The 24-year-old catapulted to fame by viral football game

Two weeks ago, 24-year-old entrepreneur Deniz Sancar filmed a YouTube video about his attempt to build a football game completely using AI in under 24 hours. What he actually created could parallel a great Mary Shelley novel.

He started building the game at 9pm, using Claude (an AI-generated coder) to develop it for him. By 4.30am, he had built 38-0-0, a relatively simple football game where users build an ultimate XI from any player in Premier League history and the game tells you if your team could clasp the elusive 38-0-0: winning every game of the Premier League season with no draws or losses.

“I went to bed, woke up in the morning and it had thousands of users,” he said. “My Instagram was blowing up.” He decided to turn it into an app, which was downloaded by over 100,000 people in its first 48 hours. In the first week, it had been played by more than 2m people worldwide, and two weeks on from its invention, 38-0-0 is played by hundreds of thousands of people every day and the app is at the top of the charts for trivia apps.

The key is in the game’s simplicity. You spin a wheel for real Premier League clubs and seasons, draft one player from that team into your XI, and spin again until you have filled all 11 positions. Each player’s performance will be based on their performance in the season you picked him from. You never know which team you will get next – so you might get your pick of City’s 2017-18 100-point winning squad and then immediately have to pick your next player from West Brom in the same season, when they were relegated. The game then uses an algorithm to discover whether your team has what it takes to achieve football’s most absurdly ambitious feat: winning all 38 Premier League matches in a season without drawing or losing a single game.

The catch, of course, is that football fans are incapable of treating anything as simple. A few spins in and you are hooked, lost down a Google rabbit hole reading about Blackburn’s 1994-95 title-winning squad and trying to work out whether Tim Flowers was actually as good as you thought he was. What about a peak-era Gareth Barry? Is a 2017 Kevin De Bruyne enough to get me Champions League qualification, even if he’s somehow meant to be fed the ball by a 2008 vintage Nicky Shorey?

Almost all player ratings are generated from an algorithm, but there is one exception. As an Arsenal fan, Sancar could not resist the temptation to slightly skew one of the rankings. “I made sure Patrick Vieira’s rating was one above Roy Keane,” he said. “I use an algorithm to get the rankings based on each player’s performance in each season, and it came out as Keane 91, Vieira 91 and I manually changed Vieira to 92,” he said. “Just for the Arsenal-United rivalry.” The other Easter Egg that Sancar has added to the game is that it is possible to achieve 0-0-38, if you pick the worst players possible – which feels in many ways like the greater challenge.

The brilliance of 38-0-0 is that it understands exactly what football supporters enjoy. It’s the nostalgia that makes this game wonderful; it reminds us of the club heroes of a season long forgotten – the obscure bits of knowledge that serve no practical purpose whatsoever until suddenly they become crucial to your chances of constructing the greatest team the Premier League will never see.

Nobody has ever gone 38-0-0 in the Premier League. Arsenal’s Invincibles didn’t manage it, nor did Manchester City’s centurions. But quite a few people have achieved 38-0-0 on the app. Not this writer, though. My highest score is 30-2-6.

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