Leveraging America’s South Asian Diaspora: Cricket’s Global Expansion Hopes
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen have been major supporters of the push.
World cricket’s showpiece event the T20 World Cup is currently underway for the first time with hosting rights shared between the West Indies, and the traditional home of baseball, the United States, with organisers looking to capitalise on the sport’s stateside popularity within the South Asian diaspora.
Grand Prairie, Texas hosted the bi-annual tournament’s opening game on June 2 between the United States and Canada.
About 20 teams, an increase from the previous 16, will contest the World Cup. Games will be played in Texas, Lauderhill in Florida, and in a converted 34,000-seat arena called Nassau County International Stadium in New York.
Dual hosting rights were granted by the International Cricket Council (ICC) in mid-2023, and the allocation to the United States was part of a strategic plan by the ICC to broaden cricket’s horizons into a country teeming with immigrants.
Cricket’s popularity can not be understated.
It enjoys a following akin to religious worship in India, and an estimated 2.5 billion people either watch or participate, ranking it second only to football (soccer) globally.
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According to the ICC, the last edition of the T20 World Cup recorded 6.65 billion cross-platform views, an increase of 65 percent on the 2021 tournament. Predictions are that the upcoming event will climb even higher.
Work Underway for T20 to Gain Foothold in the States
While traditionalists point towards the five-day Test match as the games’ pinnacle, the advent of T20, a game in which both sides bat for 20 overs with the match finishing in three hours, has exploded in popularity and is now seen as the most lucrative format of the game.
The short game has also triggered a surge in the United States.
Understandably overshadowed by established markets, cricket has gained traction in recent years due to demographic shift, leading to the formation and growth of local cricket leagues concentrated in Arizona, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and Florida.
The shorter, family-friendly format in which colourfully attired players arrive to music and fanfare is seen as the antidote to a reluctant U.S. audience accustomed to the ballpark experience who may perceive cricket as a stuffy English game.
Launched in 2021, Major League Cricket (MLC), has brought leading international players into the country, and is being developed into a potential nursery to grow and share the game with the 5.4 million South Asians who now call America home.
It has received a US$1 billion investment from American Cricket Enterprises, a consortium including Satyan Gajwani and Vineet Jain of The Times Group, and Willow TV founders Vijay Srinivasan and Sameer Mehta.
Other investments have come from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (who also owns the Seattle Orcas T20 cricket franchise) and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, show how seriously things are being taken.
MLC CEO Vijay Srinivasan earmarked the 2025 season for expansion from 19 games to 34, saying via a statement:
“We saw cricket mania sweep across the US last year off the back of our inaugural season of Major League Cricket. Now, we take exciting momentum into the highly anticipated ICC T20 World Cup and season two of the MLC.”
MLC’s strategy has committed to further expansion by taking the game to different venues and identifying local talent who will have their skills honed via academy programs. A feeder league eponymously named Minor League Cricket, has been in place since 2022.
Further scope for the game’s development will come via the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, featuring cricket for the first time since the Paris’ Summer Games in 1900.
Despite the renewed push, cricket in America is not unheard of and traces its origins back to the 18th century when British settlers introduced it to regions on the eastern seaboard, flourishing initially in Philadelphia.
It declined in popularity after the Civil War, and baseball soon assumed the mantle as the country’s favourite pastime.
It is not just the South Asian market that has embraced the game either.
Around 200,000 people play cricket regularly in the United States, spread across an estimated 6,000 teams.
While that figure provides organisers with a bedrock to carve out new niches of support, the real test will be whether dyed-in-the-wool American sports fans can be converted or at least take a passing interest in the sport.
