Sorare released their free to play World Cup game this week, Global Cup 22. From first impressions it looks like a great competition to get new users onto the platform and has some pretty big prize pools for the winners. I have put together some early thoughts on roster building strategy for the Group Stage match days and beyond. Before we dive into strategy, I’ll briefly run through the game rules and schedule.
If you haven’t signed up to Sorare and fancy giving it a go, sign up via this referral link and earn a free limited card when you collect five cards via New Card Auctions.
Competition Overview
First off, players get to select a roster of 8 National Series cards of World Cup players that fit inside a budget of 100 points. Players range between 6 points for those not expected to play up to as high as 23 for Messi and Neymar. Your roster must consist of 2 Goalkeepers, 2 Defenders, 2 Midfielders and 2 Forwards and can only have 2 players from any one nation.
The players are used to select the usual SO5 squad (GK, Def, Mid, Fwd + 1 Outfielder) with a team captain earning a 20% bonus. Only National Series cards can be used in the Global Cup competition and no experience score bonuses will be counts.
After each match day you will earn an additional National Series card based on where you finish in the week. You will also be able to select 4 additional cards after the group stages finish, after the round of 16 and after the quarter finals. At this stage it’s unclear how wide a choice the selection will be from.
Once the World Cup ends, your National Series cards will be converted into regular common cards of the same player to be used in normal Sorare competitions. If the player is not from a team licensed to Sorare you will receive a player with “a similar position and scoring value” as your national series player.
Rewards
There are a lot of prizes to be won each match day across a few different categories, in addition to some overall leaderboard prizes and some interesting raffle draws throughout the World Cup. There is a huge amount of Ethereum on offer for the podium positions, for reference 1 ETH = £1064 or $1261 at the time of writing.
However, with 107,000 players registered one day after launch (9 days before games start) the prizes are incredibly top heavy with only 3 receiving ETH and 5,000 receiving Limited cards each match day. The same is true for the overall leaderboards with only 10 players receiving Ethereum rewards.
There are plenty of Special Edition National Series cards available (100,000) each game week. But don’t get too excited, these cards are collectible only and will not be usable in either the Global Cup competitions or post World Cup competitions. It’s unclear how much value these cards will have, but given the price of non-scoring cards in the regular game it’s likely to be minimal.
Roster Building Strategy
First off you can redraft as much as you like until 20th November – play around with different builds and see what you like. Also make sure you pay attention to injury updates and any line-up insights you can glean from manager press conferences.
Where to Save Points
The 100 point budget averages out to 12.5 per player. So if you want to fit in some big stars (definitely!) you will need at least a couple of budget options to afford them.
The obvious first place to make a saving is with the second Goalkeeper. There is a good chance teams will not rotate keepers, even if they have qualified before Match Day 3. The cheapest keepers come in at 6 points, so even selecting one alongside the highest cost keepers (15 points) will come in under the 12.5 point average for both.
When looking for more savings, I will probably look to save on my second defender. In general, defenders will have less chance of a decisive action than forwards and midfielder making it harder to hit big scores. Although this isn’t true for all defenders, at team with two star defenders such as Joao Cancelo and Kieran Trippier may still be very successful.
Correlating Success – i.e. Stacks
In Daily Fantasy Sports competitions, correlating success is key to maximising your chances at hitting a monster score. If we want to have a shot at a podium position or even just win a limited card we will need a monster score.
In practice this means we want to stack players where we can (you can only have 2 player stacks per nation) and avoid having our goalkeepers/defenders and forwards playing against each other as positives for one are negatives for the other.
If you think Kylian Mbappe is one of the favourites to win the Golden Boot, if he does someone(s) on the French team will provide him with assists. So if you believe in Mbappe, maybe you want to stack him with Griezmann or Camavinga who could provide multiple assists.
One stack I will be sure to have in my squad is a Goalkeeper and Defender stack. When selecting a goalkeeper the focus should be on teams you think have a good chance at multiple clean sheets as this is the only predictable decisive action for keepers. If your keeper keep a clean sheet then his defenders will earn the +10 point clean sheet score, putting them well on the way to a good score before they do anything else.
Plan for the whole World Cup
When you select your roster, plan for the whole World Cup. You have no control over who you get in rewards on a weekly basis and at the minute it’s unclear how you will select additional players before the round of 16, quarter finals and semi finals. If the selection is budget based again, you can’t guarantee adding multiple starters to your team if your original players are eliminated.
So in general, target teams that you think have a realistic path to the semi-finals and don’t invest multiple players on riskier teams. For instance, Wales will have an amazing match-up against Iran in Match Day 2 so it may be tempting to add Gareth Bale, however it’s far from a sure thing they make it out of their group which would leave Bale useless after Match Day 3.
With this in mind Spain and Germany jump out as the riskier of the major nations. They have to play each other and the loser of the match could risk a shock elimination if they can’t beat a sneaky good Japan side. There are great players in both teams, in particular Kimmich, but they are higher risk than teams like France and Brazil which should ease through their group.
Thanks for reading, I will be putting some more articles in the build up to the World Cup focusing on my favourite stacks, value players and more. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Global Cup competition either in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter @ThinkingFantasy
Thinking Fantasy 
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