AI helping create popular mobile sports games
After the World Cup and before the domestic season, many football fans still crave more. Amateur coders are helping to fill this gap. After the
After the World Cup and before the domestic season, many football fans still crave more. Amateur coders are helping to fill this gap. After the World Cup and before the domestic football season begins, the world's most popular sport tends to enjoy a relatively quiet period. For some though, the need for football remains. This summer that demand has been met by the creation of a raft of mobile sports games in which players can dive into nostalgia and storytelling. This craze has seemingly been inspired by the viral 82-0 basketball game in which players can draft an all-time NBA starting five by spinning a random wheel for teams and decades. Inspired by this, Deniz Sancar, a hobbyist coder who works in, created 38-0-0. Sancar told "mobilegamer.biz" that despite having no previous coding experience, he built the game overnight with Claude Code, an advanced AI assistant that is designed to help with coding. The game was number one in the UK App Store games charts in June. Destiny Eleven: From TikTok to France and the world Another example is Destiny Eleven. Maxence Pigne, a PSG fan and a project manager, was inspired by a game he saw on TikTok that allowed players to play out the career of a professional footballer. After the 2026 World Cup, Pigne released his version, also created with the help of AI assistant Claude, which took the original idea further by offering more variety and choices in the career.
The man who specializes in computer science told French weekly "Le Point" that the decision to publish the free game earlier than planned paid off because by the end of July, the game had over one million players with 14 million careers having been created. Leverkusen striker Martin Terrier is reportedly a fan of the game, which has seen many variations in different languages emerge in the weeks since its arrival. Mobile games are big business It's clear mobile games have come a long way since Nokia released "Snake" back in 1997. They are now big business. According to digital market intelligence platform Sensor Tower, approximately 50 billion mobile games were downloaded in 2025, generating $82 billion (€71 billion) in in-app purchases. According to "Game, the German Games Industry Association," revenue in Germany in 2025 was approxiamtely $3.12 billion, with 28.1 million players. "This clearly indicates that mobile gaming in Germany is no longer a niche topic, but rather a serious genre with significant purchasing power," Kyle Kuscu, chairman of the German Mobile Gaming Association (DeMoGa), told DW. "This is also relevant for the esports sector: Germany has a broad player base, and mobile gaming is the largest platform in the country in terms of user numbers." This summer, the emergence of sports-drafting games has clearly benefited from a World Cup summer but also because of game design.
The BriefWire