This article is a transcript of an interview recorded on September 19, 2023.

Boris: Hello Mark.

YNWA: Hello Boris, how are you doing?

Boris: I’m good, I’m good. I have to say that I am pretty excited and have never been that excited for an interview, I have to be honest.

YNWA: Me too. I apologize. I thought we had a similar talk in the past. I was confused with another mate named Boris.

Boris: No worries. I think I contacted you for some articles that I have published on SorareInfo, since then I have worked a bit because it has been a project of mine to develop my beginner IT skills. It has not been finalized yet, but I am pretty confident that the website will look good on all the screens of different sizes. Since Hibee was the first guest interviewed, I always remember your podcast, I have transcripted episodes that gave me a lot of knowledge, and I think the community enjoyed that as well so I am excited about this interview.

So, for the people who do not follow you as closely as I do, can you please introduce yourself and explain how you discovered Sorare?

YNWA: First of all, thanks for inviting me. I always admire the people that are building. And I value that you help people find valid information about Sorare. It is invaluable. It is difficult to put into context the value because you don’t know who is watching, who is reading, and what their reactions are after they have read it. But everyone being proactive can only help the game. I did it for a couple of years with Hibee, as you know, and it is nice to see the next generation of content providers bring quality to Sorare users.

My journey started with Sorare back in 2018, before it launched in 2019. I was recently looking at crypto and different projects, all sports-related and it was because I was playing a baseball game called MLB Champions that I first came across Nicolas, the co-founder of Sorare. He simply asked me via Discord: “We are building a football game similar to this, would you be interested in helping us shape the early stages?”. Of course, for me, football is my first love and it was a no-brainer for me to jump on board. So I said: “Yes, I would be very happy to give feedback”. We gathered around 30 beta testers, names of OGs you have probably seen in the game, Bergleeuw, Mamba, there was a guy called RickOshay, a very big guy in crypto, and other names that you will always see on the leaderboards these days came back from the early 2019 when the first version of the platform was released, the first cards launched and the first games of SO5. The first games of SO5 were just played on Discord channels. It was not the case of logging in and setting up your teams. You went online and in a chat room we were picking up players and submitting our lineups on a Discord channel and we had a very primitive points system, it was based on goals, yellow cards, assists, and clean sheets or things like that. We crowned the winner based on a manual adding-up score. From the very very very early until where we are today. It’s 4 and a half years, almost 5 years now.

Boris: Yeah, it has been a long time. It is funny. I did not know this story. I said to ZeNoob, a French content creator, one of the first 150 managers that I was 180. I also said to him “The more the list goes, the closer I am to the first”, and I think today I cannot be closer to the first because you are the first manager of Sorare.

YNWA: Yeah, it is a nice thing to be known for. But you know, there was a group of 30 and amongst these 30 there were some specialists in crypto that have more far knowledge than me about the crypto markets, there were a few, you know, pure football lovers and I put myself in that category. And between us we helped, troubleshoot, overcame the early challenges, and yeah, started the process of what we see today.

Boris: I said to ZeNoob “Give me the list”, but maybe you are the best to give me the list, I will spoil now my last question which is “Who do you recommend for the next interview?” and if you want to give special names that are part of this VIP group, don’t hesitate to 😀

YNWA: Okay. If you want to stick with the OGs, I will see if I can come up with some.

Boris: Let’s see if they will accept. It was just a funny thing I think. When I started SorareInfo, I thought it wouldn’t be possible, and that’s what I said to you on Twitter. Before shooting the big guys, I wanted to have a little bit of context so that I didn't pop up from anywhere. So that’s nice. Nicolas reached out to you. What was your reaction? You know this guy is serious. Did you invest time in building the idea?

