This article is a transcript of an interview recorded on November 10, 2023.

Intro

Ricardo Romao: My name is Ricardo Romao. I was born and raised in Venezuela and migrated to Spain with my girlfriend near Barcelona. I played football all my life, not very good but I play. I have always been passionate about football. I studied engineering, and I have been working as a programmer for 14 years now. When I heard about Sorare, it was like a mixture of two things I love and do daily. I watch football daily, I play once a week minimum, and I code all day. I am a tech enthusiast. It was like, “Waouh, I have been hearing when this NFT thing came and made a big splash on the scene.” I heard about it and was like, “Okay, NFTs are a good idea; I see the value of holding it, and you are the unique owner because you can see on the blockchain.” But it did not excite me because I was wondering what its purpose was. And then Sorare came into the scene, and I was like, “How do I put my money?”. So, I bought some cards, and then when I realized they had an API, I got interested in messing with the API and seeing what I could do. I started coding some side projects related to Sorare.

Boris: I also saw the romao.live in your bio. Can you please explain what it is?

Ricardo Romao: It was a project for my girlfriend because she works in HR, and I saw her taking notes, physical notes in her notebook and the whole house is full of notebooks. I was sick of it, so I told her about giving her a digital notebook for free. You have a million note-taking apps, but she wanted something very specific, so I put that out there. Right now, I am not really maintaining it, it works, but I am more focused on other tools like Whorare.

Boris: I wanted to mention that because I am following a guy on YouTube providing advice for beginner developers, and he said that 3 main projects could help someone get developer skills. The first one is a blog, which is the best to start; then the second one is an app like romao.live, a to-do list, and then the third one is social media where you can like, import photos, add friends, etc. He recommends building these 3 projects to have a good foundation. What is your opinion about that before we move on to speaking more about Sorare?

Ricardo Romao: First of all, learning by doing it is the best approach in programming. I also suggest reading a lot. If you read a lot and go through exams and theoretical stuff and don’t put it into practice, it is a waste of your time. Those 3 projects are basic. That’s why romao.live is out there. I have never done the Facebook or Twitter clone, but it is also a good idea. It gets you to think about handling a lot of users at the same time. You get to think about storage, the high availability of your servers, and maybe with a note-taking app or something in your local machine, you don’t get to think about this stuff. It is good advice, but my main advice is to learn by doing. Get your feet wet, get in there, think about a project, and solve your own problems. It has worked for me. Or solve your girlfriend's problems. You learn a lot about putting yourself in the user's shoes and thinking about the problem, not only from a developer's point of view, because we sometimes get too technical about stuff and we don’t think about “okay, this is the real problem that the user is facing.” But when you are the user, when you are the Sorare user for example, you experience the problem better and can provide a better solution.

Boris: Also, one thing that I want to mention, deviating from the subject, is that I currently live in Barcelona. So maybe at some point, we can catch up and organize something.

I think you have a very good approach. Why did I speak about this? Because with SorareInfo I want to generate a desire for the people that read what I am writing to create content. In my case, I also wanted to learn basic coding skills, HTML, CSS, PHP & MySQL. So, that is why I am building a basic blog. When I speak to you or guys who develop a project that is computer science related, or when I speak with a content creator, I am always asking some questions because I want to speak about those topics and not only focus on the project itself. I like to understand what it provides. Just to give you a bit of context. Maybe we can speak about Whorare, I checked really quickly.

Ricardo Romao: Have you played it?

Boris: No, I will play it right now. Can you please explain how you arrived at this decision and tell me what you want to say about it?

