How The Licensed Digital Player Card Game Works
Sorare is a fantasy sports platform where the team you field is made of digital player cards you actually own. The company behind it was started in Paris in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort, and the football game opened to the public the following year. Since then Sorare has grown from a niche experiment for crypto-curious football fans into a licensed product with agreements covering hundreds of clubs and several major leagues.
The loop is easy to describe. You acquire cards of real athletes, either from newly released batches or from other collectors. Each game week you select five cards, enter them into a competition, and your entry earns points based on how those athletes performed in their actual fixtures. Finish high enough in your competition and Sorare pays out prizes, usually more cards and sometimes cryptocurrency.
What makes Sorare different from a normal fantasy league is that the roster is not free. Cards are issued in limited numbers as non-fungible tokens, so a Mbappe card is not something everyone can simply pick. Once you own one, you can hold it season after season, use it in as many game weeks as the rules allow, list it for sale, or move it out to a personal wallet. That combination of collecting, trading, and playing is the reason Sorare is often described as a trading card game that happens to keep score.
Three sports have run on Sorare. Football came first and remains the largest by far. Sorare MLB brought licensed Major League Baseball players into the same card and lineup structure, and Sorare NBA extended the model to basketball. Formats, competitions, and the exact roster of live sports change between seasons, so treat any specific competition name in this guide as an illustration of how Sorare structures play rather than a permanent fixture.
Origins And Licensing
Sorare began with a bet that the trading card business could be rebuilt for people who never open a physical pack. Instead of printing cardboard, the founders issued cards on a public blockchain, gave each one a verifiable supply, and attached a game so that owning a card meant something beyond looking at it.
Licensing was the slow part. Using a player's name, face, and club badge requires deals with leagues, clubs, and player associations, and Sorare signed them one at a time. The football catalogue now spans competitions including LaLiga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, and Major League Soccer, alongside a long list of individual clubs across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Those licences are the moat. Anyone can build a fantasy game with a spreadsheet of statistics, but very few can print a card with a club crest on it legally. That is why coverage of Sorare tends to focus as much on which leagues have signed as on the product itself, and why the card catalogue expands in bursts that follow the deal calendar.
Cards And Scarcity Tiers
Every card in Sorare represents one athlete for one season, and it belongs to a scarcity tier that fixes how many copies exist. In football the tiers run from Common, which is unrestricted and free to obtain, up through Limited, Rare, and Super Rare, and finally to Unique, where a single copy exists for that player and season. The supply numbers are set at issue and never change, which is what gives a Rare card its scarcity story.
Scarcity does two jobs at once. It sets the price you pay, and it sets which competitions the card can enter. Sorare separates its tournaments by tier, so a Limited card competes against other Limited cards rather than against Uniques. That structure means a newcomer with a modest Limited squad is not automatically buried by a collector holding one-of-one cards, and it gives each tier its own market and its own prize pool.
Cards also carry progression. Playing a card in Sorare competitions builds experience over time, and that experience translates into a bonus applied to the card's score. A seasoned card with a long history of use is therefore worth slightly more in points than an identical fresh card, which adds a reason to keep and use a card instead of flipping it immediately.
Scarcity tier is the single most important attribute of a card. It determines cost, competition, prize ceiling, and how easy the card will be to sell later.
Football Supply Per Season
Copies issued per player, per season, in the paid football tiers on Sorare. Bar lengths use a logarithmic scale so the smallest tier stays visible.
-
Limited1,000
-
Rare100
-
Super Rare10
-
Unique1
Source: scarcity structure published by Sorare for football. Common cards are unrestricted; supply figures differ in other sports.
Lineups And Competitions
Play in Sorare is organized into game weeks that follow the real fixture calendar. Before the deadline you build a lineup of five cards, respecting whatever position and eligibility rules the competition sets, and you name one of them as captain. The captain's score receives a bonus, so the choice matters more than it looks.
Competitions in Sorare are filtered by scarcity, by league, and sometimes by extra constraints such as a cap on how many cards from the same club you may field. Some are open to everyone holding the right tier, some are reserved for newer managers, and some restrict entries to a specific competition or region. Reading the eligibility panel before you buy a card is the difference between a useful signing and an asset you cannot field.
