Games Like Sorare: How to Build an NFT Fantasy Sports Platform

Games like Sorare combine digital player cards with a fantasy sports game. Users build lineups from their cards, and each lineup scores points from the athletes' real matches. This guide explains how Sorare works, which products compete with it, and what a similar platform needs, including licenses, live data and gambling law.

How Sorare works

Sorare is a French fantasy sports card game that launched in 2019 and covers football (soccer), basketball and baseball. Each card represents a real player for one season and comes in a scarcity tier: Limited, Rare, Super Rare or Unique. Sorare also gives out common cards that are not NFTs, so new players can start for free.

Players, called managers, build lineups of five cards for each game week, and each card scores points from the player's real match statistics. The best lineups win rewards such as new cards or prize money.

New cards enter the game through auctions and packs that Sorare runs, and managers then trade cards with each other on a secondary market. Sorare earns money from primary sales and from fees on trades. A card's price follows the player's real form: when a player starts to score goals, the card earns more points in lineups, and demand for it rises.

Sorare's cards started on Ethereum, and in July 2021 Sorare moved most transactions to StarkWare's StarkEx scaling system to cut fees. In October 2025, Sorare moved its player cards to Solana as compressed NFTs and moved users' ETH balances to Base. Sorare also accepts credit card payments, so new users need little crypto knowledge.

Games like Sorare

Few products copy the full Sorare model of licensed NFT cards plus a fantasy game, and the closest products fall into three groups.

None of the products in the table lets users own licensed player cards and play them in a fantasy game across seasons, as Sorare does.

The game loop to build

1. Card issuance. Mint a fixed supply per player, per season and per tier. Enforce the supply caps on-chain and publish them, because scarcity is what buyers pay for.
2. Primary sales. Sell new cards through auctions, fixed-price packs or drops, publish the rules, and use verifiable randomness if packs contain random cards.
3. Scouting and trading. Build a marketplace with listings, offers, direct trades and a price history for each player and tier.
4. Lineup building. Managers pick cards for each game week, with rules that can cover positions, a captain bonus, tier limits and a cap on total card value.
5. Scoring. Pull official match statistics from a sports data provider, then calculate scores after each match and publish them.
6. Rewards. Pay prizes to winners, and publish the payout table before each game week.

Architecture of a Sorare-style platform

Most platforms keep the game engine off-chain, because scoring depends on outside data and on rules that change each season. A smart contract cannot read match data by itself, so the data would come through an oracle that the platform controls, and on-chain scoring would cost more and still depend on the platform. The layer 2 NFT guide compares low-fee chains for the card contracts.

Licensing

Sorare's cards show real player names, faces and club badges under licenses. Sorare's partners include the English Premier League, LaLiga, Real Madrid, the NBA and its players' association, Major League Baseball and the K League. Without such licenses, a platform cannot legally sell cards of real players in most markets, and licenses take a long time to negotiate and usually go to companies with funding and a track record.

A new platform has four realistic options:

• Start with one league, a lower division or a women's league, where rights may cost less.
• Partner with one club or federation for an official product.
• Use fictional players in a game that does not depend on real match statistics.
• Choose a smaller sport with an active fan base and fewer competing license buyers.

The sports NFT marketplace guide covers sports collectibles in general, and the NBA Top Shot guide covers a collectibles model without a fantasy game.

Gambling and regulatory risk

When users pay for cards, compete and win prizes with money value, gambling and fantasy sports laws may cover the game. Two cases show the risk for Sorare itself:

• The UK Gambling Commission charged Sorare in September 2024 with offering gambling without a license, and the case was still open in March 2026. Sorare added stricter identity checks, risk warnings and self-exclusion tools.
• In 2022, France's gambling regulator, the ANJ, began to examine whether Sorare was gambling. France then passed a law, known as JONUM, for games in which players can sell digital items for money, setting up a three-year trial in which such games can operate legally under conditions set by the regulator.

Whether gambling law applies depends on the country and on design details, such as whether entry is free and how the prize pool is funded. Plan geo-blocking, age checks and KYC on payouts from the first release.

A design that lets users bet on match outcomes is a betting product, which falls under separate gambling rules that the sports betting dApp guide explains.

Team, timeline and cost drivers

The NFT contracts and the marketplace are a small share of the work. The figures in this section are estimates, not quotes. A first version with cards, a marketplace, lineups, scoring for one league and credit card checkout needs six to eight people for six to nine months, covering contracts, backend, game logic, two frontend or mobile roles, data integration, design and testing.

Running costs come mostly from licenses, the data feed, prize pools, customer support and compliance. Game design is also a large part of the work, because the scoring system and the reward table decide whether managers return after their first week. The NFT gaming platform guide covers game economies.

Frequently asked questions