Ricardo Romao: You are on Twitter, so maybe your timeline is similar to mine, and it is full of Sorare stuff. And I saw a lot of posts, you know, the graph of the scores from SorareData, some people posted those scores and did not say the players. So they posted the picture, just the graph, but not the player's name. And I was like: “Okay, I don’t know who this is”. I was thinking that I should know. Like, “Who had 5 DNPs in a row and then scored a 100?”. It was like a challenge. So, I thought I could build a good project related to that to crack the heads of the people. If you know Sorare and you like Sorare, maybe you are so into it that you start remembering the scores of some famous players or not. Some guys are following Asian leagues that I have no idea about but they do. It was a nice challenge, and I wanted to publish something related to Sorare that could be profitable. Even if it is not profitable, it gets some users and excites me. I wanted to receive some feedback from people like me. I went in and tried to connect to the API for the first time and get some data. Then I figured, “Okay, maybe the charts are monotonous because you always see the L5 or L15”. So what if I do the images and blur some part of the image so people can see easier than just the stats? Because you can see part of the face and that actually got me to learn some image manipulation stuff on the server side. Because the first version of Whorare that I launched, I think it was August, or September maybe, was all front-end, I had no server-side code. So all the information traveled to the front end, and if you go to right click, inspect, you could see the correct answer, and you could see the image without the blurriness, so people were cheating obviously and getting high scores. I was like, “C’mon, I have made this game for people just to enjoy, and there you are cheating on it.” But it forced me to rethink the architecture of the game's flow. I got a little lost on your question, sorry.

I saw that people liked it, so I kept varying the types of questions. Recently, I included the last five games scores, and you see the scores and the badges of the teams, but sometimes you see one, and sometimes you see the other. I have other ideas for it. I am just polishing some technical stuff that is still a little bit buggy, and when I get it done, I will maybe improve the rewards because I have been given the rewards for some time now, but it is, as you can see, low Limited T3 or T4 maybe. And I want to do a big event, maybe a big game week where I offer 10 or 15 rewards, maybe some low-cost Rare cards, to see if I can make it profitable. To see if people are willing to pay a little bit to recharge their energy and have another go at it. Maybe if I do, I will keep improving it. If I can’t make it profitable in the short term, maybe I will talk to one of these guys from Sorare to see if they can provide the rewards or do some kind of partnership, but I have not talked to them yet.

Boris: Just to have an idea, how much does it cost you for the cards?

Ricardo Romao: It’s like 5 euros each game week, so 40 euros a month.

Boris: Okay. You said directly that you want to make it profitable. Can you please tell us more about that? What are the challenges? Did you think about other products, or was it directly your idea?

Ricardo Romao: Maybe something similar to SorareData, like providing an accessory to Sorare. Sorare is already huge, they have a lot of developers, and their product is growing daily. But they cannot do it all. The other product I made that already disappeared was called sorarescout and I published it for a while. My intention with that product was to make it profitable as a service for Sorare users to get information on players. I don’t know if this happens to you, but when you go to buy a player, if you see that it is posted too low, you go to Google, Transfermarkt, or another website to see what is going on with that player, to get some news, to see when the contract expires, etc. So I made a little product that grouped all the information and you can see them directly in your place. But I was relying on too many third-party services, like Google News and Bing because it was cheaper, trying to scrape information from Transfermarkt and other sites, and it was just cumbersome. This is not my main job. I have a 9 to 5 job and other responsibilities, so I could not put much time into that product. So it died.

I can see that Whorare has already a lot of traction. A lot of users are playing it. When I did not have an energy limit, there were people putting in hours a day, and that was crazy for me to see. Something I made on a couple of weekends, there are people playing for hours. It got me excited and it got me to think that maybe it could be profitable. If Whorare does not achieve profitability, I can think about other ideas. I will give some time to Whorare and keep going with it, but if it does not succeed financially, it is not a problem. I will go with the next project. I think there are a lot of opportunities to build side or complementary tools for Sorare that may have a shot at being profitable.

Boris: Yes, that is for sure. There were a lot of people posting, and it was a game initially on Twitter, like “I post these scores, can you guess who is the player?”. Also for people like me who create content about players' recommendations, it is also a way not to disclose the player. Because for example, I recommend a player only for the paid subscribers of the newsletter, and instead of saying on Twitter, “I have recommended this guy, and he scored this score the next week”, I can just say, “I have recommended a guy with this score, now this week he has scored this”.

Ricardo Romao: Yes, it is a teaser. It is a way to let people know you are looking at this, but you don’t reveal who it is.

Boris: Yes. It is also a way not to make the price increase too much because what I have seen is that when I started to recommend to 10 or 100 people via the newsletter, the prices of a card, just after the publication of the newsletter, was usually going up because 10 to 100 people were receiving the same player recommendation and some were following this recommendation. Now, today, there are more than 800 people, I don’t recommend players every week because the newsletter is mainly for people who pay. If I am sending recommendations to 800 people, it can generate fluctuations. Sending it to 10 people or 800 people, the prices can be affected, so in some cases, I buy the card of the player I recommend before sending the recommendation.