YNWA: No, Nicolas at that time was you know, someone I did not know. He did not really know me, so it was only because of my behavior on the MLB Champions Discord that again, there was a group of us, who were pushing for changes, some things happened, and some did not happen. And I think you know me well enough, I am quite vocal and if I don’t see something I like, I will speak up and try to present a solution. I think that was one of the reasons, you would have to ask Nicolas, but I think that was one of the reasons why he contacted me, he could see that I was European, and he could probably tell that baseball was not my preferred sport. In an American Discord channel, the timezone is different, and the sport is very different. And my username probably also indicates that I am more of a football fan than a baseball fan. I was one of the many people he reached out to. But for me, it was someone saying: “Look, I have got an opportunity here, we are gonna build a company, it is gonna be around football, it is a fantasy football, you seemed to be in love for the game” and I said: “yes, sounds right on my street”. At that time I was not about investing any money it was more about being part of a think-tank, brainstorming, and seeing if something could happen, for me there was no risk in continuing the conversation. Then one thing led to another and things started to happen.

Boris: This is a big question that I had and I wanted to ask you before. Because I have worked as a consultant for some blockchain projects and some asked me to target the whales, I did not like that. I wanted to ask you, if you want I don’t include it in the interview, doesn’t it bother you that sometimes people that know you contact you only for money? You know that it’s purely opportunistic and there is not this flame or this original entrepreneurship spirit of “let’s just try building stuff”. Sometimes are you getting pissed? How do you select the ones that you invest time or money?

YNWA: It is really hard. I mean. You have to be so careful. When I first met Nicolas I was quite naive. I was not aware of all the different types of scams or rug pulls that you could get involved in. Back in 2018-2019, I would take somebody's offer value and I would say “Okay, if they proposed something to me, I believe it” and then I react. As I have got a bit older and wiser in crypto, I feel more skeptical when somebody approaches me and says “Hey, it’s nice, take a look at this”. The good thing is that I know how to look for the red flags these days. Right now, I don’t have any time, so I would pass this to colleagues specializing in Research at BlackPool so they do the research for me. I think that first I have to resonate with the topic, so if it is football, great, you are gonna succeed in getting my intention. If it is another sport, yeah, you would probably get my attention. I would like to see if there is any IP involved, what are the licenses, and any athletes, and then, I want to meet the people behind it. I think that again, 4 or 5 years ago, you could do a lot more from behind your computer screen but I think now, if you are gonna get into a new partnership, even working remotely, you need to go meet these people and let them show you the same vision, moving forward and do the same if you have a physical company like everyone is going to the office at the same time. I would take more steps. You mentioned you are an entrepreneur yourself, it does not matter how ambitious you are, you still have to go through the right steps, there are no shortcuts, you can’t get greedy, and normally, if somebody is falling into that category, you can spot them. And now, there are other people you could speak to, contacts that you have trusted over the years that you can refer to. Everybody knows everybody, even if it is such a big industry and global. With only one or two messages or phone calls these days, you can quickly verify that you are speaking to someone you should be speaking to or you should be avoiding and you can make your decisions.

Boris: I think especially for you, for people that have, let’s say, big wallets, they are not always showing their faces or creating content. You have done that, and I wanted to speak about that later, but I will ask you now: why when you joined Sorare you directly “work” for them, I don’t know what was the exact status but why did you take this decision to spread the word everywhere, to directly buy cards, etc…?

YNWA: It was just all auctions at a much slower rate. I don’t know if you remember the traditional Power Hour, so again, we had a theme on a Sunday with only one Unique a week. And yeah, maybe there were 3 or 4 Super Rares, I can’t remember now, maybe 3 or 4 Super Rares a day. There were not a lot of cards because there were not a lot of us playing. Also, there were not a lot of licenses, so we only had the Jupiler League plus West Ham, so we did not have a large variety of cards from every single country. We had a very limited set of players, and it did not take long for us to realize that you only wanted to have the Victor Osimenh, the Hans Venhacken, the Mariokas, Declan Rice and there was quickly a group of 20 players that regularly were fitting the top of the leaderboards. At the time, the amounts seemed large to me, even if it does not comparing to today. In a game, which is very very young, where there is no guarantee that it would be successful 12 or 24 months later, asking people to buy cards of Belgian football players, even if it were 5 or 20 euros, when you got a gallery of 50 cards, all the Beta testers were very committed, both with time and eventually money. There was no such thing as Limited cards, there were no Free to play cards. So the lowest scarcity of cards you can commit was Rare.

