2023 is here and it promises to be another big year on Sorare. Over the past 12 months, the global fantasy football platform has grown to cover most of the world’s top leagues and players, added two new sports and finished 2022 with a huge World Cup competition. Below, we’ll look ahead to Sorare in 2023 with some predictions for what may be in store.
Will the Premier League be added on Sorare? Are thresholds here to stay for the long-term? Will we get women’s football? These are some of the burning questions that we’ll look to answer or at least second guess.
Sorare 2023 Predictions – 10 Things to look out for in 2023!
The Premier League
This is the big one that Sorare managers are most excited about. Despite persistent rumours throughout 2022, we didn’t get the Premier League last year, with Liverpool the only EPL club to be fully licensed for 2022/23. Adding the Prem, would not just cement Sorare’s status as the leading global fantasy football platform using digital collectables, but make it all but impossible for anyone to compete in the space for the next few years at least.
The consensus amongst the Sorare community still seems to be that the Premier League is imminent and while not confirming anything, the Sorare team have done little to quell the speculation and excitement about a Premier League launch. It would certainly be a big boost to the whole platform and market which did largely endure a tricky 2022, although it still fared far better than almost all other NFT projects.
When will we get the Premier League? That’s tough to call but there appears to be two windows that are most likely. The first would be very imminently – in January or February, allowing Sorare to roll out 2022/23 cards before we get too late in the season whilst bolstering Champion Europe prize pools with early edition Premier League cards. The second would be for the start of the 2023/24 season, with an announcement perhaps midway through the year.
Evolving Thresholds & Capped Modes
Sorare has already announced the introduction of new ETH thresholds across all scarcities and capped modes for 2023. These will effectively replace the current Rare only thresholds in Global All Star with $5 thresholds at Limited level, all the way up to $250 for Unique. The capped mode will work in a similar way to those in Sorare NBA with each player’s L15 average affecting their usability.
While it will most likely be harder to win thresholds now, especially for those with smaller galleries, the addition of them across all scarcities is surely a positive thing. However we can expect the exact rules for capped modes to evolve as 2023 progresses and we can expect another big update ahead of the 2023/24 season in Europe.
The good news is that thresholds do seem to be part of their long-term roadmap, something which we doubted when we did our 2022 Sorare predictions and that makes it a bit easier to plan and strategise.
Limited Pro
This was something we saw coming in 2022 but didn’t ultimately get, although it still seems a logical step for Sorare to take. Adding a Limited Pro where managers could select a mixed team of Limited and Rare cards would help bridge the gap between the two scarcities and make the jump to Rare more appealing and accessible for managers on lower budgets.
If it were introduced, it’s likely to work much like Rare Pro where managers can select at least three Rare cards and up to two Super Rares for global, U23 and regional leagues. It’d also enable managers with Limited only galleries to get into rares without forking out for a goalkeeper.
Greater Crossover between Sports
We’ve already had some evidence of this with the successful launch of basketball and particularly capped modes, which are explained in greater detail in Sorare NBA guide. The same type of competition is being rolled out into Sorare Football with the capped thresholds contests likely to become a major focus for managers.
Having three sports gives Sorare greater scope to test things out and see what works and what doesn’t in football, basketball and baseball. Anything that proves a big hit in one sport, may well be implemented in the others so even if you’re just sticking to playing football, it may be useful to keep an eye on the other sports for clues as to the future direction of gameplay.
There has also been speculation of potential multi-sport competitions where you could for example pick three footballers and two NBA or MLB players to compete in a gameweek. This wouldn’t currently be practical given gameweeks don’t fully overlap and it’s unlikely to be at the very top of Sorare’s 2023 “to do” list, but it would be a nice extra way of attracting football managers to basketball/baseball and vice-versa.
Increased Utility
The introduction of capped modes clearly favours managers with large galleries and with the supply of cards ever increasing, it makes sense for Sorare to head in that direction as they need managers to sweep up not just elite cards, but those of low-scoring players too.
Having a large gallery enables you to get a wider range of players to choose from for capped competitions and it’ll be easier to find five that are currently underperforming their L15 average, making it much easier for you to reach thresholds.
We can also expect Sorare to add more special competitions and different ways to use your cards in 2023. They experimented with ticket specials and other real world prizes in 2022 and it’ll be interesting to see what other ways they can find to add utility to Sorare cards this calendar year.
Simplified Training
We got some small tweaks to training in 2022, but not the big overhaul and simplification that was needed. For anyone with a mid to large sized gallery, selecting training teams each gameweek is currently perhaps the worst part of being on Sorare. It’s a time consuming process and involves no real skill or tactical nous, but thankfully it seems like we will get a big change coming soon.
It remains to be seen exactly what that will be, but anything that reduces the time spent selecting lineups would be a bonus with a one-click “train all players” option preferable as it really isn’t much fun!
Marketing Drives
Until this point, Sorare’s focus seems to have been progressing towards their long-stated goal of adding the Top 20 leagues whilst improving the product. They have made good progress on both fronts and it feels like a much more complete platform now than it did 12 or 18 months ago when there were far bigger gaps in terms of their coverage of players and leagues.
Adding the Premier League feels a bit like the final frontier before we get a really big marketing push where they prioritise user growth. We passed 200,000 Sorare managers owning a card (excluding Commons) in late 2022 but those numbers will need to grow significantly if the company is to truly reach its potential and big marketing pushes are likely this year.
A More Social Platform
Another trend on Sorare over the past couple of months has been the effort to make it a more social platform where users can compete against their friends. Private leagues were first introduced during the World Cup with users able to create and join leagues and that will continue throughout 2023 for regular gameweeks. The “Private Leagues” tab has since been added to the main menu bar which is a sign that Sorare view them as a big part of their future roadmap.
They may prove a bit harder to run effectively during the regular season when compared to the common-only Global Cup event given managers have very different galleries and different focuses. However we can expect some tweaks as 2023 goes along and Sorare figures out ways to make them better and more inclusive.
We may also get other iterations that allow users to directly interact with each other on the platform with the current ability to follow other managers serving no real purpose. Perhaps that will change in 2023?
A Women’s World Cup Competition
The introduction of women’s football has been muted and has received a mixed reaction from the Sorare community. Most of that stems from the one-sided nature of many women’s matches in the top leagues with Barcelona utterly dominant for example in Liga F.
For those reasons, it’s unlikely we’ll get female footballers added with the capacity to compete directly against men but there’s no reason why we couldn’t get a special, separate, competition for the Women’s World Cup for example. The competition will take place in July and August in Australia and New Zealand and the event would be the logical time to introduce women’s football to Sorare in some capacity whilst also filling some of the void created by the summer break in Europe.
A common-only tournament, similar to the recent Global Cup may be the best bet, with perhaps national series collectables thrown in again.
Auto-Bidding across all Sports
This one may have gone under the radar a little bit if you’re not involved in Sorare NBA but it’s a potentially huge change to how auctions work on Sorare. There’ll be no more setting alarm clocks for auctions and much of the drama will be taken out of them if auto-bidding is swept out across all sports on the platform.
Essentially, you would be able to set a maximum bid that you’re willing to go to on the player. Sorare will then automatically bid the minimum increment against the current highest bid. Therefore you will never pay more than your maximum bid, but can still get the player for less than that amount if other bids are lower.
Thanks for checking out our Sorare 2023 predictions and we look forward to seeing how things pan out across the year ahead.
If you’re not yet on Sorare, sign up here to activate the latest new user offer which will see you get a free limited card after your 5th auction purchase. You can also get in touch via @sorarelaliga on twitter with any questions.
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