The Beautiful Data #4 : Card Popularity

Below article is the work of u/loveanalytics, originally published on Sorare‘s channel on Reddit. To access his original Beautiful Data post, please follow this link : The Beautiful Data #4: Card Popularity

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Hello everyone!

This week, we’ll take a look at card popularity in Sorare.

If you missed my previous posts, then you can check out the first edition that talks about player form, the second edition that talks about consistency versus explosivity and the third edition that talks about player popularity

Cards owned by different users

A big part of Sorare is people trading cards between themselves after they appear on the primary market. Cards swap hands multiple times, and it’s interesting to see which cards have the most distinct users.

Card Link	Player	Distinct owners	Season
https://sorare.com/cards/sergio-padt-2020-rare-13	Sergio Padt	19	2020
https://sorare.com/cards/igor-alberto-rinck-de-camargo-2019-rare-52	Igor de Camargo	17	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/steeven-willems-2019-rare-15	Steeven Willems	16	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/angel-martin-correa-2019-rare-34	Ángel Correa	15	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/dennis-appiah-2020-rare-2	Dennis Appiah	15	2020
https://sorare.com/cards/declan-rice-2019-rare-64	Declan Rice	15	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/igor-alberto-rinck-de-camargo-2019-rare-36	Igor de Camargo	15	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/ortwin-de-wolf-2019-rare-54	Ortwin De Wolf	15	2019
https://sorare.com/cards/damien-marcq-2019-rare-6	Damien Marcq	15	2019

Sergio Padt (Rare #13) was owned by 19 different owners throughout its history, which is impressive as it’s a card that was issued in the 2020 season. Igor de Camargo and Steeven Willems follow suit with 17 and 16 distinct owners respectively.

Player hoarding

Something that is fun to look at are managers that collect a card of the same player multiple times. So let’s see the players that are owned the most by a particular manager (Max 1 appearance per manager).

User	Player	Count
VictorNettoyeur	Marley Ake	32
PawelTrader	Nuno Tavares	26
Tronyque	Heo Yool	21
Zima Blue	Nicolò Zaniolo	19
QeeYou	Jason Davidson	19
Klapperschlängla	Obbi Oularé	19
Bomberoni89	Jean-Daniel Akpa Akpro	18
uyuiio	Jason Davidson	16
Losamax	Yuji Takahashi	15
uyuiio	Yoon Yong-Ho	15
jandelah	Ivan Marcano	15

We see VictorNettoyeur has great hope that Marley Ake becomes a huge star in the future by owning an impressive 32 cards of that same player!

Now let’s see which player’s cards are concentrated the most to the same managers by subtracting the number of cards of that player to the number of distinct users owning at least 1 of that player’s card:

Name	Cards Count	User Count	Diff
Ismaily	81	36	45
Cristiano Ronaldo	154	109	45
Hans Vanaken	200	156	44
Akihiro Hayashi	108	65	43
Igor Plastun	136	93	43
Weston McKennie	155	112	43
Sébastien Dewaest	109	67	42
Ivan Marcano	109	68	41
Jason Davidson	95	55	40​

For example, Ronaldo collectors seem to have multiple cards from him, as 109 users own 154 cards.

Card Gems

Some players have been printed a few times for different reasons (for example he moved to another club). Those offer precious collectible value as they are extremely rare to find. Let’s take a look at the players that averaged at least 50 in the Last 5 games and that have less than 10 cards in circulation:

Player	Cards Count	Average Last 5
Jonathan Buatu	1	59
Sei Muroya	1	77
Bruno Costa	2	54
Renzo Saravia	3	53
Luciano Narsingh	3	52
Maurício	3	66
Isaac Thelin	3	52
Thijs Oosting	3	52
Mohamed Buya Turay	4	62
Marques	5	50
Kazunori Yoshimoto	6	52
Omid Ebrahimi	6	52
Sam Nicholson	7	67
José Gonzalez	7	66
Marvin Baudry	7	52
Miloš Kosanović	7	51
Lasse Sobiech	8	66
Kazuki Kushibiki	8	70
Aïssa Mandi	9	57
Magnus Eriksson	9	68
Marton Eppel	9	51
Park Byung-Hyun	9	53

For example Buatu has just 1 card available, and his last 5 is quite impressive

Cards with the most bids

When a card goes on the market, there are always bidding wars going on between different managers. Let’s take a look at the cards that had the most bids throughout Sorare’s history.

Card Link	Player Name	Number of Bids
https://sorare.com/cards/alphonso-davies-2020-rare-41	Alphonso Davies	60
https://sorare.com/cards/neymar-da-silva-santos-junior-2020-rare-57	Neymar	59
https://sorare.com/cards/kylian-mbappe-lottin-2020-rare-67	Kylian Mbappé	59
https://sorare.com/cards/neymar-da-silva-santos-junior-2020-rare-55	Neymar	59
https://sorare.com/cards/joao-felix-sequeira-2020-rare-49	João Félix	58
https://sorare.com/cards/alphonso-davies-2020-rare-43	Alphonso Davies	57
https://sorare.com/cards/florian-wirtz-2020-rare-59	Florian Wirtz	57
https://sorare.com/cards/kylian-mbappe-lottin-2020-rare-36	Kylian Mbappé	55

Popular names such as Neymar and Mbappe feature heavily, as they are wanted by so many different managers due to their star status.

Players with highest card circulations

Cards can come in from both the primary market and rewards. Here are the players that feature the most:

Player	Card Count
Jonathan David	210
Jhon Lucumí	208
Jean Butez	207
Fashion Sakala	202
Jordan Larsson	201
Hans Vanaken	200
Arnaud Bodart	199
Mike Maignan	198
Simon Mignolet	197
Imran Louza	194
Théo Bongonda	192
Agustín Marchesín	192

Mainly, we see players that had cards minted in all of Sorare’s seasons: 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Now, let’s take a look at the players that have the most distinct users that own the card. So if a user owns 4 Jonathan David, we count it as 1.

Name	User Count
Jhon Lucumí	194
Jean Butez	189
Mike Maignan	179
Agustín Marchesín	177
Arnaud Bodart	177
Fashion Sakala	177
Jonathan David	175
Simon Mignolet	174
Imran Louza	174
Théo Bongonda	174
Moussa Diaby	172
Jordan Larsson	172
Buta	171

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this fourth post, any feedback is appreciated. Also feel free to share what kind of data analysis you would like to see in the future!

If you want to access some of this data, you can fetch game stats information for different players from our API. You check out https://github.com/sorare/api

You can request an API key in order to be able to do more requests by sending an email to contact@sorare.com.

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Next article will focus on best criteria to buy a good midfielder on Sorare.

See you soon,