It’s time to talk about users. Active users. How many are really playing the game?
***Please note this article may start reading negatively but keep going to the end ;)
This number is what you find as of 29th November 12:00 CET on the Sorare homepage, which may well be the number of users who have signed up at some stage, but how many are really playing the game?
I will focus solely on Sorare Football, the pro version (excluding rivals) for this breakdown, because at the end of the day, users playing the pro game is what makes Sorare money. NBA and MLB are a bit of a black box for me — without knowing exact numbers, I do believe Sorare Football has by far the largest active user base. I also apologise in advance, this one is quite graphs and numbers heavy, hope you can follow along!
Card Owning Users
Firstly we can check SorareData for the number of users owning at least 1+ blockchain card. This stands at 266,335 as of November 29th 2023. That’s less than 7% of the figure above quoted on Sorare’s website. Are there really ~3.7m free-to-play users?
This chart is covering all sports and of course there are users who own cards within the NBA and/or MLB who do not own cards or actively play within Sorare Football. So we need to dig further.
Now if we go back to the week beginning 19th September, before GW409 (10 weeks ago), we see roughly 6,000 more users own at least 1 card, ~4000 more own at least 5 cards, and ~3000 more own at least 10 cards.
It’s worth comparing the graphs provided by SorareBase at this point, for the same time period it shows ~5,500 managers buying their first card with an investment.
Amateur, Kick-off and Specialist Competitions
With GW427 last weekend, changes were made to the Amateur and Kick-off divisions, stating that anyone who owned 10 or more “scarcity” cards, i.e. limited or above, are no longer permitted to join these competitions. (I did think Specialist was also supposed to fit these rules, but it seems like I can register line-ups in these currently so perhaps not). Firstly, this makes sense, giving more recent users a better chance of getting that winning feeling, and ideally progressing. Conveniently, this allows us to see how many users are at this stage of the game, less than 10 cards but active.
The English Premier League is, naturally, the most popular competition and for the last seven non-international weekend GWs, the number of entries has ranged between 80,000–90,000. In GW427 we see the drop off of managers who did play but no longer can, presumably because they have more than 10 scarcity cards. Entries are down to 55k, So roughly 30k managers. The other amateur leagues follow the same trend with slightly smaller entries across the board.
If we use this 55k number as a barometer, that could tell us ~1/3 of users with less than 10 cards actively enter this competition. But we don’t know about users who own no cards at all, so that number will be lower. I suppose we could use Sorare’s own number from their website — let’s be very fair with it and assume that equally 1/3 of those 3.7m free to play users are signed up for each of the three different sports. That’s 1.2m free-to-play Sorare Football users, yet we only have 55k playing Premier League Amateur? Even if we summed up all the users playing the five amateur leagues as if they were unique, we’d arrive at 220k for this past weekend — that’s only 17% of the conservatively estimated 1.2m who could have entered.
Now let’s look at kick-off. We see a pretty flat line across the 8 GWs, not showing the same drop off as Amateur. Interestingly, the Spanish league has the most entries pretty consistently. Notice the number of entrants, an average of 5.5k. That’s 10% of the PL amateur entries. If we assume all of these users are unique (unlikely but let’s be optimistic), we land at 27k users, about 50% of the PL amateur entries and 12% of all amateur entries.
But what about those +6k users who have now purchased their first card in this time? Sure, some may have gone the NBA route and some may have bought outside the top 5 leagues, but you’d expect at least a slight increase in numbers? Well, to put a sales spin on it, perhaps viewing things in a pipeline format makes sense. Maybe users are graduating to specialist and up at the same rate as users are joining kick off, so perhaps it makes sense that these numbers are stable?
Ok, then let’s look at Specialist. (Where, as I mentioned earlier, it seems is not restricted to <10 scarcity cards — all users may enter).
We see small growth, mostly in the most recent GW with a natural decline in the English PL due to users likely prioritising those cards for the PL Winter Competition. (Again, interestingly La Liga & Bundesliga are the most popular competitions here in terms of entries).
