Sorare Leagues – Current Coverage & Targeting the Top 20

Sorare has come a long way since its early days when few clubs and hardly any leagues were fully licensed. The coverage has expanded rapidly over the past year or so with numerous new additions. Below we’re going to look through all the Sorare leagues that are currently covered on the platform and contemplate which ones may soon be added.

What leagues do Sorare cover?

*Sorare stopped minting and auctioning Russian Premier League cards following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but existing cards can still be used.

All of the above leagues plus the following continental cups and international tournaments are also covered in SO5 fantasy football: AFC Champions League, Africa Cup of Nations, Concacaf Champions League, Copa Libertadores, Copa America, European Championship, UEFA Nations League, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, UEFA Conference League plus World Cup qualifiers in every confederation except Oceania. We’re assuming the World Cup itself will also be covered!

The Sorare coverage is therefore quite expansive and features just about every major club and international competition in world football. At the time of writing (June 2022), there are 27 domestic leagues in Sorare that are covered. That means when you sign up to Sorare, you can buy player cards and use them in fantasy tournaments when those players are involved in matches in any of the above listed leagues and competitions, even if they transfer from one club to another after you purchase the card. This is an important thing to know if you are starting out on Sorare so don’t automatically panic if your player is linked with a move.

The number of Sorare licensed leagues is lower though with only 11 having a full license to ensure that you can buy cards from every team in the division. These are all updated each season with the new cards typically coming out a few weeks into the new campaign with the promoted teams included. 

Some of the covered leagues don’t actually have any fully licensed clubs but you can still use your existing players if they transfer to that league. However some leagues such as the Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1, already have numerous licensed clubs, but Sorare doesn’t have an agreement with the entire league at this stage. You can view the growing list of fully licensed clubs here.

Sorare Leagues Covered – What is their target?

Sorare’s regularly stated goal has been to onboard the top 20 leagues in the world. This has frequently been communicated by the company and members of the Sorare team and was reaffirmed last year when the Bundesliga was added which was described as “a major breakthrough as we get closer to our goal of partnering with the top 20 leagues in the world”. 

There was even the suggestion that the goal could be reached by the end of 2022. That seems unlikely now at a time when most cryptocurrencies and NFTs are losing value and are receiving bad press (although the Sorare market has held up remarkably well in the circumstances). That may make deals more difficult to conclude right now and talk of a much coveted Premier League license has gone slightly cold, although Sorare reportedly remained confident of pulling it off as of April.

What are the top 20 football leagues?

This is actually quite a difficult question to answer and while repeating their target to add the top 20 global leagues, Sorare have not specified what they see them to be. It’s pretty obvious that Europe is home to the most competitive leagues and the “big 5” of England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, which make up “Champion Europe” on Sorare, are clearly amongst them.

While there is no official way of ranking global leagues, the UEFA country coefficients, calculated by analysing the results of each country’s clubs in European competitions over a five year period offer one way of ranking European leagues by their relative strength. After the “big 5”, Portugal and the Netherlands have the next highest scores and are safe additions into the top 20. Austria and Scotland are next, but their coefficient scores are clearly skewed by one or two high-performing clubs and neither featured in Bleacher Report’s recent piece where they ranked the top 20 global leagues according to something called the M.F. Coefficient.

The top flights in Brazil and Argentina ranked 6th and 7th respectively according to that and are also unquestionably the top 20 global football leagues. The same goes for Mexico’s Liga MX which is widely perceived to be the strongest in the CONCACAF region having produced 37 CONCACAF champions with the USA lagging well behind in 2nd with only 6.

So we can feel pretty confident about naming 10 of the top 20 global leagues. By looking at transfermarkt’s total market values, it feels we can add three more European leagues. The Turkish, Russian and Belgian top flights have total market values of between €800m and €950m to complete the top 10 most valuable European top divisions (after the 7 already mentioned) with a significant drop to the next most valuable one (the Austrian Bundesliga – €445m). 

It seems safe to assume that Sorare consider the Turkish, Russian and Belgian leagues to be amongst their “top 20” with all three already fully licensed. The inclusion of the MLS may spark more debate, but while it does benefit from having 28 teams, the total market value of the league tops €1bn according to transfermarkt which suggests it is also worthy of that status.

After that the picture gets a bit more murky though and it’s certainly debatable whether Sorare’s four other licensed leagues – Scotland, Austria, Japan & Korea, are truly amongst the top 20 globally. It’s very hard to really compare the standard of those divisions with other strong leagues in South America such as the Colombian and Uruguayan top flights, not to mention the second tiers in the major European nations.

It would certainly feel generous to include the J-League and K-League in the “top 20” and therefore Sorare has so far only secured licenses for at most 9 of the 20 strongest top tier leagues, meaning they have a long way to go to reach their goal.

Top 20 football leagues by total market value

This data comes from transfermarkt and is accurate as of 16/6/22. By total market value, we mean the total estimated value of all the players in the league.

Perhaps the main takeaway here is that all of the second tiers in the “big five” European countries make the top 20 by this metric. While it hasn’t started covering the leagues or minting cards, Sorare does have an agreement in place with both the Bundesliga and LaLiga to cover the second tiers in Germany and Spain so it is possible that those do feature in their long-term “top 20” plan.

Securing the rights for the Premier League, by a distance the world’s most valuable, is clearly the big one on the horizon though and that’s something to continue to keep an eye on as we head towards the 2022/23 season.

Women’s Football on Sorare – Coming soon?

In addition, Sorare have toyed with the idea of adding women’s football which has generated some differing views within the community. Many are strongly against it given many leagues are severely imbalanced with dominant teams and one-sided scorelines which could potentially radically alter the current SO5 landscape and create stacks that would be almost impossible to beat with male players.

The outstanding Barcelona femeni for example won all 30 of their league games in Spain this season, scoring 159 goals and conceding only 11. European champions Lyon meanwhile dropped just 2 points in the French League, scoring 79 and conceding just 8.

Those are the extreme examples though. The FA WSL in England does produce plenty of one-sided games, but the strongest teams are in fact relatively comparable in the level of their domination to some male sides already competing in SO5, while the National Women’s Soccer League in the USA is typically very competitive and may be a better first port of call should they decide to go down the female route for adding new Sorare leagues.

The company does seem serious about it. “We believe that NFTs can significantly accelerate the development of women’s sports” was the message from Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia speaking to Cointelegraph last year.

There are ways in which Sorare could introduce women’s football without seriously affecting the current gameplay. They could be included in Special Weekly tournaments for example or operate in their own section, totally separate from the male SO5 tournaments. We have also seen Sorare recently announced that they are going to be launching MLB baseball NFTs and more sports may be on the horizon featuring both men and women.