Football, hockey, basketball and even car-soccer all codified a 'be one player on a human team' mode 15 years ago. It became their stickiest pillar. One giant sport was left out.
There's a format hiding inside every great sports game franchise that almost nobody outside the sports-gaming world talks about — and it might be the most durable, socially sticky idea the genre has produced. The pitch is simple: instead of controlling the whole team, you control one player, and the other ten are your friends.
A 15-year head start
This isn't new. The lineage is remarkably specific:
- —FIFA Pro Clubs — launched in FIFA 09 (2008): each human controls a single created pro, up to 11v11
- —NHL EASHL — launched in NHL 09 (2008): fully human-controlled 6v6 hockey, everyone a unique player
- —NBA 2K 'The Park' → 'The City' (2013 → 2020): a shared world with 3v3 and 5v5 Pro-Am at its core
- —Rocket League (2015): car-soccer, 1v1 to 4v4, ~100M monthly players after going free-to-play
the year FIFA Pro Clubs and NHL EASHL both launched — cricket still has no equivalent
Every one of these became a beloved, enduring pillar of its franchise. Why? Because it changes what a sports game is about. You're not a puppeteer moving eleven avatars — you're one athlete with a role, an identity, and teammates who need you. Success is personal and social at the same time. That's a fundamentally more human, more repeatable loop than 'beat the AI.'
You don't control the team. You are one player on it — and that changes everything.
The sport that got left out
Now look at cricket. It's the world's second-most-followed sport. Its mobile games have been downloaded at staggering scale — World Cricket Championship past 100 million installs, the Real Cricket series claiming 500 million-plus across its titles. And yet, for all that, cricket has never had a mainstream 'eleven humans, one player each' team-multiplayer game. The big titles are single-player careers or, at most, 1v1 where one person still controls the entire team.
downloads claimed across the Real Cricket series — yet no true 11v11 human team mode exists
Cricket is structurally built for this
Here's the argument that makes it more than a gap: cricket may be better suited to the one-human-one-player model than football ever was. Football is a continuous flow of 22 bodies; carving it into eleven clean individual roles is genuinely hard. Cricket is natively turn-based and role-specialized — batter, bowler, wicketkeeper, fielders. Those are discrete, individually-owned jobs. The design problem EA had to wrestle with for a flowing sport is, in cricket, most of the way solved by the sport itself.
Why now
The market is ready in a way it wasn't before. Cricket returns to the Olympics at LA 2028 after 128 years. Krafton bought a controlling stake in Real Cricket's studio in 2025 — a bet on cricket IP as a mass-market, non-gambling franchise. And in India, regulatory change has pushed capital and attention away from real-money gaming and toward exactly this kind of skill-based, social, entertainment gaming. The whitespace is real, it's enormous, and it's finally the right moment to fill it. That's why we're building Gods of Cricket.
Sources: EA/GameSpot/Wikipedia (Pro Clubs, EASHL); NBA 2K Wiki/2K (The City, Pro-Am); Google Play & Nautilus Mobile (WCC, Real Cricket downloads — self-reported); TechCrunch (Krafton–Nautilus, 2025). Rocket League MAU is a third-party estimate.
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