But in total, there were 2,500 more entries in GW427 vs GW409, and only 1,500 more vs GW413. Again, don’t forget we’re looking at these as unique entries, which is unlikely as managers will be entering multiple Specialist competitions so the overall increase in users is smaller.
Let’s look at combining all top-5 leagues across kick-off and specialist, and the total entries for all 10 competitions here.
Entries peak in GW417 and generally over the time period we see a small 7% increase in overall entries. It will be interesting to track Amateur, Kick-off and Specialist entries over the coming weeks.
Cap Modes
We might expect that the next natural progression for managers is Cap 220 Limited and/or Cap 240 Limited. Cap 220 sees a small gradual rise, peaking this past weekend with the start of the month-long competition.
Unfortunately however within Cap 240, we see a gradual decline over this time period, despite more users owning cards than before. Notice the number of users here — an average of 32.5k each full weekend GW. Remember the number of users who dropped off from PL Amateur this past weekend mentioned earlier? 30k.
Those numbers seem too close to me to be a coincidence. If we jump back to the Soraredata graph showing 10+ card owners, we see 97k. Are only 1/3 of those present within Sorare Football? I find that hard to believe, I would say more so at least 50% are present within Sorare Football, so let’s round it to 50,000.
That then tells us less than 60% of 10+ card owning active users enter Cap 240 Limited (remember <10 card owners may also enter here), and less than 33% of active users enter Cap 240 Rare. Rare shows an average of 16.5k users over these same GWs — again worryingly, this number is not growing — it is very flat.
Number check
To summarise up to this point (I’m aware there have been a lot of numbers)
Amateur players: 55,000–220,000
Kick-off players: 6,000–27,000
Cap 240 Limited players: 32,000
Cap 240 Rare players: 16,500
Estimate at 10+ card owning active players: 50,000
(36% of users have 10+ cards across all sports).
Best case we’ve got 300,000 active users within Sorare Football, of which 26% actually own cards. A more conservative estimate might land us somewhere at about 140,000 (on the positive ~50% would then own cards). TL;DR FAR AND AWAY from the 4m quoted as “playing” on Sorare’s website.
Silver Lining
This sounds like I’m being negative, but allow me for a second. Sorare have managed to get nearly 4m users signed up at some stage. This is phenomenal. Sure some might be dormant, some might be burnt, some might be invalid, some might be solely interested in other sports, but they live in Sorare’s database. They can be reactivated. That number alone is ~15x the number of actual card-owning users on the platform, nevermind others who are yet to even hear about Sorare or who haven’t taken the plunge in signing up yet.
For reference, Fotmob recently celebrated 15m MAU last week. I’ve enjoyed following their journey over the past couple of years as well (shout out Norway!). Within those 15m, how many do you think might be interested in Sorare?
But first, the priority is getting those that are actively playing amateur investing in the game. Rivals is another key weapon in the arsenal. Moving users up through rivals, kick off and specialist, up to cap modes and eventually up scarcities is always talked about — progression. Not all will go all the way of course, but we’re talking somewhere in the range of doubling or quadrupling the number of card owning active users today. That would already be a huge and significant growth step for Sorare, with users who are already engaged with the game!
Is the Pro ecosystem built for double the users owning cards and actively playing as it is today? No, nowhere near. For me, better steps are needed all the way up the ladder to reward progression, investment and engagement. Can you imagine the uproar if entry numbers double in every competition but prize pools remain the same? It won’t work, and won’t lead to any positive in terms of sustaining price levels or enticing users to invest. I actually believe we are close to a tipping point already and I wouldn’t be surprised if changes, potentially significant, arrive not too far down the line.
Nicolas and team are ambitious, that much is clear, and I’m sure they have multiple potential solutions at the ready. Despite recent gameplay developments and improvements, I do believe momentum has slowed somewhat in recent months, however it does feel like the team are going back to relay foundations in a different manner, for a growth journey in the years to come. The JONUM ruling might have been the catalyst required to accelerate, time will tell. It’s hard to believe that only 10 months ago there was no PL and you could still win $25 for 205 points in All-Star Rare — the Sorare world moves fast.
