Sorare Ushers in the New Era of Global Fantasy Football

You enter the stadium, everything is empty, all the lights are off, all the stands are empty. As you approach the goal, you brush against the cold metal of the post and stop for a moment. When you close your eyes, you have the impression that you hear the clamor of the crowd rising in the distance.

You feel a sense of tension as you approach the goal, your will to win is strong, you thought out your strategy, you made your careful choice of your player’s position and you know the time it took to obtain that ultimate card was well spent.

A real fantasy

Welcome to Sorare, where you are the manager of an imaginary football club, although not that imaginary, because your players are real and participate in matches from real clubs. In fact, Sorare has succeeded in obtaining more than a hundred licenses with recognized clubs from around the world such as Paris Saint Germain, Juvenus and Atletico de Madrid.

The “Fantasy” aspect of the game will be about the way you will drive your team. It all starts with a free pack that you will receive upon registration, this is where you start to build an initial team of 10 players.

Choose wisely, because your resources are limited!

Once your team is assembled, it’s time to send them onto the field.

Several tournaments are available for play: First is the “Rookie” level the cards are obtained for free at the entry level, making Rookie the best level to grab some easy to win prizes. These prizes can be rare or sometimes unique cards and $ETH

The matches correspond to those which took place during the weekend. Depending on the performance of the players who have participated in the matches, the player you own in Sorare will see their statistics go up or down.

Watch this gameplay video for an overview of the game mechanics:

Officially Licensed Blockchain Cards

Each player has their own “Fantasy Score” which  will influence their playing statistics during tournaments, the score is calculated according to several subcategories :

Player Score

Several criteria must be taken into account in order to achieve a score that is as close as possible to 100. These criteria can positively or negatively impact your score:

• Successful or failed penalties.
• Number of yellow and red cards.
• Goals.
• Assists
• Decisive actions for, or against your team.
• Support or unjustified attacks against your opponents

Card score

The “Card Score” is calculated according to several criteria: 

• Level of rarity of the cards, 
• Membership of the same team 
• Influence of the captain 
• Participation in the same season.

The cards rarity impacts its score and even allows you to set the power level that your player can ultimately reach.

There are 3 levels of scarcity for the cards in-game : Rare, Super Rare and Unique. 111 NFTs are minted each season. Their initial prices are respectively 0.01 $ETH, 0.1 $ETH and 1 $ETH.

The scarcer the cards, the higher your player scores.

Therefore, the scarcity of the cards will determine its maximum level.

So for example, out of 100 cards, ‘Rare’ cards maximum level is 12, ‘Super Rare’ max level 34, and ‘Unique’ can go up to level 100.

Team score

Team Score is just a simple addition of the 5 Card Scores that make up your team and is the final score that will appear in the public rankings.

Sorare performance

Since its arrival on the Ethereum blockchain in May 2020, Sorare has undoubtedly made a place for itself in the big league.

The project has shown steady growth from May until now in terms of volume traded and reaching peaks of $230,000 week. If this trend continues, Sorare can boast of having a monthly market that exceeds $1,000,000 dollars..

It’s interesting to notice, as the graph below illustrates, that the peaks of late July and August are merely the start of an upwards trend with levels of support found at increasing values.

We analyze this increased activity to be due to both, growth of community and an acceleration of the market linked to the various news announcements from the project, such as obtaining club licences.

The relative increase in the price of cards over time can be explained by several factors:

• Arrival of new clubs that generate interest.
• With each new club, a new wave of players come in (their latest announcement with PSG has exposed Sorare to PSG’s 80M users worldwide). 
• Increase in the values of cards, due to increased utility in-game, a phenomenon that we have already seen in projects like Gods Unchained.

The sales volume to date is very strongly influenced by the introduction of new cards. It is however very interesting to note that the volume of sales has only a very limited impact on the volumes of USD traded.

Conclusion

From a market point of view, Sorare has undeniably made a place for itself in the heart of major NFTs projects in just a few months.

It is important to mention how the Sorare community supports the growth of the project through a network of Ambassadors and initiatives such as SorareData or SorareClub.

Sorare succeeded in creating an interactive virtual universe with reality. Trying to figure out which player is going to play each week’s IRL to adapt your team for the weekly tournament is very addictive. Sorare covers transaction costs allowing the player to participate in the weekly tournaments with their base pack and try their luck to rise through the ranks claiming higher value packs.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article. No content or article should be considered as financial advice. We strongly recommend you to conduct due diligence and always do your own research before investing in a project.