeting European leagues or Asian leagues.

This way, as well as playing in the All Star tournaments, you have the opportunity to enter some of the specific tournaments set up for those leagues only.

Once you have decided on that, you will need to do a bit of research and SorareData is going to be a big help with that.

Next I will go through an example of researching players to buy so that you can get a basic idea of the process.

Researching players to buy on Sorare

First I head to the Market and filter the leagues and scarcity of cards that I am looking for. 

Below you can see some of the players that came up when I filtered the leagues to J1 and MLSPA. You can see their current price, how long until the end of the auction, their average score for the past five games and their points multiplier.

I decided to take a look at Fabian Herbers, who had an average score of 49 and a 5% points multiplier.

Clicking on the player here brings up some more detailed information, including the score for each of the past five games and any bids that have been placed by other managers so far.

My next step was to search for the player on SorareData and check out some more in-depth statistics.

Here you can see the average selling price of the player over various time periods and at different scarcities. At the Rare level, the 7 day average selling price was 0.02 ETH, which at the time was around £66.

Another useful feature is the SO5 Scores tab, which shows what score the player has achieved for their matches historically. You can just look at recent scores, the past year, or all of them.

It gives you a better idea of how the players performs and you can see how many of those dreaded DNPs there are.

If I was to go ahead and buy this player, I would just need to go back to Sorare and place a bid. On the Manager Sales section it is slightly different as they are "Buy It Now" style listings, although you can make private offers or trade cards too.

In this case, I decided not to bid on the player. As you can see on the SorareData screen, he is a Substitute and my preference is for players who are regular starters. Substitutes still earn points but they are given a starting score of 25 points rather than the 35 points given for starters.

That is the basic process, so it is fairly simple but it just requires a little bit of time to check on some extra stats to have the best chance at having a reliable and consistent team.

Review Summary

I have found Sorare a lot of fun to play and I have enjoyed both the collectible aspect of the game as well as playing in tournaments to try and win prizes.

The great thing is, you can still be successful on Sorare with little or no football knowledge. If you do happen to know your stuff though, you can use it to perhaps gain an edge in certain leagues, or buy players that you think may rise in value.

At the time of writing this, I have won a total of 0.12 ETH in prizes in the past six months, which at the moment is worth just under £400. I have also made £318.57 profit from buying and selling players. 

That means that I have more than recovered the initial outlay of building my team, which was around £600, and anything from here on is pure profit.

I decided reinvesting it to buy a Goalkeeper was a the way forward, so that I could aim for those higher ETH prizes and have the chance to win more Rare cards.

I have given Sorare a "Pass" and I look forward to seeing the new developments to the platform in the near future and beyond.