SorareData Newsletter, Issue 10 ⚽️
What’s 🆕
🔦 Feature Spotlight
Is it harder to win Underdog Limited or Champion Europe Limited? 🐶🇪🇺
📺 Latest Streams & Podcasts 🎧
What’s 🆕
Have you ever wanted to go back in our lineup builder to see whether you entered your Sorare lineups exactly how you built them on SorareData? Or, did you want to go back to see what led you to make certain decisions even if the results didn’t turn out how you hoped? Well, now you can.
SorareData users can now see previous gameweeks in our lineup builder to gloat about their great builds or lament some questionable decisions. Just select the date filter like you would if you were going to a future gameweek and instead select one in the past.
🔦 Feature Spotlight
SorareData’s Player Rankings page is one of our most popular tools, as it allows users to see detailed comparative scoring averages and card prices all in one place.
The page defaults to show the highest average scoring players over the last 15 gameweeks (for those who made a minimum of seven appearances in that span), and users can easily sort the columns by decisive score or all-around score in that time. They can also do the same over the last five or 40 gameweeks.
Additionally, users can see the averages of the latest public transactions for limited, rare and super rare cards, with the ability to also show the current floor price.
That’s one of a number of options available on the page, including filters to help you narrow down by position, SO5 or domestic league, whether they are U23 eligible, if they play in an upcoming gameweek, or only show players from your gallery.
Looking for the best midfielders for the upcoming Second Division Europe region, or the top U23 defenders from the Süper Lig? With a few clicks, you can see them all:
Is Underdog Limited harder to win than Champion Europe Limited? 🐶🇪🇺
Last week’s newsletter discussed the minimum number of points required to win rewards in Underdog competitions, including the observation that they are becoming more competitive as more Sorare managers participate. In fact, Underdog Limited is now regularly either the second or third-most popular competition on Sorare for a variety of reasons, including the fact that many marquee players cannot be used because they do not qualify by averaging more than 50 fantasy points in their last 15 gameweeks, and that only four cards of the same scarcity are required for entering.
We touched on the minimum number of points required to win rewards, including the average number of points per card needed in those scenarios, however, we stopped short of that by not examining how many points were required for each tier of reward, or whether those points were comparable for similarly tiered cards in other competitions.
Well, it’s now time to jump into that data.
We’re going to focus our analysis between GW293, which is when Champion Europe started back up again, and GW302, which was last weekend.
The initial view makes it look like Underdog (the yellow bar on the right of each GW) is the place to go for Tier 0 and Tier 1 limited rewards because of the lower number of points required to win compared to All Star, U23, Champion Europe, Challenger Europe, America and Asia. However, it’s important to remember the most important rule about Underdog contests, other than that every player has to average no more than 50 fantasy points per game over their last 15 gameweeks: only four cards of the same scarcity are required. To put that into context, we need to examine how many fantasy points per card you must average to win these top prizes, and then see if they are comparable to the other competitions.
Doing that gives us much different pictures:
Champion Europe remains extremely competitive, including multiple gameweeks requiring an average of more than 100 fantasy points per card to win a Tier 0 card, and more than 90 for a Tier 1, but what we also see is the huge jump for Underdog. However, there is one big caveat that can’t be ignored: your captain.
Captains gain a 20% advantage in most Sorare competitions, but Underdog increases that to 50%, which actually puts more pressure on managers to get their selections right. Even with the difference in the captain bonus, you still have to average more points per card in Underdog for the same score as other competitions. For example, if you had five players who each scored 50 fantasy points, your total would be 260 points:
50 + 50 + 50 + 50 + (50*1.2) = 260
The basic formula is 5.2x = 260, which means you have to divide 260 by 5.2 to see how many fantasy points each player has to score (before your captain bonus) in order to reach that total.
And we can use almost the same formula to determine the average scores per card to reach 260 in Underdog: 4.5x = 260, which is the same as 260 divided by 4.5, which is 57.78.
Put another way: 57.08 + 57.08 + 57.08 + (57.08 * 1.5) = 260.01
Let’s use a specific example to make sure we understand this difference. In GW298, the minium score required for a T1 reward in Champion Europe Limited was 298.52 while the minimum score for a T1 in Underdog Limited was 296.65. Using the two formulas, we can see that while the total scores were similar, the averages per card were not:
Champion Europe: 298.52 / 5.2 = 57.41
Underdog: 296.65 / 4.5 = 65.92
We’ll now take our graphs one last step, showing the average number of underlying fantasy points required per card:
When you look at these scores on a per-card basis, Underdog is actually much more competitive in terms of winning top rewards, which is actually pretty remarkable because every player has to have averaged no more than 50 fantasy points over their last 15 gameweeks. This isn’t to say that Underdog cards are more viable in regular competitions, but it’s at least a signal that just because these players come in with low averages doesn’t mean that low scores will win rewards.
📺 Latest Streams & Podcasts 🎧
Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
SorareData Strategy Show: The Pros and Cons of Late Swap
Lairdinho and psufans2 discuss one of the most popular suggested solutions to DNPs on Sorare: late swap. In addition to discussing what late swap actually is, they discuss how to manipulate lineups to ensure organized Sorare managers can almost always avoid DNPs within the rules.
SorareAndrews Podcast: Is This All Too Much?
Lairdinho and Black use the announcement of SorareNBA to discuss whether three sports is too much for most Sorare managers to handle effectively.