Alongside the classic ranked format, where your five-card total is compared against every other entry, Sorare has introduced head-to-head play under the Rivals banner, in which squads face a single opponent across a game week. The two formats reward different things. Ranked play favours ceiling, because you need a big total to reach the top of a leaderboard, while head-to-head play favours reliability, because you only need to beat the manager in front of you.
Because a card can normally be entered in only one competition per game week, roster depth becomes its own kind of strategy. A collector with fifteen usable cards can run several entries in parallel, while a collector with five can run one. This is one of the quieter ways in which Sorare rewards accumulation, and it is worth understanding before you decide how to spread a budget.
How Scores Are Calculated
Scoring is where Sorare stops being a collectibles app and becomes a game. Each football card that plays receives a score on a scale that tops out around 100, and that score is built from two ingredients. The decisive part captures the events that change matches, such as goals, assists, clean sheets, saves, and errors leading to goals. The all-around part captures volume work, such as passes completed, duels won, tackles, interceptions, and possession lost.
The weighting is position aware. A defender is not judged on the same distribution of actions as a striker, and a goalkeeper is judged on a different set again. That means Sorare scores are best read within a position rather than across positions, and it explains why a busy holding midfielder can post a solid score in a match without touching the scoresheet.
The biggest single risk in any lineup is not a bad performance. It is a player who does not appear at all. A card whose athlete stays on the bench or misses the squad contributes nothing, and no amount of scarcity or bonus compensates for that. Serious managers spend more time on team news than on statistics, which is a lesson newcomers to Sorare usually learn the hard way in their first month.
| Component | What it captures | Practical note |
|---|---|---|
| Decisive score | Goals, assists, penalties, clean sheets, saves, defensive errors | High variance, drives the biggest single-week totals |
| All-around score | Passing volume, duels, tackles, interceptions, possession lost | Stable floor, rewards heavy-minutes players |
| Position weighting | Different action weights for keepers, defenders, midfielders, forwards | Compare players within a position, not across positions |
| Captain bonus | Uplift applied to the card you nominate as captain | Best used on your most certain starter |
| Card bonuses | Experience accumulated by playing the card in Sorare competitions | Small but decisive in tight leaderboards |
| Did not play | Athlete unused, injured, suspended, or out of the squad | The main cause of failed entries; check team news |
Football, Baseball, And Basketball
Football is the original and still the centre of gravity. It has the deepest card catalogue, the most active market, the widest set of competitions, and by extension the most reliable prices. If you are trying to understand how Sorare behaves as a system, football is the version to study first.
Sorare MLB applied the same card model to Major League Baseball under licence from the league and the players association. Baseball translates unusually well, because the sport already thinks in terms of per-player statistics, and because hitters and pitchers give the scoring system two clean, distinct roles to evaluate. Lineup construction in Sorare MLB is closer to reading a probable starting rotation than to reading a manager's press conference.
Sorare NBA extended the platform to basketball with NBA and players association licences. Basketball scoring is dense and comparatively predictable, since starters accumulate points, rebounds, and assists in volume most nights, so the swing between a good and a bad game week is narrower than in football.
One caveat worth repeating. Sorare runs each sport as a separate game with its own cards, scarcity numbers, competitions, and reward structures, and the company has adjusted or retired formats before. Before committing money to a particular sport, confirm in the product which games and competitions Sorare is currently operating.
The Marketplace
New cards enter circulation through timed auctions run by Sorare, where the highest bid wins a freshly minted card. After that, cards move between collectors on a secondary market, either at a fixed asking price or through offers, including card-for-card swaps.
Payment can be made in cryptocurrency or by card, and Sorare shows prices in both, which removes most of the friction that usually keeps mainstream sports fans away from blockchain products. You do not need to understand gas fees to buy a footballer.
Prices are driven by a mix of scoring potential, club prestige, age, and pure fandom, and they are not uniformly liquid. Cards of well-known players in popular leagues trade often, while cards of squad players in smaller leagues can sit unsold for a long time. Anyone treating a Sorare collection as a store of value should look at recent sales for that exact player and tier, not at a headline number for the platform as a whole.
