What is Sorare?

In short, Sorare provides digital football (or soccer, for some of you) cards. If you have ever watched football, you have probably heard of Panini at some point. The Italian company that has been making collectible football stickers and cards since 1970. At the core of its business, Sorare does the same thing, but digital. This article will go in to depth about the difference between physical and digital cards and why Soraredigital cards have an exciting future ahead.

Digital football cards?

Yes, digital football cards! You might wonder why and that is understandable. Why would you collect digital football cards when you have physical cards? What about my album full of Panini cards? Do I have to look at my new cards online?

First of all, if you are unsure if you are interested in digital cards over physical cards, you can try Sorare entirely for free! Signing up through our link will get you free Common cards to start your collection and the opportunity to earn a free Rare card. This way you can get a quick start and decide if digital collectibles are something you could be interested in.

This also brings us to the cards themselves. There are four different rarities, Common, Rare, Super Rare and Unique. They come in different limited quantities with the Unique cards being one of a kind, hence the name. Let’s dive in!

Common cards act as free promo cards. They are available in virtually unlimited quantities and hold no value. As you can see, just like physical cards, they have a picture of the player and information such as the player’s age, position and club. In the top left corner you can see what season the card belongs to and its rarity.

Rare cards are the first of the limited tier cards. As you can see, these have a number in the top left corner underneat the season. This Virgil van Dijk card is number 31 out of the 100 Van Dijk cards to be released in the 2020–2021 season.

As for the Super Rare cards, there are only 10 available per player and as mentioned before, there’s only 1 unique card per player every season.

So how are they unique?

Good question! What makes these different from any other image of a football player taken from the internet? How do I know that this is really card number 31 of Virgil van Dijk? Enter the blockchain.

By now, you might have heard of Bitcoin or Ethereum and the blockchain. Sorare cards are created on that blockchain. As Sorare themselves put it:

“Blockchain technology gives Sorare cards super powers”. With bloackchain technology our licenced digital cards have provable scarcity. If you own a Sorare card it is yours. You have complete ownership of your card and it can be used in the open world. It can be used in other games that use Sorare cards, the opportunities are endless.

Our digital cards are Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity, as well as digital ownership, and the possibility of asset interoperability across multiple platforms. NFTs are used in several specific applications that require unique digital items like crypto-gaming,crypto art, crypto-collectibles.

So in short: every Sorare card can individually be identified, just like how we identify physical objects with serial numbers. Every card you own is yours, only you have access to it and you can decide to keep it, trade it, sell it or give it away. Best of all, as opposed to physical cards, digital cards can’t decay. Your 2020–2021 cards are going to look just as crisp in 2050 as they do now and you don’t have to spend any money whatsoever to maintain them.

But there’s more, lots more!

Now you know how Sorare cards work. But they are so much more than digital Panini cards. While physical cards are usually just collectibles to collect and trade, Sorare cards can also be used to play games. This is where the digitial aspect really shines!

Sorare themselves host a year round fantasy football competition. Every week you can compete to field the best team based on your football knowledge and the unique Sorare cards you own. Every match a real life football player plays, his statistics are tracked. How many goals they scored or conceded, how many passes they succesfully completed and much more. All these stats are used to calculate a final score between 0 and 100 for each match. If he does not play in real life, he does not score points in Sorare.

Sorare users can field teams of 5 players every week. Based on their real life performance, your cards score points. The user who has the team of 5 with the highest total score wins the round.

Let’s say I field a team of Messi, Neuer, De Bruyne, Van Dijk and Modric. Depending on their real life performances, they score points. Since Virgil van Dijk is injured in real life, he doesn’t play and doesn’t score any Sorare points. The other 4 players together can score a total between 0 and 400 points for my entire team.

The best part is that these scores are updated live throughout the match, adding an extra layer of excitement to watching real life football. You can watch Messi do great on live television and see this immediately be reflected in his match score on Sorare.

Different levels of competition ask for different cards. You start at the rookie league, which you can enter with Commons and it goes all the way up to competitions that you can only enter with Unique cards. This encourages Sorare users to go out and collect, trade and buy cards, making sure there’s an active community out there.

Beyond Sorare

Games and competitions aren’t just limited to Sorare. Because Sorare cards are digital they can be used all over the digital world. That means that other businesses can work with Sorare to integrate Sorare cards in their own games. For example, game developer and publisher Ubisoft has partnered with Sorare to build their own OneShot League.

Just like how you can bring your Pokémon cards to different tournaments, you can bring your Sorare cards to different games. All you have to do is connect your Sorare account.

And this is just the start. As of today Sorare has 128 official licenses for football clubs in 23 different leagues, ranging from individual clubs such as Real Madrid and AC Milan to entire leagues such as the Eredivisie and Korean League.

As Sorare manages to secure more licenses, the amount of available cards will grow, together with the opportunities to trade them or use them in games.

Now you know what Sorare is, meaning there is only one thing left to do and that is give it a try! Use our link to sign up for free and receive 10 Common cards to get your collection started. It also gives you the opportunity to earn a free Rare card later on!

If you have any further questions make sure to comment down below!