Sponsored by Sorare
The Sorare Academy is back for another Gameweek with 10 more prizes on offer to the winners.
You can enter your team for free now ahead of Friday’s 11am GMT deadline.
Nearly 3,000 managers submitted a team for last weekend’s Sorare Academy tournament – were you one of them?
This week, contributor MDJ is going to look at the winning line-ups from the previous week and preview the weekend of football ahead.
Last weekend’s winning teams
Last weekend’s scores were the highest we’ve seen so far. Congratulations to our winning manager, Tinoums, whose team featured some familiar names:
- Alisson – picked up a clean sheet for Liverpool to score 70.
- Trent Alexander-Arnold – paired that clean sheet with two assists to score 97.
- Jordi Alba – passed his way to 77 points in Barcelona’s win.
- Toni Kroos – two assists and a dominating performance scored him a perfect 100 points.
- Vinícius Júnior – a goal and plenty of chances took his score to 83.
Picking the right captain here – Kroos – made a big difference and Tinoums cleaned up with 446 points overall, just three more than the next closest manager.
Completing the top three were DMould123 and ButcheredLyons. Both also had Alexander-Arnold and Kroos in their teams and ran our winner very close indeed.
Other players featuring heavily in the top ten were Kylian Mbappé, Mohamed Salah, and the Bayern duo of Dayot Upamecano and Robert Lewandowski. There were only eight points separating the top 10 managers and we saw a definite theme emerging: the cream is rising to the top.
How to score 100 points
Toni Kroos got the maximum possible score of 100 points in Real Madrid’s game against Granada, helping to propel our winning manager to the top of the leaderboard. How did he do it?
Two assists took his decisive score straight to 70 points. On Sorare, the decisive score tracks the big actions – goals, assists, red cards etc – and functions like a ladder that you climb up (or down) for each action.
The remaining 30 points came from his all-around score – the smaller actions that track a player’s overall contribution to the game.
For Kroos this largely came from his work in possession of the ball:
- 12.5 points for accurate long balls
- 15 points for accurate passes
- 6 points for big chances created
- 4 points for attempted assists
The eagle-eyed among you will realise this adds up to more than 30 points! Kroos also lost some points for missed passes and lost possession but even so, the score can never exceed 100.
What can we learn from this? Perhaps that this is the reason we’re not really seeing any differentials in the top 10 places. Unless a player is on for a hat-trick, they will usually need to see a lot of the ball in a dominating, possession-based team to hit those high scores.
Recent prizes
Winning managers receive a Limited card from a top European team. Examples of recent prizes for first place are:
- Aurélien Tchouaméni – French wonderkid who is currently attracting the eye of Chelsea scouts.
- Frenkie De Jong – Barcelona youngster and Netherlands international.
- Achraf Hakimi – PSG defender dubbed ‘best right back in the world’ by people who haven’t seen Alexander-Arnold and Cancelo play.
All of the above would set you back around £250 to buy on Sorare so it’s well worth giving it a shot.
Coming up this Gameweek
So now it’s over to you. Can you win one of the 10 cards on offer this week? All the instructions are there – just click on the empty slot in your team, then the player you want to pick.
The big clubs have got some decent fixtures again this weekend so that might factor in your thinking:
- In the Premier League, it’s hard to look past Liverpool assets again, at home to Southampton. Expect to see Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold in some winning teams but Diogo Jota might be more of a wildcard, if he recovers from the slight knock he took in the last game.
- Bayern Munich took a surprise defeat last weekend but are playing Arminia Bielefield next, who are second from bottom in the Bundesliga. No doubt most managers will fill their teams with their players, with Manuel Neuer looking a good shout in goal and Leon Goretzka, Thomas Müller and Robert Lewandowski all looking dangerous, providing they stay clear of the team’s COVID-19 outbreak.
- There’s another top versus almost-bottom clash in Ligue 1, with PSG taking on Saint-Étienne. Marquinhos, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe are likely to have very high ownership as a result.
- Betis against Levante looks good for some goals in LaLiga. The Levante defence is looking really shaky so consider Nabil Fekir or Willian José if you want to try your luck with a differential (ignoring everything I’ve said above!)
Don’t forget to set your lineups before the deadline (11am Friday).
Good luck with your teams this weekend!
Here are Adam FT’s picks for the week with his pearl of “wisdom” being “always Captain Salah.”
#ad 18+
2 years, 4 months ago
UCL (C) switch from Lewa (6 x 2) to Salah (Porto at Anfield)?
Y. Yay
N. Nay
H. Haller away to Besiktas