Ownership And Wallets
Cards on Sorare are issued as non-fungible tokens on Ethereum, so each one has a public, verifiable record of supply and ownership. To keep in-game transfers fast and cheap, Sorare has used layer 2 scaling technology from StarkWare rather than settling every trade directly on the main chain.
In practice most people never touch a wallet. You sign in with an email address, and Sorare custodies the cards for you while you play. If you want self-custody, you can withdraw cards to an external Ethereum wallet, at which point they are yours in the fullest sense, though a card sitting outside the platform cannot be used in lineups.
It is worth being precise about what ownership means here. Owning a Sorare card gives you a token tied to a licensed image and a role in a game. It does not give you rights over the athlete, a stake in their earnings, or any claim on a club. The value of the card depends on the licences and the game continuing to exist.
Rewards And Prize Pools
Finishing well in a Sorare competition pays out prizes drawn from a published pool. The most common prize is another card, awarded by rank, with the scarcity of the reward card scaling to the difficulty of the competition. Higher tiers and premium competitions can also pay cryptocurrency.
The reward table is visible before you enter, which is unusual and useful. You can see how deep the payouts go, what the prize cards are, and therefore whether a competition is worth entering with the squad you have. A shallow prize structure in a crowded competition is a poor use of a strong lineup.
Two things follow from this. First, prize cards are how most collections grow without further spending, so consistent mid-table finishes compound over a season. Second, rewards are not income. Payouts depend on athlete performance you do not control, and Sorare gives no guarantee that any entry returns more than it cost.
Funding And Backers
Sorare raised a $50 million round led by Benchmark in early 2021, then a $680 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in September 2021, reported at the time as one of the largest venture rounds ever raised by a French startup and valuing Sorare at roughly $4.3 billion.
-
Series A / 2021$50M
-
Series B / 2021$680M
The cap table also includes athletes. Kylian Mbappe and Serena Williams were both named among the investors backing Sorare, alongside a group of current and former professionals who doubled as ambassadors for the product.
Source: rounds announced publicly and covered widely in the business press.
Set Against Other Ways To Play And Collect
The clearest way to understand Sorare is to place it between two familiar things it borrows from: free season-long fantasy leagues, and physical trading card collecting. It takes the scoring loop from one and the scarcity and resale market from the other.
| Model | Cost to field a team | Do you own the roster | Resale | Prizes | Time horizon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sorare | Free at Common tier, market price above it | Yes, cards are tokens you hold | Open market, price varies by player | Cards, sometimes crypto | Weekly play, multi-season holding |
| Season-long fantasy | Usually free | No, picks reset each season | None | Bragging rights or small pots | One season |
| Daily fantasy contests | Entry fee per contest | No | None | Cash | Single day or slate |
| Physical trading cards | Pack or single-card price | Yes, a physical object | Dealers, auctions, grading market | None, value is resale only | Years |
Read the table as a description of trade-offs rather than a ranking. Free fantasy costs nothing and risks nothing. Physical cards give you an object that does not depend on a company staying online. Sorare sits in the middle, offering a weekly game with real stakes and a resale market, while carrying the platform and market risks that come with both.
Risk, Regulation, And Responsible Play
Card prices on Sorare can fall, and often do. A player's value is tied to minutes, form, transfers, injuries, and the mood of the collector market, and any of those can turn quickly. Cards are also priced partly in cryptocurrency, so a collection can lose value in fiat terms even when nothing about the player has changed.
There is platform risk on top of market risk. The catalogue exists because of licences, and the game exists because a company operates it. If a licence lapses or a format is retired, the cards affected lose the competitions that gave them utility. Withdrawing tokens to your own wallet protects custody, not usefulness.
Regulation is unsettled. Games that mix paid entry, chance, and prizes sit close to gambling and securities law in many countries, and Sorare has drawn attention from regulators and lawmakers in Europe as well as legal challenges in the United States over how its game should be classified. France has since legislated for a category of games based on monetizable digital objects, a framework discussed directly in relation to products of this kind. Rules differ by jurisdiction and continue to move.
