The ability to play a game and earn money from it, doesn’t always come cheap, and that’s definitely not the case with fantasy football game Sorare. However, you can generate a decent revenue stream through this fantasy football game. So how do you start playing Sorare, what’s the play-to-earn mechanic and how do you start making a profit. That’s what we’re going to find out today.
Fantasy football game Sorare hasn’t seen the success of NBA Top Shot yet, but it’s definitely on the right track to start attracting a bigger audience. Footballers like FC Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann and his defending colleague Gerard Pique are investors in the game. At the same time other players are actively playing the game, like Daley Blind from Ajax Amsterdam for example.
Sorare is one of the biggest blockchain dapp in terms of volume, but they are still behind when it comes to active players. On a weekly basis Sorare sees more than $3.3 million in trading volume, according to data from DappRadar. These numbers come from 5,947 traders on the platform.
Sorare explained in a nutshell
In Sorare you will use player cards to make a team. Every team consists out of a goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, attacker and one extra player. This extra player can play in any position, but not as a goalkeeper. You can use this team in certain divisions. For example, there’s an Asian league where you can only use player cards that are from clubs in Japan or South Korea. The American division allows clubs from for example Argentina, Mexico and the States. While there’s a bit more variation in the European divisions. However, the most common competition is the Global All-Star one, and that’s the one I will focus on in this article.
Every week Sorare has two Game Weeks, or rounds. Before the next round starts, you need to make a team that’s best suited for the upcoming matches. So you can switch your cards around based on which team are actually playing and against whom. Yes, the score you earn with your cards depends on results of the same players in the real world. Therefore it’s very important to know a bit about the players, stay up-to-date about their suspensions and injuries, and so on. Even though you only need five players to make a team, it’s strongly advised to have at least 10 cards. This will give you flexibility and allows you to adjust your team when needed.
What can you earn?
For this article we’re focusing on the Global All-Star division 4. That’s the lowest division that allows cards from all leagues. We pick this particular division because there are two prizes to be won. If we end up among the top 130 players in a game round, we’ll win an extra player card. In addition, if we score more than 205 points using our cards, we’ll win 0.01 ETH. Do we get 250 points, we’ll get 0.02 ETH. In addition, everybody who scores more than 200 points, but is not in the top 130, has a chance to win an extra player card as well.
So, we’re aiming for 250 points in Global All-Star division 4. As we have five players in our team, each of them needs to have a score of 50 to maximize our chances for prizes. Keep in mind, Sorare recently changed their reward system, and already announced more changes are coming this summer.
Getting started
When you go to the website and sign up, you’ll be given some fake money to make a draft. It will be your task to select some players within your budget, and those player cards will become your team. These are so-called common cards, and aren’t stored on the blockchain. They don’t have value, can’t be traded, but you can use them in your teams. When you make your draft, get a goalkeeper who always plays. He will come in handy at certain occasions. It’s even wise to have two goalies. Don’t spend too much on midfielders, because when you start buying cards you’ll see there are midfielders aplenty.
Once you’ve confirmed your draft, you will have a bunch of free, silver cards in your account. You can use these to play the game, but you can’t really compete for rewards. So you will need to acquire some cards from the marketplace. The red cards are the cheapest ones, followed by the blue ones. The black-brownish ones are unique cards, and often sell for thousands of dollars.
Buying cards
When you’re buying your first cards, you want players that are consistently playing or performing. When you go to the marketplace, it will directly advice you a bunch of players based on their card value versus their general performance. In the screenshot below their performance is green colored, which indeed is a good score. Yellow would be average, while red would be kind of bad. These scores are calculated based on the performance of a player in their last five matches. So when a player misses some games because of an injury or the Corona virus, their scores will be lower.
First of all, these cards still cost hundreds of dollars. In addition you will notice that these players are all well in their thirties. What will happen when the football season ends this summer? Will they continue? For example, Eric Botteghin will very likely leave Feyenoord, and we don’t know anything about his future. Therefore investing into these players right now, is probably not the best thing to do.
Like we said before, we need 50 points per player in order to optimize our prizes. We also don’t want very old players, so the maximum age we’ll be looking for is 30 years old. Using the filter options on the left side of the Sorare marketplace gives us easy access to a whole bunch of players to meet our criteria. It’s relatively easy to find defenders and midfielders with a decent price, but attackers and goalkeepers are a whole different story.
This goalkeeper is currently the cheapest one on the marketplace that still regularly plays for his team. All the cheaper ones never play, and will therefore not generate any points. The only reason you’d buy a cheaper one that never plays, is when you know he’ll play in the future. So that purchase would become an investment. However, keep in mind that right now we want to make money from playing Sorare, so we need a keeper that actually plays.
As you can see here, I made a team with one goalkeeper, one defender, one midfielder and two attackers. You’re free to acquire a second defender instead, which would probably save you some money as well. These players all have had decent scores in their last 5 matches, which would give me that 250 points per game week we’re looking for. You could always pick the goalkeeper (that always plays) that you got from your common / free cards. He’ll generate less points, but it would save you some budget on team creation.
Looking beyond Sorare
Sorare itself offers a whole bunch of data about players and their performance. But there are all kinds of sources to stay in the know with your players. Using your Sorare account, you can log into SorareData.com. This is a third-party website that gives a whole lot more information about player performance, and also organizes its own competitions. Yes, that means you can use your player cards – which are NFTs – across a variety of games!
SorareData shows information over the past 5, 15 and 40 games of a player. That shows us Alessandro Ciranni has been performing above average in the past 5 matches. SorareData also shows he hardly missed a match in the past 40 matches, which probably means he’s not injured or suspended very often. The price of the card is slightly above the average market price, but this would be a nice purchase.
You’d need to look in a similar fashion to each of you potential transfer targets. Your search will not be limited to Sorare-related data websites. I would definitely advice you to real dive deep into the world of football. I consider Transfermarkt.com a very good source for information. Here you can easily see how often players get yellow cards, how many minutes they play per match and so on.
If we look at our friend Alessandro Ciranni, we’d see he played 90% of the time. He has received 9 yellow cards so far, which is quite a lot. However, he’s only 24 years old and has been captain of his team since December last year. He could make a nice transfer this summer. When we would buy him, he should, because his team Royal Excel Mouscron is at the bottom of the Belgian Jupiler League and is facing relegation. So, that could be a reason to refrain from buying him… and that shows that good research is required before buying a player card.
What do you earn in Sorare?
Let’s just say we would buy the players I have selected above, only those five. It would mean that we would regularly depend on the common cards to fill up spots in our team. This would make competing for that 0.02 ETH and especially the free card extra hard. But okay, these five cards will cost us 0.432 ETH or $1,057. Of course you could barter with other players, and get a discount here or there. Not buying that expensive goalkeeper would already save us half of the investment. However, having a goalkeeper that always plays is an absolute must to be competitive in Sorare.
Let’s say we’re able to compete in one game round per week using all five our cards. If these players keep performing as they do, that would mean 0.02 ETH per game round. However, there are always unlucky weeks. So let’s say 0.01 ETH per week, across 34 football weeks. We’d also win that 0.02 ETH, let’s say five times. That would bring the total earnings to 0.39 ETH or $954 per season. It’s safe to state that earning your money back with minimal investments will take more than a year through the play-to-earn mechanics. However, you can increase your chance by reinvesting earnings in new players cards. This will allow you to be more competitive. Winning just one card, will also influence your earnings a lot.
The nice thing about Sorare and other NFT-based play-to-earn games, is that your investments can always be sold. There’s a market out there with lots of demand for these cards. As long as the players have potential and are still active in the sport, they have value in the game.
~100 dollars per month