Boris: What was your initial strategy? Directly, as far as I remember, you were the one that was selling a lot on the Secondary Market, the equivalent of LeBonCoin in France or Wallapop in Spain, the secondhand apps, you were one of the big actors of the Secondary Market.

YNWA: Quite simply, I had two criteria. My first criterion is that I always wanted, if possible, to try to get the first edition of any player. And I also wanted to go for players that I felt have the highest reputation in the real world. So later on, that shows that it was not probably the best tactic because the best tactic has always been to find the best players that are gonna provide the best output for the best economical price. So, if I could take this journey all over again, I would be more, I would not be so sentimental. An example was West Ham, I thought, “WoW, West Ham, they are the bigger club”, the value of West Ham was higher than the value of all the Belgian clubs added together. So for me, personally, I thought Declan Rice, he would be the best card in the game for the very beginning because you know, if another thousand people play the game or another thousand of people play the game, they are gonna look at the database “who is the best player? Okay, I want Declan Rice”. I made my decision for what I thought were high reputation players and I quickly found out that each week on the leaderboards, they were getting beaten. They were getting beaten by lesser-known players from Antwerp and Brugge, and again, I had to adapt my strategy. I was probably quite stubborn, and most of the first edition cards of these players were already sold so as I did not want to buy a 2/10 Super I decided to wait for new players and look for the 1/10 because I felt that there should be or there could be collective value to these cards. I did not give any thought to the fact there are new editions per season. In the world of collecting, sports cards, when more people joined, I thought there was gonna be more interest in the first editions but unfortunately, the game has never had any real game rules, maybe the collector bonus has recently changed that slightly but I think it is too late. We play Sorare now with these player cards but the reality is that these player cards are more like player poker chips. It does not really matter if these cards are number 1, 2, or 3. It does not really matter if it is the jersey. The bottom line is that they are all chips to win the tournaments on a weekly basis and you win the chips back and you start the tournament again three weeks later or four days later. To answer your question, my strategy was to go for high-reputation players and first editions because I was looking at it as a way to derisk. If I wanted to sell out quickly, I felt that more people would like to buy the first edition than a 2nd edition.

Boris: Regarding the divisions, they were not the same structure. How did you prioritize the divisions you compete in? And did this selection evolve over time?

YNWA: The selection evolved, but my process has always been the same: look for the best prizes and put my best teams where the best prizes are. And yeah, I think at the time there were maybe 2 or 3 divisions and it was very simple. We did not have lots and lots of cards. You would just pick your best five and then pick your next best five, and then if you have a goalkeeper, you pick the next one. Today, it is similar; even though there are more teams, there are more tournaments, I would always prioritize where I think are the most interesting prizes. For me, this month has led a little bit more towards All-Star because of the monthly competitions that run alongside the weekly ones. Then, for me, it’s Euro Champs, U23, Cap240 Unique, Cap240 Super Rare, and then after that, see what is left over.

Boris: What is the first card that you bought?

