It’s been wall-to-wall announcements on Sorare lately but this one might have flown under the radar a little bit so I wanted to take a few moments to highlight what’s happening – because it’s a big one!

The announcement came out last Friday, completely out of the blue. From this point forward, in addition to the current league coverage (and aspirations of onboarding the top 20 leagues in the world), Sorare will be adding a wealth of international and club tournaments to the game:

International tournaments:

• European Championship 2021
• U21 European Championship
• Copa America (from Group Stage)
• World Cup Qualifiers UEFA (from Group Stage)
• World Cup Qualifiers CONCACAF (Final Round)
• World Cup Qualifiers South America (from 1st Round)
• World Cup Qualifiers CAF (from 3rd Round)
• World Cup Qualifiers AFC (from 3rd Round)

Club tournaments:

• AFC Champions League (from Group Stage)
• Copa Libertadores (from Group Stage)
• CONCACAF Champions League (from 8th Finals)

This means that if you have any players involved in these tournaments, their scores will now count in SO5. Sorare also said that they will be revealing plans for new SO5 international tournaments soon.

Quite obviously, this announcement gives a lot more utility to players. It gives managers a better chance of putting a midweek team together when pickings are slim, as is the case for the upcoming gameweek (GW161) where we now have CONCACAF games to choose players from (giving me the chance to put a full team together, which I wasn’t expecting!).

Increased utility can only be a good thing, even if it might make those midweek SO5 tournaments a little more competitive than before. Even players who’ve transferred to foreign leagues not currently covered by Sorare suddenly have some prospect of competing in SO5 from time to time.

The biggest thing for me though is that it gives Sorare an opportunity to make a bit of a splash over the summer with the Euros and the Euro U21s. These are great additional marketing opportunities for Sorare and it also gives more utility to Euro cards over the summer, perhaps helping to hold prices up a bit (which is good if you’re holding a player, perhaps not so good if you’re looking for a dip over the summer to buy-in!).

Coverage of the World Cup Qualifiers is also going to be a big bonus as it means we’re less likely to have weeks go by with little or no SO5 games on – no more international breaks!

One important thing to note here is that, as far as I know, Sorare have been able to develop this ‘expansion pack’ by expanding the data feed they get from their data provider (Opta). I don’t think there is any additional licensing as part of this so I don’t expect we’ll see national team versions of cards produced – we’ll have to work with what we already have.

So it’s a pretty good time to have a look through your roster to see how many of your players will be affected by this announcement. These are the players I expect to have in contention:

Euro U21s

• Mitchel Bakker
• Justin Kluivert
• Amine Gouiri

Euros

• Altay Bayindir
• Alex Meret
• Lukas Hradecky
• Ozan Kabak
• Denzel Dumfries
• Duje Caleta-Car
• Kieran Trippier
• Jason Denayer
• Hans Vanaken
• Robin Lod
• Piotr Zielinski
• Sebastian Szymanski
• Aleksandr Sobolev
• Donyell Malen
• Arkadiusz Milik
• Diogo Jota

That’s about a quarter of my squad!

The Euros list looks good at first glance but there are a fair few players in there that are back-ups rather than first choice starters – and I suspect that will be the case for most people, particularly with goalkeepers. I’m also lacking any French, Spanish or German coverage, which isn’t ideal.

I don’t have many players in contention for the U21s but with only 8 teams in left in the tournament, and many of my younger guys already having made the step up to the senior team, I guess that’s not too surprising really.

I’m not going to do anything to specifically target these tournaments. I don’t have the bankroll and I’d rather just get a feel for how it works. We don’t yet know whether it’s going to be as simple as a bolt-on SO5 league for these tournaments or whether they might offer something more like the One Shot League, for example.

To me, it doesn’t make sense to plough a load of money into Euros players (for example) unless they are already on your target list. The tournaments are relatively short anyway and there’s no guarantee that your player will last the distance.

We also don’t know if any additional clubs (or leagues) will be added ahead of the Euros. I hinted at the difficulties with finding a goalkeeper for this. You’re really looking at a choice between Courtois, Neuer, Szczesny, Shunin, Cillessen and Hradecky – not a lot of choice. Adding some more teams before the summer, particularly if they give a bit of extra depth to the goalkeeper pool, would make a huge difference.

Don’t get me wrong though, this is a fantastic announcement from Sorare, adding value to our cards and providing a springboard to push Sorare to the next level over the summer. I expect we’ll see another influx of new users during June, if they get the marketing right.

If you’re reading this and haven’t joined Sorare yet, now is a great time to join so you can get yourself set up ahead of the summer. Find out everything you need to know to get started on Sorare.