Quinny opened his account on the 20th of June 2020, so he has been around when there were around a thousand users. He was already in the football gaming space for a couple of years and when he came across Sorare, he did not know anything about NFTs. He had a kind of crypto interest and believed in its potential in the future. Nevertheless, before Sorare, he had never created a wallet or anything related to the blockchain space. He did have a passive interest and was seeing that prices were going up and down. When he realized how the technology on Sorare was working and the opportunity that was enhancing, he decided to jump into the game.

Since he started playing soccer games on Megadrive and PlayStation such as Football Manager and FIFA International Soccer, he has seen their evolution. Today they are much more intuitive, and you can go much deeper. The details they offered as games in the last 20 years have changed, and it has been phenomenal. The NFTs that Sorare are offering encapsulated everything he has touched on in his life regarding football: cards, games, and alternative gambling.

He is a UEFA B coach licensed and when he joined Sorare he was very bullish. In fact, he was one of the early adopters and an “extreme fan”. Even before Sorare, he was watching 4 to 5 games a week across different countries.

First moves

At the time he opened his account, there were no “cheat cards”. So I was looking for penalty takers or some basic stuff like that to compose his teams. His first 6 to 8 months on the platform were not very the most active ones. After that amount of time, the first big moves from the Sorare were coming such as big club announcements (PSG, Bayern, Real, MLS…). It requires a quick adaptation from him.

After discovering Sorare, he spent a week researching how he could make money thanks to the platform. So he decided to dig a bit more into how to create a wallet, manage keys, and that kind of stuff. He then decided to buy Ethereum on Coinbase by deposing some fiat money through PayPal. After his first five months, Ethereum was valued at under 500$.

Budget management

On average, he was spending around $1,000/year on FIFA FUT packs. That was enough money to think that this amount could have been spent on Sorare. So when he opened his Sorare account, as he has a relative interest in crypto, he saw cards just as FIFA coins. He wants to be precise and does not recommend this strategy to anyone, especially nowadays. If he could have sold something at the end and could return the money, that would be a bonus because he cannot do that in FIFA.

You can watch all the Quinny content on his YouTube channel from day one.

Compared to today, the first versions of the Sorare website look "very old and rubbish". He just wanted to have fun and started a game. He did not know how long Sorare would last. He thought that Sorare would be trendy for 8 months and that a new game would become more popular after that time. He considers himself an average man with an average job and average income.

In terms of deposits regarding Sorare, he explains that it is essential to monitor the money moves and control them. This is because spending is effortless, especially now with your credit card.

What he was doing when he started was making small and frequent deposits. He said: “Okay, at the end of the week, I can buy this guy I am after for this game week, and if I cannot buy this guy, then I will wait until the next week to save more money”.

He began with a small budget idea to build it up and continuously consolidate his teams. It was easier for him to do so because, at that time, there were not so many options. Moreover, it was before the launch of SorareData, so he was only picking up guys that he recognized and had some sort of understanding of.

He thinks his original strategy is underused today as there is so much choice. According to him, many people make mistakes by instant buying and do not recommend buying today to play tomorrow. Waiting is one of the best strategies.

If you look at some of the first cards he bought, a lot was bought around December 2020 and April 2021. He bought it with Ethereum, which was super cheaper compared to now. So by using that “waiting strategy”, sometimes he saw that in his account, thanks to the positive long-run valuation of Ethereum, he could now afford to buy some cards he was looking at that he could not afford to buy one week before. There was a fee for moving the crypto from Coinbase to a wallet. And then another fee to move the crypto from the wallet to the Sorare wallet. There were three steps. So moving money was costed even more money than today, and it was not economical to put 20$/day or something like that. It was better to come with 1 ETH or 2 or even more and then spend it on the market.

Thanks to the community, it was easy for him to get some great deals 💙

His very first player

It was Gabriel:

His strategy

Initially, his goal was to get as many cards as he could for the money he had got, and hopefully, tomorrow, his gallery could become more significant, and he could win in Divisions because with the budget he started with, finishing on podiums was not feasible.

He started by buying some guys he knows are quality, and no one spoke about them. The bet was that these players could perform better in the future to sell them and make a profit later. If the bets were winning, he sold the cards to upgrade the team by swapping them, for example. This is still applicable today because some people may have domestic knowledge. If you live in Germany, you know who will take the penalties in the different Bundesliga teams and who is always good during home games against Borussia Mönchengladbach or whatever. He encourages you to work on your strengths first when you have just arrived.

Very early on, he considered going for MLS cards a good strategy because he is half-American and has followed MLS for almost his entire life. Moreover, it does not matter for the scoring matrix where the players are playing. Some MLS players will get hat tricks more frequently than in other leagues. He was MLS-centric regarding Rare and Super Rare cards for the first two years. He got a lot of good players early, so the value when they started to perform better increased.

He is always excited to look after new stuff but also nervous about doing so. That can be explained because, as he mentioned earlier, he was spending real money on the game. He is not comfortable with buying random people for random reasons. He has done this a few times because that is just life; we are all humans, and the temptation is hard.

