The World Cup is almost upon us and Sorare has invited us to play along with a new free-to-play mode – The Global Cup. Here is a quick overview of all you need to know.

How to play

The lowdown you need is all in their recent Medium post but if you want the tl;dr:

• The Global Cup is played with a special series of Common cards that have been released just for this tournament;
• You have to draft an initial squad of eight players (two from each position), with no more than two from the same team;
• Each player is assigned a points value based on how they are expected to perform and your initial draft of eight players cannot exceed a total of 100 points;
• You line up five players for each ‘matchday’ (basically a full round of games) in the usual way, with the captain scoring an extra 20%;
• You can add new players before the round of 16, the quarter-finals and semi-finals, within a 50 point cap;
• You can also strengthen your squad by winning cards each matchday;
• Scoring is the usual Sorare scoring, based on the player performances each matchday.

This is completely free to play, you don’t need any cards. You do need a Sorare account of course so make sure you sign up first and use my link (or indeed anyone else’s link) to make sure you get a free Limited card if you end up buying five players from auction later on.

Prizes

There are some great prizes on offer so it’s really a no-brainer to enter this.

Each matchday there are over a hundred thousand cards to win – both the National Series cards, which are pure collectibles, Limited cards that you can use in the main game and Common cards to boost your free-to-play collection for the future. The top three managers each week also win a share of 6 ETH (which is about £6,000 at the time of writing) – the highest podium rewards we’ve ever seen on Sorare.

Placing highly on the overall leaderboard opens up some real money-can’t-buy experiences, like having a kick around with Zidane, as well as more ETH rewards.

And, if that’s not enough, Sorare has created a new game mode for this – Private Leagues. You can enter as many of these as you like, either for bragging rights or prizes. Look out for people advertising their leagues on Twitter and Discord, and please feel free to enter mine too!

My private league

Everyone is welcome to join my league – ‘Mediocre or Bust’. To make it a little more interesting I’ve put up a couple of rewards:

• A Ivan Perišić Limited card to the manager who finishes in first place on the overall leaderboard;
• A Bryan Cristante Rare card to someone randomly selected who finishes above me on the leaderboard.

Enter via this link or use the code: 3CUUFT

I’ve chosen to allocate the Rare card randomly, rather than to the top placed manager, because I’m conscious that the person who wins the overall Global Cup is going to also end up sweeping up the top prizes from all the private leagues they enter too. Adding some randomisation means there is more of a chance to keep going, even if you’re not pushing for first place. All you have to do is beat the score of my team, Mediocre FC. Should be easy enough!

Matchday dates

The usual gameweeks have been rejigged during the World Cup so that Sorare can properly cover each round. Make a note of the dates below and don’t forget to get your teams in before the deadline.

One last tip – it’s well worth setting your teams as soon as possible rather than leaving them to the last minute. With only five players in a team, and no modifiers other than the captain choice, there is likely to be a lot of duplicate teams, especially in the early stages. In this case, it’s the time of submission that is the tiebreaker. So don’t waste any time (and maybe think about some differentials that might help your team to stand out of the crowd?)

Good luck!