[Someone]

Depends on location. Cricket requires a ball that bounces. Football, you can play with a wad of left-over paper tied together with tape or strings.

Cricket puts restrictions on the pitch (ground must be fairly hard and even where the ball bounces) that are easily met in typically dry India but harder to meet in wet England, where they need to nurture/torture grass to get the right conditions (growing it to get long, strongly interleaving roots, but then drying out the ground and cutting the grass very short to not make the bouncing ball slip)