Every fantasy cricket site will tell you who to pick. Very few tell you what people actually picked, and how it worked out. This is the first of a monthly report built entirely from teams made on CricketDream: who got the captain's armband, which low-owned players won matches for the few who backed them, and how often the crowd's favourite captain was the right call.
This is a small, honest sample. 52 managers is a league, not a nation, so read the percentages as "what our players did" rather than a poll of every fantasy player in India. We will publish the same numbers every month so the trends become clearer as the sample grows.
How we counted
- Every Fantasy XI team built for a match that was completed between 1 and 30 September 2026.
- Real accounts only. Our internal test accounts, which we use to check scoring and substitutions before matches, are left out entirely.
- "Picked" means the player was in the starting XI. Bench players do not count.
- Points are CricketDream fantasy points for that match before the captain or vice-captain bonus. A captain earns double.
- The Captain Battle only looks at matches with at least 10 real teams, so one or two teams can never decide a result.
The most-captained players
The European T20 Premier League produced the most teams of any competition this month (170 of the 397), which is why its all-rounders sit near the top. Bas de Leede was handed the captaincy 24 times, more than anyone else. The more interesting column is the second one: what each player actually scored in the games they captained.
Shubman Gill is the standout. The 17 managers who made him captain did it across two ODIs against West Indies: 110 in Thiruvananthapuram on 27 September and 223 off 133 balls in Guwahati three days later, worth 329 fantasy points before the captain's double. No other popular captain came close to that return. At the other end, James Vince was a popular ETPL captain who averaged 52.7 points in those games.
The most-picked players
The best differentials
A differential is a player few people pick who then scores big, which is how you climb a leaderboard when everyone else has the same core. We looked for players who were in 25% of teams or fewer for a match with at least 10 real teams, and who scored 60 or more points.
The Johannesburg ODI on 27 September was a differential goldmine. David Miller made 142 off 93 balls with nine sixes, and Jack Edwards took five wickets for Australia, yet each was in only one of the 13 teams built for that game. Two players in this list, Craig Young and Jai Moondra, were in nobody's team at all. If you only remember one thing from this report: the ODI series drew far fewer teams overall than the T20 leagues, and that is exactly where the low-owned big scores were.
The Captain Battle: did the crowd get it right?
CricketDream match pages show the Captain Battle: who most teams made captain, and once the match is done, how those captains scored. Across the nine September matches with at least 10 real teams, the crowd's favourite captain averaged 64 fantasy points. The top scorer in those same matches averaged 201. The favourite finished in the match's top three scorers only once.
In six of the nine matches, not one manager captained the top scorer. The India v West Indies series shows how fine the margins are: in the first game the crowd backed Gill and he made 110, only for Kohli to outscore him with 139 off 88 balls. In the second, half the teams switched to Kohli, he made 48 points, and Gill went on to 223. Managers split their captaincy between three and seven different players per match, so the armband is far from a settled question.
CricketQuest: the mystery players that beat you
Away from team building, signed-in players finished 289 daily CricketQuest games in September and solved 90% of them, needing 3.7 guesses on average. The hardest days were Kumar Sangakkara (11 September), Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (18 September) and Kusal Mendis (28 September), each solved by two in three players. The surprise was the other end: the "hard" Jos Buttler day and the "expert" Shakib Al Hasan day were both solved by everyone who played them.
What it means for your next team
- The captain the crowd agrees on is usually a safe score, not a winning one. If you are chasing a leaderboard, your vice-captain can follow the crowd while your captain does not.
- Low-ownership value showed up most in the ODIs, where longer innings produce bigger individual scores and one differential can carry a whole team.
- Check the Captain Battle on the match page before the deadline. It shows exactly how concentrated the captaincy is, which tells you how much a different pick could gain you.
The October report lands in early November. If you write about fantasy cricket and want the underlying numbers for a piece, get in touch through our contact page and we will share them.