Sorare Raises $680m!

If you’ve been following us here over the last few months you will know we have been very excited about a new fantasy football platform called Sorare.

Well today they announced absolutely huge news that blows all of our (already high) expectations out of the water!

Sorare revealed that they have raised an astonishing $680m in Series B funding, valuing them at a massive $4.3bn. It is the largest fundraise in the history of French Tech and the largest in Europe for a Series B.

The round was led by global giant Softbank and joined by major firms like Atomico, Bessemer Ventures and D1 Capital as well as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and football players Gerard Piqué, Rio Ferdinand and Antoine Griezmann. You can check out the Reuters story about the fundraise here.

In our most recent blog about the platform, we said we believed Sorare was the most significant development in the sports trading space since the launch of Betfair 20 years ago, which revolutionised sports betting and trading.

Well it looks like we are not alone and clearly some of the world’s biggest VC firms agree!

We want to delve into what this means for Sorare itself, for us as users and what we would like to see them focus on now.

What This Means for Sorare

This is obviously fantastic news for Sorare and the mind boggles at the opportunities it opens up for them. We would like to congratulate the whole Sorare team on this amazing achievement and what they have done with the platform since launching just three short years ago.

In their own blog announcing the news, Sorare say it will enable them to become the next global sports entertainment giant, which in one sense sounds very ambitious but on the other hand with $680m at their disposal now is not actually too outlandish!

Their specific goals are:

Building their team by recruiting more staff, including opening an office in the US;
Adding more clubs and leagues – the Telegraph for example report (behind a paywall) that talks are going on with the Premier League, which would be huge for the platform;
Building a mobile app and accelerating their marketing;
Expanding into new sports, starting next year. We would love to see “Sorare Golf” ourselves, but it could work well in many other sports and with the plans to open an office in the US you would have to think some US sports are in the works.

They also mention support for community initiatives, underprivileged entrepreneurs and female sports which is good to hear.

An area we expect to see a lot more of is the “real world experiences” the CEO Nicolas Julia has talked about a number of times in interviews. They kicked this off recently with VIP tickets to El Classico (Barcelona v Real Madrid) and this week are giving away 100 pairs of tickets to Spanish matches through their partnership with La Liga, so there could well be much more of this kind of thing going forward.

In a general sense though this funding will be about growth for them and building the user base. Currently they have around 600,000 registered users and 35,000 paying users, so in terms of user numbers they are still relatively small and there is a very large runway ahead potentially. How they choose to grow the users and how fast this happens will be the questions now, but no doubt we will see a very significant expansion of their marketing efforts.

In a rapidly growing early-stage company like this there can also be a danger of trying to do too many things at once and not quite getting them right, but hopefully they will pace themselves and manage their growth plans sensibly.

More than anything though it’s just a very exciting time to be involved with the platform. It still feels very early in their journey and if they do achieve their plans to have over a million users, then being in the first fifty thousand or so would make you very early to the party.

What It Means for Us, the Sorare Users

Whilst the news is primarily excellent news for Sorare, it should also have benefits for us as users. Although the possibilities are endless, the main implications we see are:-

A better gaming experience – the introduction of an app is long-awaited and should be of great benefit to the Sorare community. Sorare podcaster John Nellis has talked about the potential for the app to include notifications and even streaming/highlights of games at some point, which would be epic in our view. With this amount of funding, these sorts of features become a possibility.
More leagues – including in particular the Premier League, will give more choice to users in terms of players they can buy (more of whom they will have heard of) and create more interest in the platform globally.
More users – this is obviously welcome and should mean the prices of cards rise significantly if hundreds of thousands of new users join Sorare. After all, as the platform grew from a few hundred users to ten thousand plus, the price of rare cards (and above) took off. However, there is a double-edge sword to this and that is more competition, meaning higher scores needed for prizes. It also means it might become difficult to afford new players without selling some first. Overall though we expect most users would rejoice at seeing their galleries significantly increase in value.
More sports – as mentioned above, we would love to see a golf version of Sorare, but really the concept should work well in many other sports and there would be the opportunity to get in right at the start of each new sport added.

So some great possibilities there for us as users. On the whole this funding should also make Sorare’s chances of success much greater in the long run.

