Looking for a new way to engage with sports? Sorare might just be what you’re looking for!
NFTs are everywhere this year, and their popularity is exploding. From celebrities like Lil Nas X to Azealia Banks, everyone has been taking the plunge into NFTs. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the gaming industry would join in on the NFT trend as well.
One of the experiments happening within the gaming industry is Sorare. Sorare is an NFT startup responsible for a global fantasy soccer game by the same name. The game has been on the blockchain since 2018. Let’s take a look at how Sorare works and what it brings to fantasy football fans.
How do you play fantasy football on Sorare?
Sorare is not too different from traditional fantasy football games. What separates the two is that instead of picking players from a list as you do in other fantasy football drafts, here, you need to purchase digital trading cards of the players you want to draft. The platform has cards of players from over 100 international teams across various leagues.
Using these trading cards, you can enter your drafted players into free tournaments and win both digital and physical prizes. Each week, Sorare has digital tournaments where you can put together a team of five players that fit the tournament’s requirements (for instance, some virtual tournaments only allow football players under the age of 21 to join).
What’s so special about Sorare?
So you can buy digital trading cards and get prizes for tournaments on Sorare’s website. But what else is there? One of the special features offered by Sorare is that you can use the cards in games built by the gaming company Ubisoft and also the games created by the members of the Sorare community.
You can also resell your trading cards as crypto-collectibles. Sorare has a limited number of cards. This means that buying the best players early on would almost guarantee you a return on investment later. To incentivize the use of the platform, Sorare provides 10 free cards when you register.
In addition to these platform-specific benefits, the tokenization of sports memorabilia can serve as a way to connect fans across the digital space. This is particularly relevant at a time when physical viewings of sports games and in-person interactions with other fans have become a challenge.
The true testament to Sorare’s effectiveness are their numbers. In September this year, Sorare raised US$680 million in funding, taking the company’s value to US$4.3 billion. However, things aren’t all smooth sailing for Sorare. In October, the UK Gambling Commission began investigating Sorare to assess whether the sale and purchase of trading cards on the platform amounts to gambling. The platform has denied involvement in anything even remotely close to “regulated gambling”.
Header image courtesy of Sorare