I think it is a really good concept. What do you think are the best mechanisms technically for your application? I am speaking about the game, the questions, etc. What you have used until now? The card scores, the pictures, the clubs' logo, maybe the names? What are the best questions you have done? And what do you want to do in the future? The ones that you like the most? How do you decide to create questions?

Ricardo Romao: It is a trial and error. I did it at the beginning. It was very basic, only an animation, a curtain that revealed little by little. That was the first version. And I realized that people, know football more than me, and just by the time the football badge got revealed, or kind of revealed, they already knew. That’s when I blurred only the top right corner of the card so you can’t see the team. When I did that, I think the top left corner sometimes showed the league badge. So that was the same. It was a progressive approach to try to improve. It got out of hand sometimes. For example, I divided the cards into squares and then scrambled those squares. I did that, and I think I did it with 5 or 6 rows and columns. It was impossible to guess, so people complained, “What the hell is this?”. So the squares are bigger now.

I think that all the ideas I have been having are right now accessible on the game. It is just a matter of randomness; I have some algorithm to calculate the frequency and determine when each type of question is shown. I have been tuning that from what I perceive as fun, and when I see too many people complaining, I change some of the most challenging questions. Sometimes, I don’t know what is complicated or not. The other day, I was speaking with some users that was like, “I like the game and especially the L5 and L15 questions”. It surprised me because people complain a lot about those. I asked, “How is possible that you like those questions?” he said, “I memorized all the L5 and L15 of every player, so when I see the scores, I already know who it is”. I said, “Okay (laughter)... you have a lot of time and a pretty awesome memory because I can’t remember any L5 or L15”. I have some ideas for upcoming questions that I am still developing. Maybe I will incorporate those questions during this big event with better rewards.

Boris: Have you considered a feature that asks questions only about cards in the gallery of the manager paying Whorare?

Ricardo Romao: I did. Someone asked me, too. But you know galleries are sometimes huge and sometimes not so huge, so if you have 15 cards if I ask you 10 questions, it is obvious who that is. So maybe I could do it but not for competing. You don’t get rewards, but it is a nice way to know if you know the cards in your gallery.

Boris: That would be interesting, yes.

You started Sorare by playing the game. Did you immediately have an idea to create a side-project?

Ricardo Romao: No. I joined in 2021. And I did not start creating Sorare stuff until early this year or December 2022. I just enjoyed it for a long time. I saw that it has a lot of potential. It was not just the NFT fever of 2021. It was only this year that the desire to build stuff around this game came to my mind. I compliment my day-to-day job with something I am passionate about. I can also learn many things I can use in my job. It is just a fun way to learn.

Boris: This is a good strategy.

First card

Ricardo Romao: I don’t remember. I can tell you that I bought a Limited Marcelo, and it is the oldest card in my gallery. When he moved to Fluminense, I just celebrated because he is now playing very well and winning tournaments, so that is the earliest card I can remember.

I was such a fool. I bought the cheapest because I wanted a lineup of five guys. I also bought some Korean guys, Japanese, and other bench players from La Liga.

Boris: Your first card is a Korean player, Diakhaby, and Tony Lato.

Ricardo Romao: WoW, that is history.

Strategy

Boris: What is your first strategy?

Ricardo Romao: When I arrived, it was just to have some fun. Then, when I saw the potential, I went straight into thresholds. I think at that time, there were two thresholds: the small threshold and the big threshold. I saw it as free money like you can buy 10 players and produce money for that. So I went into that. Then I changed a bit because it was not that exciting. It is exciting, but I don’t know why winning a $ 15$ or $ 20$ card is more exciting than winning $ 50$ in cash. So I changed a little bit my strategy. I went for MLS for a bit. Also, I was hooked on Sorare, and the European leagues ended early. I started watching MLS, which I would have never considered if it had not been for Sorare.

My goal is to have fun and to make football more exciting for me than it is already. So, I keep changing my strategy and am not too worried about doing great on Sorare. I just want to have fun and meet some new people. A year ago, I discovered a player from Genk in Belgium. Now I watch the Jupiler League and am excited about JPL, which I would have never thought about. I guess that is the beauty of Sorare. It was nice to see a player in JPL scoring in the 92 minutes and me jumping at home because he helped me win a card.

