Buying, Selling & Trading Collectible Cards with Sorare Fantasy Football
The emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has enabled game producers to create unique collectible items that can be used in and outside of a game’s ecosystem.
Paris-based blockchain gaming company, Sorare, jumped on the NFT opportunity to create a fantasy football game where players can buy, sell, and trade digital collectible cards that are used to play the game.
In this article, you will learn how Sorare works and how you can buy, sell, and trade the football crypto collectible cards in and outside of the game.
Sorare Is Building a Bridge From Fantasy Football to Crypto
For many football fans (or soccer fans, if you are American), getting a Panini Sticker Booklet and collecting all the players is a regular feature during the World Cup. For die-hard collectors, the annual Premier League Panini booklet is typically also a must.
In addition to football fans who are avid collectors, there is also a massive market for fantasy football games.
Fantasy football is a virtual game where gamers become managers who construct a team, buy, sell, and trade players and then compete via a scoring system that uses real-world match results and player performances.
Sorare combines the two concepts of collectibles and fantasy football to create the world’s first blockchain-powered fantasy football collectible card game that allows anyone with an internet connection to participate.
Sorare’s crypto collectible cards are non-fungible tokens — operating as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain — that prove rarity and ensure that each player truly owns their collectible cards.
What’s more, Sorare’s football collectible cards can be bought, sold, and traded outside of the game on NFT marketplaces, such as OpenSea, directly within your Trust Wallet.
Putting Football Fans First
Sorare stands out as one of the most user-friendly blockchain games in the market. A big reason for that is that it caters more to fantasy football fans and collectors rather than crypto community diehards.
So you’re going to need to give them your email address if you want to play.
However, because Sorare’s playing cards operate on the blockchain and the game supports ETH as a payment method, it is likely to attract more people into crypto. By providing a consumer-friendly gaming and collectible cards experience, more football fans are now being exposed to blockchain and cryptocurrency.
How to Play Fantasy Football on Sorare
To play the fantasy football game and start collecting your favorite players, access www.sorare.com, and click ‘Play’ or ‘Sign Up.’
Next, you can either sign up using your Google account or using a nickname, an email address, and a password.
Once you have signed up and confirmed your account via email, you will gain access to the dashboard.
At this point, you are ready to receive your first ten common cards for free and start building your first five-a-side team.
Click on ‘Claim my first 10 free common cards’ to get started. Next, choose whether you want to auto-select or select your own team.
Since we know what we are doing, let’s choose our own team. :)
To start, you have 400M to spend. You will need to choose two goalkeepers, two defenders, two midfielders, and two forwards, and two more players of your choice.
To do that, you simply click on “Select” under the player you want in your team. However, make sure you keep an eye on your budget. You can only spend 400M.
Once you have selected your team, you will be taken to the ‘Play’ dashboard so that you can start composing and registering your first team for the upcoming weekend.
Click on the tournament and then ‘Register a Team.’ You will then be prompted to input your mobile phone number to continue to the team creation page.
After you have confirmed your number, you can compose a team for the Rookie competition on the upcoming weekend.
Once you have chosen your team, you can click ‘Confirm,’ and you are set for the weekend.
Enter the Transfer Market
Now that you have gotten the hang of how the game works, you can start to buy new players to add to your squad.
Before you can enter the transfer market, you first need to connect an Ethereum wallet and fund your account.
To connect your Trust Wallet Ethereum wallet, you can use WalletConnect, an open-source protocol that allows mobile wallets to connect to web-based decentralized applications.
Once you have done that, you can now fund your Sorare account using ETH or using a Credit Card. Funds deposited in the game will be denominated in euros.
Sorare subsidies all gas fees for in-game transactions, creating a frictionless user experience for the game’s transfer market that remains unaffected by increases in Ethereum gas fees.
To get your hands on more valuable cards, you click on ‘Secondary Market,’ where you will find all collectible cards currently available for sale or to bid on.
You can sort the available cards by price or when they were listed and filter them by player characteristics, such as nationality, position, or club.
You will also notice that there are different types of cards, namely: rare, super rare, and unique.
As the names suggest, the rarer the cards, the more expensive they typically are. So, for example, a rare card of Paris St. Germain’s Neymar will set you back by about €1,000 while the unique card of the star player was sold for a whooping €23,874.14 at an auction on October 19, 2020.
The ability to buy, sell, and trade Sorare’s collectible cards is arguably one of the game’s most enticing features. For experienced, football-savvy collectors, Sorare provides an opportunity to generate a profit on the game’s transfer market.
What’s more, the cards can also be sold or auctioned on third-party marketplaces and traded with your friends.
A Bustling Secondary Market for Sorare Cards
Outside of Sorare’s internal transfer market, the biggest market for the football crypto collectible cards is found on OpenSea.
OpenSea is the first and largest marketplace for crypto collectibles. The platform enables users to buy, sell, and auction blockchain gaming items, crypto art, and virtual goods backed by physical assets.
For Sorare players, OpenSea provides another avenue to get their hands on the best (and most valuable) players or to sell them to collectors who may not even be playing the game and are purely interested in the collecting aspect.
To log onto OpenSea, you can use Trust Wallet’s DApp Browser (as demonstrated in this video).
Alternatively, you can connect your Trust Wallet via WalletConnect.
Once you have connected your Ethereum wallet, you can bid for or purchase Sorare cards that fit your team or crypto collectibles portfolio.
For example, if your team needs a Neymar, you could bid for a rare card from the 2020–21 season. The last time the card depicted below traded, it was sold for 3.888 ETH.
While Neymar tends to be pricey, you can also find cards for as little as a few dollars. Once you use cards in-play and they start to earn experience points, you may be able to sell them on for more than you purchased them for.
To transfer cards out of the game, so that you can trade them with friends or sell them on third-party marketplaces, you will have to export your Sorare private key and import them into an Ethereum wallet, like Trust Wallet.
What’s to Come?
Sorare currently has 45,000+ users and over 100 licensed football clubs, ranging from Paris St. Germain to West Ham United. Even Bayern Munich joined Sorare on November 10.
In October, Sorare users spent over €1,000,000 on footballer collectible cards, highlighting the strong demand for digital football collectible cards.
As Sorare continues to gain popularity and more users join, the game’s collectible cards should gain value as they remain provably scarce by design, and holders have full ownership of their cards — thanks to blockchain.
A team composed of top players has the potential to gain a substantial amount of value as the game’s user base continues to expand, and more popular football clubs join the foray.
So if you love football and have a fondness for collectibles, check out Sorare. You may earn some crypto along the way.