Test your Fantasy Football skills in the free-to-play Sorare Academy tournament

The Academy is back for another Gameweek with 10 more amazing prizes on offer to the winners.

The previous Gameweek featured over 3,000 unique players, so let’s look at the winning team from last week – and the prizes that were won. 

Congratulations to Polux17, TheFreak and Kekkoa88, who make up our top three.

Polux, as you can see, went for the Galactico approach and in the Academy, you really have the freedom to choose any player you want, which is something people are telling me they love about this version of the game. 

Our winner made the most of it and what I like here is the ability to combine our usual FPL stars like Mohamed Salah (Always. Captain. Salah.) with big names like Toni Kroos and (questionable this year!) Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi.  

Prizes will be winging their way to all of our top 10 from last week; let’s look at some examples of prizes that went to the winners the week before last.

All of these have a current market value on the Sorare eBay-style auction house into the low hundreds of dollars – not a bad prize at all! 

Picking your Team

The Academy is completely free to play so why not give it a go this week? Just head over to https://www.sorare.academy/ to enter your team. 

The free game gives you the chance to check it out, and if you enjoy it and wish to do so, you can consider buying some Sorare cards to start building your team for the main Sorare Tournament “SO5” later on.

Fixture Frisking

You can pick stars from across all these leagues where a Sorare card exists. As Sorare cards are officially licensed by the clubs, not everyone is available yet – although this is rapidly changing. Recently La Liga and the Bundesliga signed a rights deal with Sorare and they hope to acquire the full Premier League rights too before long. But we can already pick plenty of EPL stars.

I have a super-secret tool over on my website to help with fixtures across the ‘big five’ leagues in Europe. 

This easily shows the teams that are likely to have the softest fixtures on paper across Europe and just like FPL, this is always a good place to start.

There’s no shock as Manchester City top the billing for the most likely team to win across Europe, as they almost always do. Liverpool and Bayern Munich are up there yet again and you can rely on managers to be picking plenty from that set. However, Wolves are no pushovers and Dortmund are tougher than the algorithm ticker lets on in my humble human opinion.  

It feels like a good week to take a look at some relative differentials. AC Milan have a plum fixture vs Salernitana, while Bayer Leverkusen meet Furth, who have amassed just a single point all season, conceding a shocking 28 goals in 13 games! I think I know what I’m going to do. 

Lille, PSG and Barcelona also make for tempting options. 

I enjoy these weeks where many of the bigger teams have tougher matches – there are lots of choices this week and we should see managers make some interesting picks. 

Form

The Academy will give us quick access to information about the players’ previous form. 

I want some Leverkusen players so I’ve filtered the Bundesliga and Leverkusen and then forwards. The Academy will easily highlight as you can see the average score of that player over the last five, and the individual scores in each game.

This is a really easy at-a-glance way of seeing who is doing well on the Sorare game. On Sorare, just like FPL, you can take player research however far you wish – it can be spreadsheet geek’s dream if you want it to be. 

However, for the purposes of this free-to-play game, I will just use the information available here. The only thing to check on is the expected line-ups if you can! 

The Squad

Here is my team on behalf of the Academy.

I am doing something I’ve never done on the Academy before and employing the “stacking” tactic with a full Leverkusen line-up, as that mismatch vs Furth is just too tempting to ignore. Nobody copy me, ok?!

Fortunately, Leverkusen provide no shortage of options. I have spent a lot of time over the years analysing the Bundesliga and here are some well-known favourites for fans of the league – and all can be expected to score well on Sorare on their day.

Remember the name Florian Wirtz in particular – that kid is surely destined for big things!

Enter your team right now for free – just make sure not to miss the earlier than usual 11am Friday deadline. 

Good luck with your teams!

Adam.