Why a five-year-old listicle still matters
Smartprix, the Indian consumer technology publication edited by Shivangi Agarwal, first published its Top 12 Best Fantasy Apps for IPL 2024 listicle on 27 September 2021 and refreshed it on 19 October 2023, the date the body of the article shows as last modified. The piece is short by today’s long-form standards — 1,856 words by its own embedded JSON-LD — but it has done useful work in the Indian fantasy ecosystem: it named a dozen apps, attached a founder date to each, named the brand ambassador where one existed, and printed a user count and a daily prize-pool ceiling. Those four data points per app are still the minimum an Indian fantasy reader needs before switching platforms.
Five years is a long shelf life for a tech recommendation. In that time, India’s fantasy cricket sector has gone through two Public Gambling Act reviews, the rollout of GST on net entry fees, the entry of the Online Gaming Act in 2025, and at least one major payment-rail change with the UPI rebrand. The apps that were on that 2021 shortlist have not all aged the same way. That makes the listicle useful not as a current shopping guide but as a baseline — the kind of document you compare against the 2026 market to see who kept compounding, who plateaued, and who was simply listed because no one had written them off yet.
This Googly11 retrospective treats the Smartprix shortlist as that baseline. It walks through the twelve apps in the order they were published, replays the figures as the publisher reported them, and ends with the practical comparison questions an Indian fantasy user should still be asking before settling on a platform for the next IPL cycle.
The twelve apps on the Smartprix shortlist
The twelve apps on the Smartprix list are a mixed bag by design: three of them are household names in Indian fantasy cricket (Dream11, Paytm First Games and Mobile Premier League), one is a sports-data utility rather than a fantasy platform (ESPN Sports App), and the rest are mid-sized operators that either found a niche audience (My Fab11, My11Circle), a regional language moat (MyTeam11), or a kabaddi/cricket split (PlayerzPot, Ballebazi). Two of them — Legend and LeagueX — sit on the long tail of the market, useful for readers who want a second or third app on the home screen but unlikely to be a primary pick.
The published figures, as the dossier records them, are:
- Dream11 — brand ambassadors MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya; more than 11 crore users; daily winnings reported as reaching up to Rs 25 crore.
- Paytm First Games — Paytm-owned; brand ambassador Sachin Tendulkar; cash prizes reported up to Rs 10 crore; instant withdrawal feature; Rs 50 signup reward.
- Howzat — founded 2019 by Junglee Games India Pvt. Ltd.; 4.6/5 user rating; 50 lakh+ downloads; live chat, real-time scoring, secure payments, leaderboard.
- My Fab11 — founded 2020; 4.2/5 user rating; Android and iOS support; quick withdrawals, multiple contest types, 24x7 customer support.
- MyTeam11 — nine-language interface; brand ambassador Virender Sehwag; more than 15 crore downloads; over 100 contests daily with winnings up to Rs 5 crore; minimum withdrawals of Rs 100.
- My11Circle — brand ambassadors Sourav Ganguly, Rashid Khan, Shane Watson; more than 1.3 crore users; daily winning pool up to Rs 30 lakh; no maximum withdrawal limit; practice contests available.
- Mobile Premier League (MPL) — brand ambassador Virat Kohli; 6 crore+ users; daily winnings up to Rs 40 crore; contests from Rs 5; 5% money-back bonus on lost cash contests.
- PlayerzPot — described as 100% legal and secure; Rs 20 signup bonus; no verification; minimum withdrawal Rs 150 to a Paytm wallet; cricket plus kabaddi.
- Legend — founded 2002; 3.8/5 rating; 1 lakh+ downloads; free gaming contests, social features, live scores.
- LeagueX — founded 2018; 4.4/5 rating; 10T+ downloads; cricket, football, basketball; real-time match updates and live chat.
- Ballebazi — founded 2018; 3.5/5 rating; more than 80 lakh users; over Rs 500 crore in winnings distributed across cricket, football and kabaddi.
- ESPN Sports App — described as founded 1979; 4.2/5 rating; more than 5 crore downloads; football, basketball, baseball and soccer coverage alongside live scores, highlights and streaming.
Twelve apps, four data points each, one short listicle. The Smartprix piece is useful precisely because it is short: it forces a reader to rank apps on what is actually printed in the body of the article rather than on what the apps’ own marketing pages say about themselves.
What ambassador rosters tell you about platform ambition
Six of the twelve apps on the list came with a named brand ambassador. Reading those six names back to back is its own kind of comparison: MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Sourav Ganguly, Rashid Khan, Shane Watson and Virat Kohli. Five are retired or senior Indian cricketers, one (Kohli) was still playing in 2021, one (Rashid Khan) is the most expensive overseas spinner in T20 franchise cricket. The pattern is not subtle. Indian fantasy platforms, in 2021 and 2023, were buying trust from the Indian Test and ODI establishment rather than from the IPL’s own current roster.
What that meant in practice is that a fantasy platform’s marketing budget in that period was spent on a single hero face rather than on a wider roster of mid-celebrity endorsements. The platforms that did this well — Dream11 with three captains across formats, MPL with Kohli — built recall that has lasted well past the original contract windows. Platforms that picked less obvious ambassadors, or rotated them quickly, never got the same lift from the spend.
For a reader comparing platforms in 2026, the ambassador roster is still worth a look, but for a different reason than in 2021. If the ambassador roster on the platform you are considering has not been refreshed in five years, that usually means marketing spend has moved to performance acquisition (entry-bonus offers, paid downloads) rather than to brand. Performance acquisition is cheaper per install but raises the cost of bonuses you actually receive as a user. So a stale ambassador roster is a quiet tell about who is paying for your signup bonus.