YNWA: I don’t remember. I see similarities between the NBA and MLB. You quickly established a top table of 5 to 8 managers that you know they are gonna be your long-term rivals in that sport. So Mamba, for example, is someone who has been on this journey since the very beginning; he is a West Ham fan. I thought, if I buy a nice West Ham card, I am gonna be competing with Mamba in auctions, and if I get it, at least I get someone I can trade with Mamba in the future if he gets someone that I might need. My point there is that I was not necessarily playing the game, but I was playing the other managers playing the game. When I saw RickOshay buying Uniques or Bergleeuw buying Uniques, I had to decide: “Do you keep up with these people? Do you try to get ahead of these people?” Because if you allow these people to buy the Uniques and then you started too slowly maybe it is not worth catching up, and it is better to stay in Super Rare. So part of my strategy was always, if I could, try to stay ahead and put the pressure on the other managers for them to look at me and say: “Ouh, he got three midfield Unique now, I only got one, if he gets injured, I am gonna have to do something”. The next auction of a midfield, it is now my turn to push this person to make a hard decision. So, that was part of the early strategy. I don’t know if that helped answer your question.

Boris: It reminds me of a podcast with Max Mersch that was exactly about this. You were saying the Unique is another level. Only Unique managers between them can understand each other in that sense. And how has it evolved?

YNWA: It took a long time for U23 to establish. U23, I can’t remember, it took maybe a year before we got the first U23 competition. We had a few Special Weeklies, like over 30s and things like that, just to add a bit of variety into the tournaments. But I think the difficult part was adapting to the new licenses. Because you get comfortable with the cards that you have. But after the Belgian league, Juventus, Atletico, and other big clubs came. And all of a sudden, Hans Vanacken is not the best player. You now look at Oblak and Joao Felix and if you get too sentimental to the players you have got, which I have been guilty of sometimes, you lose the opportunity to a new manager coming in that will prefer Ronaldo over a Genk player. So, you have to move with the times. It is only now that the platform starts to really mature because the teams have been licensed for multiple years now. You have to be disciplined and ask yourself if you can sell your worst cards and replace them with cards from these new teams. Many people, unfortunately, from the Belgian community started to get disappointed six months later. Instead of realizing the problem was not to move on, they complained about the system that they considered unfair. The reality is that the average Belgian striker will not be as good as an average Spanish striker. It is what we see now because there is a risk of owning Challenger players that can disappear to any part of the world. There is no guarantee comparing to somebody playing Atletico Madrid at the age of 19 or 20, the chances are, worst case they go down the league a little bit, worst worst case they go to LaLiga 2, worst worst worst case they go to Holland or somewhere like this, but at least you get a bit more of protection regarding who you buy. I think the Ajax Academy of 2019, they look like incredible cards to buy, in reality, most of the people did not have very successful careers. So again, for me, I always had a balance in my head to judge Champions, Challengers and I always have been conscious that I don’t want to go too crazy for Challenger cards because I have watched their career path. Even Jota, who went to Celtic and is now in Saudi Arabia. You can’t use his card now. You have to wait he gets a transfer again or for Sorare to add the Saudi league.

Boris: I forgot the first question: Did you arrive with a specific budget?

YNWA: Yes, there is not an unlimited amount of money. My budget evolved based on my long-term belief in the project. The more I could see Nicolas and the team listening, the more I could see the evolution within the game; then, obviously, a nice card came across the market, I find a way to get that card in auctions. Back then, I had a large amount of crypto into this MLB Champions game and for me, that game was on the decline, so I was devesting and using that money into Sorare. So I was fortunate not to arrive without experience in crypto. Even if MLB Champions was not a successful game, Bergleeuw and myself, we did well via trading and by winning there, so I kept shifting from MLB Champions to Sorare. I was able to utilize and reutilize the money from one game to the next. That’s how I operated. Now, I am at the stage where, if anybody is studying my transaction history, I am taking my winnings and selling the prizes I win. I have not put money into Sorare for years now.

Boris: Your yield is crazy.

YNWA: Yes. I have been very fortunate with the yield. You need to spend a large amount of money today to establish in Super Rare and Unique. It is a commitment. We have seen a lof of the whales, Duke, Bambi, Breece, AJ, Roxy, Pranksy, they are spending a lot and are starting to yield what they spent. Will they yield everything they spent? Who knows? But the people who are ready to speculate, you tend to see the results, they are on the leaderboards, and they are getting returns.

