Godfather of cricket: who is it, and why India and England disagree
No board awards the title, which is why the answer splits by country. In England it is WG Grace. In India it is almost always Sourav Ganguly, and the two are not competing.
Jun 16, 2025 · Updated Sep 1, 2026
Search for the godfather of cricket and Google returns a Quora thread running to dozens of answers, a stack of Instagram reels and four different names. There is no official holder. No board awards the title, no almanack records it, and the people using it are not all talking about the same thing.
Ask in England and the answer is WG Grace. Ask in India and it is almost always Sourav Ganguly. Both are right, because they are answers to different questions, and the confusion comes from four separate nicknames being used as if they were one.
Godfather of cricket: the short answer
These four titles get swapped for each other constantly. They are not interchangeable, and knowing which one you actually mean settles most of the argument.
| Nickname | Who it usually means | What it rests on | How settled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Father of cricket | WG Grace | A first-class career from 1865 to 1908 that turned the game into a national event in England | Settled, and used for more than a century |
| God of cricket | Sachin Tendulkar | 100 international centuries and 34,357 international runs | Settled in India, though it is a fan coinage rather than an award |
| Godfather of Indian cricket | Sourav Ganguly | The captaincy years from 2000, then the BCCI presidency | Widely used, entirely informal |
| Godfather of the IPL | Lalit Modi | Founding and running the league from 2008 | Informal, and complicated by what happened next |
Why nobody officially holds the title
Cricket hands out plenty of honours. There is an ICC Hall of Fame with a published list of inductees. Wisden has picked its Cricketers of the Year since 1889, and five of them in most years since 1897. Boards retire shirt numbers and name stands after people.
Godfather is not on that list. It is crowd language, the kind of thing that starts on a placard and ends up in a headline, and there is no committee anywhere that votes on it. That is exactly why the search results for it are reels and forum threads rather than record books, and why any page claiming to give you the single correct name is making it up.
WG Grace, the one name with a paper trail
William Gilbert Grace, born in 1848, is the reason the question exists at all. He played first-class cricket for 44 seasons, from 1865 to 1908, starting at 16 and finishing at 60. Across 870 first-class matches he scored 54,211 runs at 39.45 with 124 centuries and a highest score of 344, and took 2,809 wickets at 18.14. That 344, made for the Gentlemen of MCC against Kent in August 1876 after his side had followed on, was the first triple century in first-class cricket.
Read those numbers with one caveat that most versions of this list leave out. The first-class status of a number of Grace’s matches has been disputed, so his career figures vary depending on which source you pick up. Even the settled answer carries an asterisk.
What earns him the title is not the batting average. It is that he took a Victorian pastime and made it a spectacle people paid to watch, and that he was the first cricketer most of England could name. He is properly the father of cricket, and the godfather usage is a loose borrowing of that.
Sourav Ganguly, and why India says godfather
Ganguly took the India captaincy in 2000, with the game in the middle of a match-fixing scandal and the dressing room in pieces. He led India in 49 Tests and won 21 of them, 11 away from home, becoming the first India captain to reach 20 Test wins. In ODIs he captained 146 matches and won 76.
The numbers are good rather than untouchable. What makes the godfather label stick is the second column of his record: who he brought through. Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan and MS Dhoni all established themselves under him, and by Ganguly’s own count seven or eight of the squad that won the 2011 World Cup had started their careers in his side.
He then went back in from the other direction, serving as BCCI president from 23 October 2019 to 18 October 2022. Player, captain, then the man running the board. A godfather in the ordinary sense of the word is someone who sponsors other people into something, and that is a better description of Ganguly’s career than of anyone else’s on this list.
Why MS Dhoni’s name keeps coming up
Dhoni is the other name Indian fans reach for, and the case is easy to make. He is the only captain to have won all three ICC white-ball trophies: the World T20 on 24 September 2007, the World Cup on 2 April 2011 and the Champions Trophy on 23 June 2013. No other captain has all three.
There is a neat detail buried in that, though. Dhoni made his international debut on 23 December 2004, in Bangladesh, in a side Ganguly was captaining. The man half the internet calls the godfather of Indian cricket was handed his first cap by the other man half the internet calls the godfather of Indian cricket. If the title is about who opened the door, the argument only runs one way. Dhoni’s own haul is covered in our piece on the trophies MS Dhoni has won.
Sachin Tendulkar is the god, not the godfather
This is the swap that causes the most trouble, because a lot of the reels tagged godfather of cricket are actually about Tendulkar, and the title attached to him in India has always been god of cricket.
His case needs no argument. Tendulkar finished with 100 international centuries, 51 in Tests and 49 in ODIs, and 34,357 international runs across 664 matches. The hundredth hundred came on 16 March 2012 against Bangladesh at Mirpur, an innings of 114. Nobody else has been near the mark, and it is the single most quoted number in Indian cricket.
The distinction matters if you are searching. God of cricket has a settled answer, and we have written it up separately as the god of cricket, alongside the wider list of most centuries in international cricket and a straight Kohli against Tendulkar comparison.
Who is the godfather of the IPL?
This one has a cleaner answer than the cricket version. Lalit Modi founded the IPL and ran it from 2008 as chairman and commissioner, and the league’s format, its auction and its television economics were built on his watch.
He was removed from both posts in 2010, after the third season, and in September 2013 the BCCI banned him for life. The findings against him included rigging bids at the 2010 franchise auction, selling media and internet rights without authorisation, and quietly trying to set up a rebel T20 league in England. The tournament’s godfather is a man its own board will not let near it, which is a fair summary of why the nickname sits so oddly.
The other names that get suggested
Three more come up often enough to be worth listing. Don Bradman is the statistical outlier of the entire sport, with a Test average of 99.94 that has never been approached, and a name that carried Australia through the Depression years. Viv Richards changed what a batter was allowed to look like, batting without a helmet and with a swagger that made the West Indies the team everyone copied. Jacques Kallis is the quiet one on the list, an all-rounder good enough to be picked twice over in the same side.
All three are all-time greats. None of them is the answer to this particular question, because the godfather tag is about influence over other people’s careers rather than the size of the numbers. For the pure ranking arguments, our piece on who is the king of cricket is the better read.
Godfather of cricket: quick answers
Who is the godfather of cricket in India?
Sourav Ganguly, in most usage. He rebuilt the side after 2000, gave debuts to the core of the 2011 World Cup team, and later ran the BCCI.
Who is the godfather of cricket in the world?
WG Grace, though the more accurate title for him is father of cricket. His 1865 to 1908 career is what turned the sport into a mass-audience game.
Is Sachin Tendulkar the godfather of cricket?
He is the god of cricket. The two nicknames get mixed up constantly, but they are separate titles with separate meanings.
Who is the godfather of the IPL?
Lalit Modi, who founded and ran the league from 2008 until his removal in 2010. He was banned for life by the BCCI in 2013.
Is there an official godfather of cricket?
No. No governing body or publication awards the title, which is why the answer changes depending on who you ask and where.
For more on the people who shaped India’s game, our profiles of India’s first Test captain and the full list of India captains pick the story up from the beginning.