User-count and download math five years on
The Smartprix article quotes five user counts. MyTeam11 is reported at more than 15 crore downloads, Dream11 at more than 11 crore users, MPL at 6 crore+ users, the ESPN Sports App at more than 5 crore downloads, My11Circle at more than 1.3 crore users. Ballebazi is reported at 80 lakh+ users, Howzat at 50 lakh+ downloads, Legend at 1 lakh+ downloads. PlayerzPot, My Fab11, Paytm First Games and LeagueX get qualitative descriptions but no explicit user number in the article.
It is worth pausing on what those numbers are actually measuring. Users and downloads are different metrics: a download is the count of times the app has been installed on a device, a user is a registered account that has logged in at least once. A platform with 15 crore downloads and 4 crore active users has lost more than 70% of its install base, which is not unusual in the category. Equally, a platform with 11 crore users in a market of roughly 70 crore adult smartphone users in India is reporting penetration somewhere around one in six — a number that is plausible for Dream11 in 2021 but that should be checked against current quarterly filings or app-store rankings rather than taken at face value from a five-year-old article.
The honest comparison move is to read the Smartprix numbers as a ranking rather than as a measurement. If the article lists MyTeam11 above Dream11 on the download axis, that is what the publisher’s editorial desk believed about market position at the time. It is not necessarily what the current market looks like.
Prize pools, withdrawal floors and the real cost of play
The most useful column in the Smartprix table is the prize-pool ceiling. MPL is reported at Rs 40 crore daily, Dream11 at up to Rs 25 crore, Paytm First Games at up to Rs 10 crore, MyTeam11 at Rs 5 crore, My11Circle at Rs 30 lakh. Ballebazi reports a cumulative — Rs 500 crore distributed since founding — rather than a daily figure, which is a slightly different metric and worth treating as such.
Prize pool ceiling is what fantasy readers usually look at first, and it is the least useful number for an actual comparison. A Rs 40 crore daily ceiling on MPL means there is a contest entry somewhere on the platform that can theoretically pay out that much; it does not mean that the median user on the platform has any realistic path to that prize. What matters more is the withdrawal floor — the smallest amount you can cash out — and the settlement time — how long it takes to land in your bank or UPI handle. MyTeam11’s Rs 100 floor is generous for casual users. My11Circle’s no-maximum-withdrawal policy is generous for high-volume users. Paytm First Games’ instant-withdrawal feature is the one that has aged best; the same promise is now table stakes across the category.
The signup reward is the third number worth checking. Paytm First Games’ Rs 50 signup is on the low end; PlayerzPot’s Rs 20 is the floor; MyTeam11, MPL and Dream11 do not advertise a signup number in the Smartprix piece at all, which usually means they have moved the welcome offer to a tiered structure (deposit X, get Y) that varies by week. The trade-off for a user is straightforward: a flat signup bonus is predictable, a tiered welcome structure can be worth much more if you intend to deposit anyway, and is worth much less if you were planning a Rs 100 trial.
What an Indian fantasy reader should actually compare
The Smartprix listicle is a useful starting point, but the comparison questions that matter on the eve of an IPL cycle in 2026 are different from the ones that mattered in 2021. Three of them are worth restating.
Where does the platform actually make money? The 2021 list took it on faith that a fantasy platform’s main revenue line was commission on contest entry. That is still true, but the mix has shifted: deposit bonuses, advertising inside the app, and subscription products (stat packs, premium match alerts) now account for a larger share of operator revenue, which means the platform’s incentive to retain you after the welcome bonus is weaker than it was in 2021.
What is the state-by-state legal picture? Fantasy sports sit in a different legal column from online real-money gaming in India. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Assam, Sikkim and Nagaland have moved at various points to restrict paid fantasy contests. A 2021 listicle did not need to flag this; a 2026 comparison cannot avoid it. The Googly11 fantasy app comparisons hub carries a per-state eligibility reminder because the same app can be perfectly legal in Bengaluru and unavailable to download in Visakhapatnam.
What is the actual path from Rs 100 deposit to a withdrawal? The 2021 list treats signup bonus, deposit bonus and withdrawal as three separate numbers. Modern platforms bundle them. The reader question that still matters is the same one from 2021, restated: how many contests, at what entry fee, with what probability of a cash payout above the withdrawal floor, do I need to play before the platform actually sends money back to my bank? That answer depends on the platform’s commission, the contest size you join, and the platform’s anti-fraud rules — none of which appear in the Smartprix table, and all of which are worth asking customer support about before you load a contest.
A fair read on the 2026 shortlist
None of the twelve apps on the Smartprix listicle has disappeared from the Indian market. Six of them — Dream11, Paytm First Games, MPL, MyTeam11, My11Circle and the ESPN Sports App — are still recognisable top-of-funnel brands in 2026. Two more — Howzat and My Fab11 — sit in the second tier with steady but smaller user bases. PlayerzPot, Ballebazi, LeagueX and Legend make up the long tail, useful as a second-app install rather than as a primary platform.
That is a reasonable shelf life for a 2021 tech recommendation in a fast-moving category. The listicle has aged well because it was honest about what it was measuring: founder dates, ambassadors, headline user counts and prize-pool ceilings. It did not promise a verdict, and it should not be read as one. The verdict is the one each Indian fantasy user has to construct for themselves, ideally after a Rs 100 test deposit on two of the twelve and a side-by-side comparison of how the money comes back.
For readers building that side-by-side comparison, the fantasy app comparisons hub at Googly11 is the place where the per-app notes, the state-eligibility reminders and the withdrawal-speed notes sit together in one place. The Smartprix article gave readers a dozen names to work through. The comparisons hub is where the working-through happens.
Frequently asked questions for fantasy readers
Short answers to the questions Indian fantasy users still ask after reading a five-year-old listicle.