The practical guidance is old-fashioned. Decide a budget you can lose entirely before you buy your first paid card, keep spending inside it, and do not fund purchases with money you need. If you find yourself buying cards to recover a bad game week, that is the point to stop. Sorare is a game with financial exposure, and it should be budgeted like entertainment, not like an investment plan.
Milestones
A short chronology of the moments that shaped Sorare, drawn from publicly announced events.
- 2018Company founded in Paris.
- 2019The football game opens to the public.
- Feb 2021$50M round led by Benchmark.
- Sep 2021$680M round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
- 2022Sorare MLB launches under MLB and MLBPA licences.
- 2023Sorare NBA launches with NBA and NBPA licences.
- 2024France legislates an experimental regime for monetizable digital object games.
How To Get Started
The sequence below is the low-cost route. It uses the free tier to learn the scoring engine before any money is involved, which is the single best habit a new Sorare manager can build.
- Create an account and claim the free Common cards Sorare gives new managers, plus any beginner-only competitions your account is eligible for.
- Enter a full game week with Common cards only. Watch how the score breaks down and how much a benched player costs you.
- Set a budget you are willing to lose, then study auctions and recent sales for the players you actually want before bidding.
- Buy one card in a paid tier and check which competitions it can enter, so your first purchase has somewhere to play.
- Submit a lineup every game week, collect any reward cards, and grow the squad from prizes before adding fresh money.
Give yourself a few weeks at this pace. Most expensive mistakes on Sorare come from buying a big name before understanding position weighting, eligibility rules, and rotation risk.
Practical Guidance For New Collectors
Buy minutes, not fame. The most reliable scorers in Sorare are not always the most famous players; they are the ones who start every week and get involved constantly. A dependable starter in a mid-table side often outscores a rotated star over a season, and costs a fraction as much.
Go wide before you go deep. Several solid cards give you more entries, more competitions, and more chances at prize cards than one showpiece card that can only play once per game week. Depth is what turns Sorare from a lottery ticket into a game you can actually manage.
Respect the calendar. Cup rounds, international breaks, congested fixture weeks, and end-of-season dead rubbers all change who plays and how hard they try. Managers who win consistently on Sorare read team news and rotation patterns rather than season-long averages.
Finally, separate the collector from the competitor in your own head. It is completely reasonable to hold a card of a player you love regardless of score, and it is completely reasonable to field a squad chosen purely on projected points. Problems start when a purchase is justified as both a keepsake and an investment. Sorare works best when you know which one you are doing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it free to start playing?
Yes. Sorare gives new managers free Common cards and beginner competitions, so you can play full game weeks without spending anything. Paid scarcity tiers are optional and unlock different competitions and prize pools.
Do I need cryptocurrency to buy a card?
No. Sorare accepts card payments as well as cryptocurrency, and prices are displayed in familiar currency, so you can collect without ever managing a wallet yourself.
Can I sell my cards whenever I want?
You can list them at any time, but a sale depends on someone wanting to buy. Popular players trade quickly on Sorare, while less-followed players in smaller leagues can take a long time to move, or sell well below what you paid.
What happens if my player does not play?
The card contributes no score for that game week. This is the most common reason lineups fail on Sorare, which is why checking injuries, suspensions, and rotation news before the deadline matters more than any statistical model.
Are the cards officially licensed?
Yes. Sorare operates under licences with leagues, clubs, and player associations, which is what allows real names, images, and club identity to appear on the cards.
Is this gambling?
Sorare presents itself as a game of skill built on collecting and lineup selection, but the classification is contested, and regulators and courts in several jurisdictions have examined models like this. Availability and rules vary by country, so check what applies where you live.
Can I make money from it?
Some collectors profit from trading and rewards, and many do not. Prices, athlete performance, and crypto values all move independently of your decisions, so Sorare should be budgeted as entertainment spending rather than as an income source.
Glossary
- Game week
- The scoring window that groups real fixtures into one round of competition.
- Scarcity
- The tier of a card and the fixed number of copies issued for that player and season.
- Captain
- The card you nominate for a score bonus in a lineup.
- DNP
- Did not play. The card scores nothing for that game week.
- Floor price
- The cheapest current listing for a given player and tier, used as a rough valuation marker.
- Bonus
- Extra points added to a card's score, earned through use in Sorare competitions.