Boris: Random questions. What was your first job in your life?

YNWA: A trainee broker at a currency firm.

Boris: What are the most profitable businesses that allow you to become an investor?

YNWA: I would not say I had a huge individual success. It is a gradual process. I have always run businesses since I left college, including property, finance, managing money, and anything numerical. The only difference here is that it relates to football, a subject matter I am very passionate about. Being a business owner helps because you get to read markets, you get to read sentiments, and again, communication. In the first couple of years of the game, we did not have an offer system. So, if you want to make a deal with someone, you have to find this person, start talking to them on Discord, and work out a deal. That is where the biggest difference is. It is not just about performances and tournaments; it is unlocking deals. Lots of the trades that I did, I think my transaction history was longer than anybody else’s. I think I did the widest variety of trades with the widest variety of people, and that is because I just kept wanting to improve, making small incremental improvements. I just kept trying to make 1% changes every day into my portfolio and for people that did not do that, I felt I was creating a bigger gap from these people every day.

Boris: Do you think that the more you go for Super Rares and Uniques, the more you are a long-term believer?

YNWA: I am not sure if it comes down to belief. I guess it does play a small role. I think people just want to compete at the highest level their budget allows them to. Right now, if you had money to buy Super Rare or Uniques, why would you buy Limited? For me, any time anybody asked me: Mark, what advice would you give me? It’s tough to give a single piece of advice, but I would always try to suggest to people that you compete at a scarcity, the higher scarcity that you could afford to. You could say some people enjoy having 5 or 10 Rare teams or 5 or 10 Limited teams rather than 1 or 2 Super Rare teams. There is no right or wrong, but for me, start as high as you can, and then the prizes that you win can cascade down. If you are starting at Limited, it is very difficult to win things that are gonna help you in the Rare division.

Boris: What’s next for your strategy?

YNWA: I have always believed in being an early adopter so when MLB came around and NBA I felt that was an opportunity to diversify from football into the other sports even though they are not my preferred sport. You have a better chance of success or being in the top 10 in a new sport where there are maybe just a few hundred managers. So maybe my mind would change when there is gonna be a fourth sport. We know it is not gonna happen this year. But maybe next year there will be a new sport, and that may encourage me to find some funds or diversify again. I think right now I am in a position similar to a lot of people, no matter the size of the wallet you have, I am quite comfortable with what I have, and I don’t feel I need to go buy anything. If I buy something, it does not guarantee that it is gonna increase my chances of winning. Because there is so much competition in every competition now, the marginal potential gains are very very small. So the only cards I am buying now are only for excitement purposes, yes, there are nice new Liverpool cards, but realistically I don’t think these new Liverpool cards are gonna help me win something else. It’s only about keeping things refreshed. I will certainly look after selling some of the cards I don’t use. I don’t see, unfortunately, any longer, a collector market. I thought at the time, you know cards like Ronaldo, will surely have utility in the future so I get the 7/10 Ronaldo, people don’t care for that. They just care about whether this card is gonna score 85 points every game week. It’s a little bit sad that the collector market has not taken off, and I have lost the belief that it will take off, so I might look for opportune moments to sell some cards that I thought I might hold for 5 or 10 years, but in reality, maybe it’s best to perhaps liquidate those and save those for something which can be better in the short term.

Boris: What was the turning point for you to lose belief?

YNWA: I think it is related to the game rules. They have never made any changes to the game rules that incentivize collecting. You can say “oh yes but now there are the collecting rules to boost bonus”. But for me, that is still linked to utility, that’s not a reason to collect. You are collecting to improve your collection points. Also, there are not enough cards from the early seasons to benefit from a full collection. So even if you got some very nice cards from 2018 or 2019, your collection bonus would be 1 or 2% maximum but that is not interesting for someone else. I don’t see how Sorare can change or reverse the trend, because unfortunately, whichever way you look at it, Sorare is an economic simulator and people treat it like that.