I read somewhere, and maybe it was you (laughter), I don’t know, “if you have a regular goalkeeper, you should think about buying the second goalkeeper, because his card is cheap and if or when your first goalkeeper, you have the second.” So I did that, and it worked out.

Boris: You should buy your goalkeeper's backup for two reasons. The first reason is value: the second goalkeeper is more expensive if he is supposed to play than when he is not. So you want to have the backup of goalkeeper number 1 to avoid paying a high price for the second goalkeeper. The second reason is for scoring the points: you want to keep scoring, even using the second goalkeeper.

I am not sure I communicated a lot about the backup. It is something that I communicated with a while ago, and hopefully, I have rarely a goalkeeper injured. But it is pretty obvious that it is a good technique. What I say with SorareInfo is that I recommend that the first card you focus on is a goalkeeper because these cards are pretty expensive. When someone has started the game, I recommend that a manager buy cards with the same price. So, if you buy a GK at 0.2, you buy also a DEF at 0.2, a MID at 0.2, and a FOR at 0.2. I don’t recommend that you start having a big difference in price between the positions when you start. I prefer dividing your budget by five and trying to have the best Rookie you can. It is maybe not the best but it is my recommendation.

So you play for the fun and buy your first Limited cards. What is your strategy?

Ricardo Romao: I know I am not a good trader, but I still want to try it out from time to time. If I am watching a game and see a young player that I have never heard of before, I look for him on Sorare, and if his card is there and cheap, I buy it. But it is always a low-value player. I won’t risk hundreds of euros on those types of cards.

When collections arrived, I bought the whole collection from Huston Dynamo to play in MLS. I have this stack of Huston Dynamo for Champion America or any MLS-related competition that brings me fun. They are Limited, and there is not a lot of money there, and there is not a lot to win either, but it is exciting, and it gets me to watch the games with MLS with a little bit more passion.

At some point, I was thinking of putting 3, 4, or 5,000 because the prices were going up like crazy. I regretted this decision some months later because prices went to the floor and I lost some money there. After that, my strategy changed to just having fun and not looking at it as an investment because it was not for me. I want to look at it to enhance my passion for soccer. Maybe this strategy will change. If it works, I like to set a strategy and follow it for a couple of months. If it does not work or is a burden on me and I worry too much, I will change it. I have enough problems, so I don’t want Sorare to be a problem. I want to have fun.

Vision and wishes for Sorare for the next 2 years

Boris: What woud you like to see Sorare to do for the next two years?

Ricardo Romao: They have been discussing this a lot and have not implemented the progress bar. It is like I have been here for 2 years, and other guys started in 2019. If someone gets in right now and buys cards, it is hard to compete. It should reward a little bit more or create competitions focused on the guys who have been there from the beginning. There should be some way of rewarding that. That’s what I expect.

I would love to see some mass adoption of the game. Like, I don’t know if it happens to you. I have a lot of friends who play football and a lot of friends who watch football, and I have no friends who play Sorare. I don’t know precisely what is the problem. I don’t know if it is a marketing thing or the product is too difficult. For me, it is not, but I have been playing for a while now. Maybe this year, they can get better with this Premier League event. The goal is to get more mass adoption. I would like Sorare to be easier for the general users.

Boris: More accessible. It is a matter of prices. I think when you arrive at the game, and you see the prices of the cards of Mbappé, even in Limited, you see that you can’t buy the big players. This is a significant barrier. But at the same time we want our cards to be valuable because I own a card of Mbappé. The balance is not easy to get. We want an attractive game without spending much and at the same time that our cards keep value.

Ricardo Romao: Yes, I get your point. I have been playing Sorare for a lot of time. So, if I play for 2 or 3 more years, I keep improving little by little. I think it can be possible to provide excitement because, in my case if one day I can buy a Mbappé thanks to some rewards received by using lower-tier cards, I am a fucking god (laughter). But I get your point. General people are going to want to buy famous players.

Boris: You want to possess the best players without spending a lot. That’s quite a challenge.

Ricardo Romao: Yeah.

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