SorareData Newsletter, Issue 4 ⚽️ ⚾️
Before we start, a quick message about baseball:
Sorare’s big community update this week included the introduction of Sorare MLB, a new fantasy baseball NFT platform. As we said back in May after the initial announcement from Sorare, we have big plans for SorareData MLB, as we build what we believe will be the best third-party platform for fantasy baseball players on Sorare.
We also recognize that everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter did so because of our football coverage, and we wanted to make it clear that this publication will continue to focus on football. That being said, our plans for SorareData MLB don’t stop at our tools and features, and we will also have a regular SorareData MLB newsletter that you can subscribe to here and have the first newsletter delivered right to your inbox when it’s first published. Our content coverage will also expand beyond a newsletter, so be on the lookout for new ways to learn about SorareData MLB, and how you can use our suite of tools to be a better fantasy baseball manager.
This week’s agenda
⚽️ SorareData Leagues
What’s 🆕
🔦 Feature Spotlight
How many lineups are managers entering? 🤔
📺 Latest Streams & Podcasts 🎧
⚽️ SorareData Leagues
Don’t forget to set your SorareData League lineups! Head over to our Gaming Arena to set your lineups and compete!
What’s 🆕
Manager watchlists - we are very excited for the release of our manager watchlists, allowing SorareData users to create groups that allow them to compare gameweek performances, check out new arrivals and sales, compare galleries, and so much more all in one tool. Check out our latest video on how to use the new feature:
Our new signing! - we’re even more excited to announce that Vithaliy is joining the SorareData team as Chief Football Officer!
🔦 Feature Spotlight
Manager watchlists on our mobile app - we’re going to cheat a little bit and extend our talk about the manager watchlists because we’re so excited about their release.
In addition to using them on our web-app, SorareData users can also follow other managers during gameweeks right on our mobile app. To see SO5 results of managers you have in a watchlist together, just click the Managers tab at the top of the GW Center (the left image below), and if you want a specific tournament, just choose it from the dropdown circled in the middle image:
And if you have multiple manager watchlists, it’s simple to just switch from one to another:
Creating a manager watchlist of friends means you no longer have to type in each of their Sorare names in the search bar to see their results; simply create a list and you’ll be able to compare them all in one place!
And if you don’t have our mobile app, you can get it on iOS or Android by clicking the icons below:
How many lineups are managers entering? 🤔
The introduction of The Academy significantly increased the number of Sorare managers who were competing for prizes with cards they had to acquire either through auctions or the secondary market. Limited cards are not required to participate, but a 40% XP bonus make them more viable to compete for rewards, especially when you can captain a limited card to get up to 60%. Playing in The Academy means you cannot participate in any other tournament (other than the common-only Casual League), and it got us thinking:
how many Sorare managers play just one lineup each gameweek?
The early expectation is that most single-lineup managers play either All Star Rare or All Star Limited, the former specifically because of the ETH threshold rewards, and the latter because it’s likely the cheapest and easiest entry to playing Sorare tournaments. And we saw just that this past weekend during GW 286, as 4,086 Sorare managers played their lone entry in All Star Rare, while another 3,004 played theirs in All Star Limited, with both representing sizable gaps above the third-highest, America Limited (1,100 entries).
The All Star competitions are where most single-entry managers play, but the introduction of Underdog and Specialist Limited Leagues seems to have led to a decrease in entries into All Star Limited, as we see in this chart, which goes back to the beginning of 2022:
It’s worth noting that the number of entries are down this time of year anyway because there are no European competitions, but it’s still a worthwhile glance into where single-lineup managers are putting their cards (note: the zero in GW 281 is because there was no All Star competitions that gameweek). Let’s look at the same chart but add in the data for Underdog and Specialist Limited Leagues, and it seems they have had some kind of affect on the numbers for All Star:
The cost to enter lineups in Underdog and Specialist Limited Leagues is likely lower than trying to build a highly competitive All Star Limited team because of the requirements for having five players who average fewer than 50 fantasy points per game over their past 15 gameweeks in Underdog, or two players averaging fewer than 40 in Specialist (simply put: players who don’t score as well in SO5 usually cost less). Given that, it’s not really surprising that some managers who only enter a single tournament in a gameweek would choose one of those, especially with the top of the prize pools either a star limited (Underdog) or a star rare (Specialist). We actually looked into that topic in last week’s newsletter.
For a deeper look into the GW 286 lineups, we actually saw four single-entry managers submit their lineups in either Asia Rare Pro, America Rare Pro, America Super Rare or America Super Rare, with four additional managers going into U23 Rare Pro (two) and U23 Super Rare (two), and four others into All Star Super Rare. And, that brought us back to our original question of how many managers play only one lineup in a gameweek:
Well, it looks like The Academy has had quite an effect on the number of single-entry managers we have per gameweek. Instead, let’s exclude The Academy so we have a more apples-to-apples comparison:
What we see here is a fairly decent drop after the conclusion of the European seasons, which is an expected outcome given a majority of Sorare managers focus on those leagues. But instead of just looking at the raw number of single-entry managers, what we really want to know is how many of the total managers across all Sorare competitions they represent, which we have here:
It seems like we should revisit this once the European leagues are back underway, but it’s clear we have a sizable number of Sorare managers who are submitting only one lineup per gameweek. And, since our questions tend to spark new questions, we also started to wonder how many managers have submitted two, three, 10, 20 or 37 lineups in a single gameweek, and what percentage of the total managers playing SO5 they accounted for. And, yes, we’ve had five separate GWs (260, 264, 268, 270 and 272) when at least one manager entered 37 tournaments, with GW 270 representing the most, as Il_Fenomeno, Nanzo, Migo and PawelTrader each did it with varying success.
Curious what 37 entered lineups looks like? Here is what Il_Fenomeno saw that gameweek:
We’ll dive into this more in next week’s newsletter to see how many Sorare managers are entering one through 37 lineups each gameweek and whether we see any positive or negative trends.
📺 Latest Streams & Podcasts 🎧
Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
SorareData Strategy Show: Overpriced U23s
🚨Live at 12pm EDT/5pm BST/6pm CET on Friday!🚨
Lairdinho and psufans2 review the current prices of many popular U23 players on Sorare and explain why they think some stars are overpriced based on their SO5 viability and collectibility.
SorareAndrews Podcast: Waiting is Not Easy
Lairdinho and Black dive into their galleries to discuss player cards they bought and are still waiting to fully utilize for SO5, including the one-and-only Joao Felix.
SorareData Strategy Show: How to Avoid DNPs
Lairdinho and psufans2 discuss the pre-gameweek processes that help them avoid dreaded DNPs, as well as their scouting strategies to acquire players who maximize their playing time.