Whilst nothing is guaranteed in life of course and those burned by the likes of Football Index will be rightly wary, having $680m at their disposal, together with the $50m they raised earlier this year and the millions they have been making each month themselves, should in theory reduce the chances of failure and give Sorare a much better chance of getting to their goal of over a million users.

Just as a point of comparison for example, Football Index raised just over $1m in funding via a crowdfunding platform, so this feels worlds apart. As we say though, it is always a good idea to be cautious and of course only invest an amount you can afford to lose in a platform like this.

What We Would Like to See from Sorare Now

There has clearly been a focus over the last few months on adding new clubs and raising these funds to fuel Sorare’s expansion. Sorare have also upgraded the platform to layer two on Ethereum which has enabled faster transactions and added a new type of card, which were both substantial achievements.

However, there are still a few issues we would like to see addressed and that we think are crucial in ensuring Sorare can achieve its growth plans.

These centre around the UX and attracting your “everyday user:”

– Introducing a stablecoin – one element that has put off people we talk to about Sorare is the cryptocurrency element. A large section of the public are still sceptical about crypto and associate it with the negative stories they see in the press. Minimizing the crypto element by introducing a stablecoin would be of great benefit in addressing this. It would also mean users would not have to worry about the fluctuating price of Ethereum. There is enough to get your head around and manage on the platform without that too!

– Having a withdraw to bank account/card option – whilst there is a good option to deposit by card or bank account using Ramp, there is no equivalent for withdrawing. This can leave new users confused and worried as their funds sit in the ether (literally) waiting to be transferred and they have the additional hassle of setting up a crypto account with the likes of Coinbase. This is an extra layer of complexity it would be good to remove.

– Addressing the money/skill imbalance – we wrote extensively in a previous blog post about what we see as a major flaw in the fantasy game at the moment and that is how money can largely determine success. Due to there being no restrictions in Sorare like in other fantasy sports games such as a team budget or maximum number of players you can enter from one club, effectively people can just come in, buy the best players from top clubs like Bayern, PSG, Ajax, Liverpool and Real Madrid and beat other players on lower budgets.

This will become more of a problem as Sorare expands and more users come in, as you are likely to get duplicate line-ups (potentially hundreds in D5) and the scores required to win a prize will keep going up. Whilst there may still be the odd example of a low-budget manager who “hit the jackpot” and won a big prize with a team of low-cost cards, essentially those are likely to become few and far between and the reward places will be dominated by teams made up of the star players.

Whilst some features like the progression bar and academy league may help to some extent, they won’t address that fundamental issue. Ideally we would like to see a maximum number of Star Rares per lineup or maximum players from one club. This would probably have to operate in a separate league structure to the current SO5, given that current users have built their galleries on the basis of the current rules.

In the long run though we believe this would be much more attractive to new users, who would see a genuine chance to win using skill and research rather than feeling at an insurmountable disadvantage to the larger galleries. The original SO5 version might then become the preserve of the wealthier users and early adopters, which would be fine and could continue as normal.

– Introducing the Academy League and Progression Bar – both of these have been awaited for quite a few months now but there haven’t been any updates on them for some time nor a planned date for introduction, so we would like to see an update on those soon.

– Guides for new users – Sorare is quite a complex game and it took us a few days of watching videos and reading guides to get the hang of it. Those were all on disparate sites from various sources though and it would be beneficial for Sorare to have their own guides, including by video, more comprehensive FAQs and explainers etc on the site itself.

So there is quite a lot there to be getting on with!

The good news though is it should all be achievable, particularly with the new staff they are recruiting. And certainly we make these points as constructive suggestions rather than criticism – what Sorare have achieved to date is incredible and we only want the game to get better.

Not Too Late to Join

As mentioned above, it still feels early in Sorare’s journey. Indeed, the CEO Nicolas said himself it is still “Day 1” of their global fantasy game, so we certainly don’t think you have missed the boat by not joining yet.

In fact with the release of the new Limited scarcity, which has made it much cheaper to play the game, it is an ideal time to join Sorare in many ways.

If you are interested in joining, please check out our Sorare Guide here and you can let us know if you have any questions at info@honestbettingreviews.com

Good luck with your journey if you do join or are already on Sorare and here’s a toast to the biggest Series B fundraise in European history!

You can sign up to Sorare here and get 10 free cards to get you started.