365Crypto
What is Sorare?
Sorare is a fantasy sports platform that mixes real-world athlete performance with digital collectibles. On Sorare, you collect digital trading cards of your favorite athletes, and these cards are NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). Players create fantasy teams, and their success depends on how well the real athletes perform in actual games. You can play with football (soccer), basketball, and baseball cards.
The Legal Issue
The UK Gambling Commission isn’t happy with Sorare. They’re charging the company with offering unlicensed gambling services, and Sorare is headed to court on October 4 to address the issue. This is a big deal because the Commission rarely pursues cases like this—it’s only happened once before since 2005.
Sorare’s Response
Sorare doesn’t agree with the charges. They claim that what they do isn’t gambling under UK laws and that the Gambling Commission has misunderstood how their platform works. Sorare plans to fight these charges in court with their legal team.
How Sorare Operates
On Sorare, users buy and trade digital cards, which can be highly valuable. Some of these cards have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The platform originally only accepted cryptocurrency (like Ether), but they made a big change in 2023 by allowing regular payments in traditional currencies to attract more users.
Long Investigation
This case has been a long time coming. The UK Gambling Commission started looking into Sorare back in October 2021. They haven’t released many details about their investigation, but Sorare has been through this before. They had similar legal troubles in France, which they settled without going to court.
