How Major League Cricket is making a play for America

Inaugural season is a hit with South Asian expats.

Jul 28, 2023 - 21:02

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How Major League Cricket is making a play for America

The world’s second most popular sport and the world’s largest sports market have finally gotten together.

Major League Cricket—a U.S.-based pro cricket league—is wrapping up its inaugural season this week with playoffs and a championship game scheduled for Sunday. Aimed primarily at the 5 million South Asian expats in the U.S., the six participating cricket teams feature a mix of worldwide cricket stars and domestic talent.

Cricket attracts more than 2.5 billion fans globally, only trailing soccer, according to Front Office Sports.

While cricket hasn't permeated U.S. sports culture quite yet, the league has managed to draw attention from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine, among other outlets. And in terms of the game's fans, Major League Cricket was a smashing success, said Tom Dunmore, VP of marketing for the league.

“The amount of energy and attention locally, nationally and globally has been completely mind-blowing,” Dunmore said. “We’ve sold out more than two-thirds of our matches and we could have sold more tickets to many of our matches. The atmosphere has been incredible, and the fans have been so passionate. There are hundreds of fans waiting to get autographs, desperate to meet their heroes. It’s hard to convey to American mainstream sports followers and media just how big superstars these players are.”

Rashid Khan, a bowler for MLC’s MI New York squad with 7 million Instagram followers and a Monster Energy endorsement deal, is one of them.

The league was able to secure top stars due to its short season—just 18 days long beginning earlier this month—that doesn’t interfere with other pro leagues in places such as India, England and Australia. And unlike most U.S. team sport athletes, cricket pros aren’t bound to a single team or league.

“To get [Lionel] Messi, [Inter Miami] had to pay a lot of money and it’s still hard [for Major League Soccer] to get top stars in their prime,” Dunmore said. “We can bring over the top stars in their prime for these short tournaments and they compete at the same level as they would in the top cricket countries. We’re immediately able to be at the top level of the sport, and the fans recognize that.”

Also read: See Lay's US welcome message to Messi made of goats

$1 billion investment

The league is backed by a $1 billion investment from American Cricket Enterprises, a group funded by Sameer Mehta and Vijay Srinivasan, the founders of Willow TV, the largest cricket broadcaster in North America; and Satyan Gajwani and Vineet Jain, the principals of The Times of India Group, India’s largest media conglomerate. Other investors include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

League corporate partners include Royal, the U.S.-based Indian foods brand; Abound by the Times of India, a financial app aimed at Indian expats; Cloudchef, an AI recipe and food delivery app; Sling; Betbricks7, a casino games app; and Betway, the online betting and gaming brand.

Royal this month debuted its first U.S. ad to promote awareness of the sport’s inaugural season. “The Many Flavors of Cricket,” from the agency McCann, displays the blending of culture, cuisine and cricket.

“The overwhelming majority of South Asians in the United States have arrived in the U.S. in the last 15 years, so they are living a somewhat plural existence. Connection to culture, language, and traditions become even more important when you are living abroad,” Andrew Cops, senior VP of sales, marketing and product development for LT Foods, Royal’s parent, said in emailed remarks. “Major League Cricket’s inaugural season was the perfect opportunity to bring our cultural goals to life through the fusion of the exhilarating sport and delicacies synonymous with the experience.”

MLC games are broadcast by Willow and streamed by Sling, with some games airing on Paramount’s CBS Sports Network. The league consists of six teams representing Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and New York City. This season, most games were played at a converted minor league baseball stadium near Dallas, with others at a cricket facility known as Church Street Park near Raleigh, North Carolina. Plans call for teams to eventually establish their own home parks.

MLC plays a version of cricket known as Twenty20, or T20, which refers to the 20 “overs,” or set of six pitches, each team is limited to. The result, said Dunmore, is a faster-moving game with more action. T20 games typically take less than three hours to complete; traditional “test” cricket has matches that can last for five days.

Dunmore said the league would look to widen its fanbase in coming years. “Our goal this year was to build on this established platform of cricket lovers. That’s the base we can build off. From that, we can reach out to different types of fans and grow the sport more broadly, and there’s a lot of ways we can do that: education, outreach, influencers, and partnerships with other sports teams,” he said. “We did just a little bit of that this year, but that’s a year two, three, four activation for us.”