I just noticed that its coming up to 1 year since I joined the platform! I thought it would be fun to review the journey so far what lessons have been learnt and what future plans are:
Overall performance:
Over the year I have won a total of 143 rewards and 3.44 ETH
My current team is worth approx 77 ETH and the below graph shows the progress. Important to note that these are very rough calculations:
The player that won me my most rewards, is one of my favourites - Insigne!
When I started there were approx 2000 players with 1 card or more:
First Team
The first team I entered was in GW114 - 6th November
I can hardly remember building this team and I have no idea what is happening with the scoring (old system). I remember being very hesitant about spending too much ETH to make this team, especially goalkeepers. Thats why I ended up with a 39 year old keeper, costing 0.195 or £61 at the time:
The rest of the team all cost around £15 each after I did some basic analysis on the Jupiler and Russian league. Unsurprisingly I didnt win any rewards (!)
First reward:
A couple of GWs later. I won my first reward with the team above after researching and targeting a few players. The team scored 330 and was able to secure 0.02 ETH which was v encouraging. It wasnt the best reward but showed me the potential of the platform
First SR
I realised from a few chats to people on discord that I was buying too many rares in similar positions and the value of SRs. The first SRs I bought were Rui but the most important was Pellegrini who i bought as a birthday present to myself for 0.4 ETH
He won me a very good reward (Botman) in his first outing!
First Unique Buy & Asia
When I began on Sorare, I noticed the different divisions but wanted to keep to the leagues which a) I had most knowledge about and b) had the longest time left in the season
Around December time, when the J-league was ending I decided I wanted to enter a new division and Asia made the most sense:
Connection to Japan - can go to live games!
Looking at the prizes/number of entries it had a lot less competition than europe where most users were based
Ability to check Japanese sources for info
Best value
I used a number of stats sites and started building teams which were generally costing 0.02 - 0.05. I was using reward/sales and crypto trading to finance this. I saw that D2 in particularly didnt have many entries & on occasion there were more rewards than entries!
The first unique I bought was Inukai. I liked his scores, age and the fact he was captain of the side. I was able to get for 1.55 ETH which was on the same day I missed out on Kikuchi
I then went on to target other uniques and bought Abe, Machida and Kawabe so that I could enter in D1 which went well until Kawabe transferred to the Swiss league! I then decided to target D2, especially U23 to fully utilise Machida before he becomes ineligible in July 2022.
MLS - a stretch too far
Gary Vee entered sorare and began tweeting about in mid February 2021. This led to a huge spike in the number of people playing, especially from the USA
This saw prices across the market rise and I was able to sell a number of players for ETH and take profit.
However, in hindsight, I also became a little greedy and decided to start building a MLS/America team. This didnt go well as I ended up overpaying and not having the time to research enough. My team simply wasnt competitive and the prices of these players came tumbling down when the hype lowered
Although, thanks to rewards in GAS and U23, my team has improved in America, overall it was a mistake from which I have learnt from....Dont stretch yourself too much and its quality over quantity! If you feel any FOMO, pause, reflect as its likely a good chance to sell and not buy. This is true for most of crypto trading and sorare is no different.
Plans
The squad continues to grow and I am always rotating players & building. I tend to first look at:
Future fixtures/lineup builder
See what needs improving
Research and target specific players
I will always look to sell players (especially rewards) to fund this. The main things I look at for my players are
Points in general (peak point to me is v important) over 40 games
Number of DNPs
Quality of team - utility in other competitions such as internationals/cup
Value
I will post separately how I do this and what sources I get into a habit of looking at in a separate post
In the future I plan to :
Continue building squads, do further analysis esp stats not seen on soraredata.
Research leagues I dont know, especially injured players who are returning
Take profits (roughly 10% of rewards)
Build this site to include statistical analysis, player recommendations and lineup info, in particular for the J league where I have noticed many users making basic errors eg not factoring rotation risk when team are also playing in the ACL/have a v important game with a rival next
If you have any questions or feedback on things you would like to see, do ask me on Discord or twitter :)
Thanks for reading!