The fantasy football game Sorare received $680 million through a Series B funding round, and will use that funds to not only grow the fantasy football game but also to add more sports to their NFT ecosystem. Furthermore, they announced to accelerate the development of a mobile-first experience, while promising to bring the top 20 football leagues on board and the top 50 national teams.
The funds will help Sorare, in their own words, ‘to create the next world champion in sports entertainment by leveraging NFTs’. To achieve this, they will expand their team, sign new partnerships with leagues and national teams, and accelerate the development of their mobile app. However, the thing that stands out the most is the promise to ‘roll out new sports in 2022’. This could mean we will see Sorare move into for example baseball and American football.
The $680 million in funding gives the French tech start-up a multi-billion dollar valuation. As a matter of fact, it’s the biggest fundraising round ever for a French tech company and the largest in Europe for a Series B. The funding round was led by SoftBank, and backed by angel investors like Alexis Ohanian and football players like Gerard Pique, Rio Ferdinand, Antoine Griezmann and Cesar Azpilicueta.
Sorare is a sleeping giant, I already touched upon this in a recent blog post. The new funding should boost their marketing efforts, of which there have currently hardly been anything. Furthermore, Sorare wants to fund small businesses in developing communities, and support the female representation in sports. Yes, that could mean we will soon have the NWSL from the States and the biggest female players from European clubs in Sorare as well. Even though that’s just speculation from my side.
Explain Sorare to me please
Sorare is a fantasy football game powered by blockchain technology. Blockchain technology introduces actual scarcity to digital cards, so these cards have a limited supply. Players can use the cards they’ve bought to create a fantasy team. Each card represents a real player. Based on the performance of that player on the actual pitch, the card holders will earn points. Every week the teams with the most points will earn new cards as a reward. The cheapest cards generally sell for a couple of dollars, while the most wanted ones go for well over a thousand dollars a piece. Join the game!
Ultimately, Sorare’s attraction is twofold. On the one hand you want to have the superstars, purely as a collectible. However, from a gameplay point of view you’d want the cards of players that do important work for their team. For example players with a high pass completion, or strikers that score lots of goals, and defenders that make lots of tackles.
How to play Sorare
You can play Sorare for free, but that takes away lots of the excitement to be fair. You need to purchase collectible player cards, and the players on these cards will become your team. Each game week you select the players, each represented by an NFT card, of which you think they will perform best.
For every game week managers will need to select a team from the player card collection. They will need one goalkeeper, one defender, one midfielder, one attacker and an extra field player. Players earn points based on the real-life performance of those players. Therefore players that play regularly, are active in winning team, hardly make mistakes, and score a lot of goals, are generally valuable. Each card can only be used once during a game week, but if you have enough cards you can join in multiple leagues.
If you make enough points, you will earn 0.01 or 0.02 ETH. Are you among the best? Then you will receive a free card, which are much more valuable. Learn more on how to play and earn in Sorare here, or sign up for the game here.