Boris: Do you think that this is a challenge only for digital market? I don’t know the physical market but I think there is this importance of Unique cards, serial numbers etc. Why not in the long term this logic can’t apply to Sorare? What is the reason, even if there is no utility, people won’t like to have the Mbappé first Unique card.

YNWA: Yes, maybe. This is reserved for 0.01% of the cards on the platform. I have my own ranking system, and I give cards a ranking out of 100 until I have my preferred top 50. And when you look at it, there are very few, except the Messi, Mbappé, Halaand, Bellingham, there is only a very very small percentage of cards on Sorare that truly are desirable. We don’t have true Rookies on Sorare because if you wanted a Halaand one, it would be when he was in Norway, for Mbappé it would be when he was in Monaco. So the first season on Sorare is not comparable to maybe a true Rookie card in the physical world. At the point where you think that a card is gonna have a meaningful value, well, it probably won’t have any utility in the game, Mbappé could be 50 or 55 years old, and you are not gonna use the card in the game, and if you have really a lot of money to spend, you probably would go and buy the physical card at that point. Because the physical one is the true Rookie, as opposed to the one on Sorare. Maybe I need to be convinced again but at this moment I don’t think there is any real true collector cards on the platform.

Boris: It’s surprising because I was looking at your gallery and I saw that one of your biggest valuable card in ETH is Bellingham and I was thinking that this card in 50 years would be worth more than what you have paid for it.

Note from Boris on May 2: the big difference between the Collector's Market and Sorare is that the Collector's Market doesn't allow you to earn ETH or cards.

YNWA: In 50 years from now, I would certainly prefer to have a Jude Bellingham Berginham, number 22 shirt number, physical card than maybe this digital one, if that exists. If Bellingham is gonna have the career and greater legacy that we expect, then is there gonna be more value in a Borussia Dortmund Jude Bellingham card or Bermingham City number 22 Jude Belligham card?

Boris: I see. We need to check if this card exists.

YNWA: Yes. I don’t know because I’m not a physical collector, I used to do Panini stickers when I was a teenager but I don’t have a physical card collection.

Boris: So the cards that you are now buying in Unique it’s more to play them and winning rewards than for the collection aspect?

YNWA: Correct. There is nobody in the game right now who is ready to pay me what I feel they are worth, so I might squeeze them as much utility as possible to slowly payback their initial costs.

Boris: Super clear. Now let’s speak about selling. How was your selling strategy initially and how did it evolve over time? Did you define criteria or were you applying the logic: “the more I can buy cards that can help me to perform, the better, I buy”

YNWA: My selling strategy was always, if I see something at the auction market I like more, then I would discipline myself to pick 2 or 3 cards from my current collection to try to sell. If I don’t do that, I need to make a decision in the short term to spend more and sell afterward. All my sellings were influenced by what I would see upcoming on the auctions. It is similar now if I knew, there were for example, new season cards for the NBA, I would probably spend 3 or 4 weeks being more aggressive in selling so that I am ready for the first cards of the NBA for the following season. It works in cycles. In my Premier League, for example, I did not mean to go aggressive, but, you know, I spent 3 ETH on these Liverpool cards, but at the same time 24 hours I sold 2.25 ETH. I am always trying to balance the books depending on what is happening in the auction market in front of me.

Boris: If we speak about Champion Europe, how may cards would you recommend to have in a Roster? If you want to speak about Unique, it’s up to you. An additional question is, would you recommend the same Roster size for Unique and for Super Rare and Rare? Or depending on the scarcity the size you recommend is different? Do you recommend and do you have the same cards to play them in multiple seasons? Or do you prefer to play with fewer cards and change them for each new season?