Regarding divisions and regions, his recommendation for someone getting started is to pick a league and scout hard within it.

As more clubs and leagues emerged, winning prizes was easier after his first six months. He succeeded in getting two podiums that he could be very proud of. So far, his strategy worked; he realized some profit by selling some players or keeping players scoring well. In mid-2021, he started to think about how he could keep the pace of the platform development. Indeed, the platform was growing, and approximately 20,000 NFT holders were now playing. One year after, it was 150,000. So he knew that the game would become more competitive, fewer people would win good prizes, people with much more money than he does, etc. So the logical conclusion was that he needed Super Rares and Uniques to chase higher prizes. Now, he thinks that he was a little bit premature with this strategy because he got Super Rares when they were cheap, but despite that, he has lost more money than he has made by buying this kind of card. Even in terms of SO5 yield, the performances were lower than what he expected. He says that he was going too early and hard, which backfired him. It was a mistake he had learned from.

Best trade

He has recently completed a fantastic sequence of trades. In his first six months, he tried to think ahead and be clever. He concluded that he should buy some young wonderkid goalkeepers. Within a month, he bought Trubin, Tani, and Vandevoordt. Tani was playing regularly but Trubin and Vandervoordt no. He saw that Vandevoordt had played two Champions League games out of nowhere, which tricked his attention.

After some time, he received an excellent offer for his Vandervoordt, so he decided to sell him because he was not playing and was a backup goalkeeper. And then, he bought another card Vandevoordt as no new season cards were available, and because he believed in him. He got the very first Vandervoordt ever, first season, 1/100. After six weeks of negotiation, he proposed 0.5 ETH when Ethereum was around 700$ and got the card.

Quinny is a massive Celtic fan, and when Celtic came on the platform, one of the first cards that were auctioned was the Unique one of Callum McGregor. He saw that one of the first people to auction on it was YNWA, the big Liverpool account. Straight away, he thought: “f*ck, I cannot get this card. Even if I have a bigger desire, he has a bigger wallet than me.”; The auction finished at 8 am European time, and YNWA won it for 1.888 ETH. Quinny had prepared himself for 4 ETH or maybe 5 for this card. So he could not believe it and begged YNWA to sell him that card. At that moment, YNWA did not even know that he had won, as the first signal was Quinny’s message asking him to sell the card. He sold him this card for the same amount he bought but with the condition to swap the Quinny’s 1/100 Vandevoordt against “a normal one”. They got a deal.

Earlier this month (October 2022), he sold the Vandevoordt for 2.8 ETH.

He explained: “Not only did he use that sentiment of a 1/100 to help me get a Unique card of McGregor, the Celtic captain, but I also sold Vandervoordt at one of his peak prices. It only cost me around 350$. And now, 16 months later, it has been a great experience with Vandervoordt.”

New leagues and new sports additions

He considers that the arrival of new sports is fantastic for the platform because the platform's aim is growing and evolving, thanks to that. When he started to play the game, the target was to bring the top 20 football leagues to Sorare; nowadays, it is to become the biggest entertainment platform and the social media of sports. Football will stay the biggest to achieve this new goal, but it does not have to be the most entertaining at every moment. A lot of people are watching baseball, basketball, NFL as well as football. He sees Sorare as a successful football game. FIFA is super successful, but EA Sports is much more successful because they have other sports than football. He thinks Sorare will be the next EA Sports as the team explores a new landscape.

He has not played SorareMLB often but has some cards of guys he knows. He wants players that are getting rubbish scores but will be in the Hall of Fame one day.

Regarding basketball, as we mentioned earlier, Quinny is half-American. His dad is American, and he has a brother that is mad about basketball as much as he is about football. So as basketball came on, you will see on his YouTube channel his brother will be a basketball expert, and Quinny, the basketball dummy. Quinny will remain a football expert, and his brother the football dummy. He is still determining how involved he will be in basketball on Sorare, but we will have fun.

Regarding the new football leagues on Sorare, as he said, the target was to have the top 20 leagues. Now the ambition is more significant, and seeing that we are far beyond that is enjoyable. He is expecting the top 50 to be captured. He is still looking for players worth 20$ to sell them later for 100$. He thinks the more divisions are coming up, the more players he will discover. He is looking for people to specialize in the Peruvian league, the Norwegian one, etc. So domestic knowledge where nobody knows about some players opens up more opportunities for people to get a hedge and win rewards. He is winning quite often, but the reality is that for most people, it takes work to compete and to win decent rewards. Especially when you are new, the competition is so ferocious.

Top SO5

• Mike Maignan
• Van Djik
• Paqueta
• Griezman
• Messi

Conclusion

Use whatever you bring to the table first when you start to build up your teams. If you know something, capitalize on it. It may be less exciting, but it is safe.

Things change fast on Sorare.

There was always great confidence within the community from day one.

He considers that new people need to set realistic goals and expectations.