How to Play Fantasy Cricket (Season-Long Leagues)

Season-long fantasy cricket is the format where you draft one squad with your friends and manage it across an entire tournament — trades, waiver pickups, rivalries and all. This guide explains the whole loop from scratch: no prior fantasy sports experience assumed.

Season-long leagues vs daily contests

Most cricket fans have only seen daily fantasy: pick 11 players before tonight's match, score, reset tomorrow. Season-long fantasy is a different game:

• One draft, one squad. You draft your team once, before the tournament, and every player is owned by exactly one manager in your league. If your rival drafts the tournament's best bowler, you don't get him.
• A closed league of friends. Typically 4–10 people you actually know, competing on one table all season — which is where the fun lives.
• Season-long management. Injuries, form slumps, and breakout stars force real decisions: trades with rivals, pickups from the free-agent pool, lineup calls.
• Free formats exist. Season-long fantasy is a strategy game, not a betting product — leagues on Googly have no entry fees and no cash prizes.

Step 1: The league

Someone (the commissioner) creates the league, picks the tournament it follows, chooses the scoring system, and invites the group with a join code or link. League sizes of 6–10 teams work best: fewer and the player pool is too deep to matter, more and rosters get thin.

Step 2: The draft

Before the tournament starts, the league holds a live draft. Two formats:

• Snake draft — managers pick in order, and the order reverses every round (1→8, then 8→1). Simple and fast.
• Auction draft — every player goes to the highest bidder from a fixed budget. More strategic, more chaotic, more fun with an engaged group.

Not sure which fits your league? See snake vs auction drafts. Either way you'll leave with a full roster — typically 11 players spanning batters, bowlers, all-rounders, and a wicket-keeper.

Step 3: Scoring

As real matches are played, your players' real performances score for your fantasy team automatically. Leagues score in one of two ways — category rankings (teams ranked across stats like total runs, wickets, and economy) or per-player points (every run and wicket has a point value). The full breakdown is in our scoring rules guide; the short version is that categories reward balanced squads while points reward superstars.

Step 4: Managing your team

This is what separates season-long from set-and-forget:

The waiver wire

Undrafted players form the free-agent pool. When an uncapped youngster starts smashing it, every manager wants him — so pickups run through waivers: you bid from a free-agent budget (often called FAAB), and the highest bid wins when claims process. Every pickup requires dropping someone, so each claim is a real decision.

Trades

Managers deal directly with each other — a struggling star for two solid contributors is the classic shape. Good leagues add a short review window where the rest of the league can veto a lopsided deal.

Mid-season drafts

The best modern wrinkle for keeping leagues alive past the halfway mark: scheduled windows where every team drops players back into the pool and re-drafts. Googly leagues can run up to three per season — an optional early window, a mandatory mid-tournament re-draft, and an optional late window — so a manager whose draft went sideways is never out of the race in week three.

Step 5: Winning

The standings run all tournament, and the manager on top when it ends takes the title — and a year of bragging rights, which in a league of friends is the actual prize.

Quick-start checklist

1. Get 5–9 friends into a group chat and pick a commissioner.
2. Create the league and pick snake or auction.
3. Schedule the draft for a time everyone can join live — it's the best night of the season.
4. Do ten minutes of prep: skim player stats and rank your top ~30 targets.
5. After the draft, check your league twice a week — waivers and lineups are where seasons are quietly won.

Want to feel a draft before committing your group? Run a free mock draft against bots — no signup needed.