YNWA: I think for your first question because each division now is so competitive, I would prefer to stack or have players for the same league so if there are fixtures that weekend, you don’t have players in different leagues. I would choose a team that either you support or chose a team that you think you can get good quality use and you understand the rotation and the pattern. Obviously, the first choice is goalkeeper, you need the main midfielders that will get the majority of goals and assists, and you need a strong defender. If you can build 7 or 8 different cards from the same club and then maybe decide based on form or fixtures, then great. But try to get to learn one team. Now, it’s more often not Liverpool. If Liverpool gets a home game, I will try to aggressively guess which are the best 5 players to start. If it’s an away game, I would probably use my Liverpool more in the Cap divisions where I can afford to make a few more mistakes. I will always try to go for players with better fixtures, especially home fixtures. I don’t think you need a certain amount of cards. I think you just need to know the players so you know when for example, they are gonna be rotated. Of course, even if you know a team well, you can still get surprised, a good example is Klopp in the Europa League, it’s not always easy to guess who will play. You really should be choosing cards you think like their manager and try to avoid a DNP every time. The worst thing that can happen is your team wins 5-0, and you only have four players, and you miss one because of DNP. If Liverpool is having 10 wins at home, 3-0 or 4-0, I want to make sure that I am on the leaderboards for these games. If Liverpool wins 0-2 away, cool, I will still be happy because I am a fan of Liverpool, but if Liverpool wins 0-2 away, I won’t expect to win any big prize because someone else supports a team that has won 4-0 at home. And I know that my players are not gonna get the same amount of points that this other team. I need to ensure that I am around when Liverpool wins 4-0 and get a piece of the actions for the Decisive. 0-1 away, 2-1, 3-1, you are not gonna win many prizes because your goalkeeper might already have conceded a goal. So you need enough players so that when your team has home fixtures and is the favorite and walks away 2-0, 3-0, 4-0, make sure that you played the players that will get you 4 * 50 points or 60 points if they can get you 5 * 100 points, fantastic, you are gonna get a much higher score and quality prize.

Now I feel more settled because I don’t want to trade my first editions. I am back in the sentimental stage where I am happy to use my cards. If my cards don’t perform, pfff, okay, I might need a radical review and assess if I am missing someone here. Are all my competitors buying stronger cards than me? Do I now need to be lucky to win? At the moment, I still need luck but I still feel I have the depth and have the cards so I can compete with Roxy, with Bambi, Duke, AJ, Nanzo, and guys like that. If I get to the stage where I don’t feel my cards can compete, maybe some of them have been retiring, and some of them have gone to Saudi, then yeah, I will assess if it is worth me adding more depth, just so I can remain competitive. I have always played U23 quite aggressively. So, I have some players who are 23 or 24 years old that I expect to keep for the next five years, so I don’t think I have that much seasonal maintenance to do. I am pretty much out of Asia now, I have never been involved in the US or the Americas, so June and July are always quieter for me unless international tournaments. I always want to be ready for the start of the European season. I think, this year for example, I don’t necessarily need to go to buy many cards unless something crazy happens or win a nice prize and want to treat myself with something. At the moment, I am really happy with the older cards I have got, and I have got higher XP on this, I have got a nice collection of bonuses on these as well. Also, now, buying a brand new card now requires time and energy to build it up to the level of some cards that I already own.

Boris: I wish you could win the Halaand 3D version, no matter the scarcity.

YNWA: Before we go, what are your thoughts on the style of the new cards?

Boris: To be honest, I am done with buying cards on Sorare, so if I win some 3D cards it’s good. My goal is not to buy them. The more beautiful the design in the future, the more beautiful the cards I will win in the future will be. I am interested but not that much into it. I like the new design. From a strategic point of view, it is nice to have a 3D feature on Sorare. I try to believe that Sorare knows what they are doing and to support their initiatives. Maybe too much, but I prefer this to the other way around. It is biased, I assume. I won’t change my mind and as I cannot do better and I am not the best design, I won’t criticise.

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