The UK’s number one iOS game 38-0-0 was built overnight by an amateur using Claude

Viral football drafting game 38-0-0 is currently atop the UK App Store charts – ahead of Fortnite – and was built by solo creator Deniz Sancar overnight using Claude Code.

Sancar is an entrepreneur who runs marketing firm Virlo. He got the idea for 38-0-0 from a similar basketball drafting game called 82-0, and built a web version of the game in a couple of days using Claude Code. He then used the same tool to create the app.

The game’s title refers to the perfect match record: 38 wins, 0 draws, 0 defeats. Players create a team by drafting players from randomly-selected Premier League teams, drawn from a random season. Once all eleven spots are full, the game calculates the player’s match record and if the team got into Europe or won the league.

There’s also an international mode in which players try to to win World Cup by drafting from random international teams drawn from prior World Cup years.

Sancar says he has no previous coding experience, but has built and released one app before, Kaizen, using Claude Code. He built 38-0-0.com overnight with Claude Code, and did the same for the app.

“I don’t have a software engineering degree or anything along those lines,” he told us. “I have a civil engineering degree in the past, but even then I didn’t do any coding assignments. I pretty much failed every single one of them that I did.”

The intention with 38-0-0 was to replicate the success of the basketball edition of the game, 82-0.

“It was so viral that NBA players were screenshotting themselves playing the game and posting their results on X,” he continued. “That’s what made me realise this is a massive opportunity, so I pulled an all-nighter vibe coding it equivalently for the Premier League, because obviously that market wasn’t touched.”

“There are a lot of similar apps to my ones that came out at similar times. I don’t believe any of us copied each other. I believe we all took inspiration from the NBA version of the game.”

Sancar says the web version of the game got 1.8m visitors in its first week. Once he built the accompanying app, it took Apple four days to approve it – four times longer than it took to actually build. As well as being number one in the free games chart in the UK, it has ranked in the top 20 in the US and other countries.

“The app had tens of thousands of users across the first day,” says Sancar, and at the time of writing it has around 100,000 downloads. The UK is the top market for downloads, followed by the USA, Ireland, and several other European countries.

At the time of writing the game is still waiting for approval for release on the Google Play Store.

The game is monetised with in-app ads, which are displayed in between rounds and if players want to re-spin. There’s also one IAP, a $9.99 purchase to remove ads.

Part of the game’s vitality is in how players can easilt share their results on social media, in a similar way to how Wordle users did when that game blew up.

Sancar adds that he has not paid any influencers to talk about the game, but did use data from his own marketing tool, Virlo, which “collates trends across YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and TikTok.”

“I utilised that data to make some social media posts myself to put the word out there,” he adds. “Because of the way the game is and the fact that you can share your result on iMessage, on Instagram Stories, and on X after playing the game, it just spread like wildfire.”

“I posted about the game a bit across X, Instagram, and TikTok, and then I woke up the next morning and it already had 30,000 users. Since then, it just completely took off, so I didn’t pay anyone whatsoever, no paid influencers, just utilizing Virlo at the start for the marketing, and then it just completely took off from there.”