Major League Cricket To Rival Big-Spending T20 Startups And Power Cricket In The U.S.

In the world’s biggest sports market, where administrators have long held grandiose dreams but only for cricket to often be mired in disarray, Major League Cricket has grand plans amid big-spending to attract top overseas talent and develop homegrown stars.

Amid such congestion, where the U.S. boasts some of the world’s most famous leagues, players and teams, it could be easy to believe the new T20 franchise league might struggle for attention.

“We believe for American fans this is the stereotypical perfect game – three hours long, extremely exciting,” co-founder Sameer Mehta told me with the six-team MLC set to finally launch for a three-week tournament in June-July 2023 after being postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Matches in the debut season are set to be played in Dallas, Morrisville, Houston or Florida, which are areas with large South Asian expatriate communities.

But it isn’t just a case of competing with high-profile American sports, the MLC will be the latest T20 league to emerge amid a slew of well-heeled upstarts, including in UAEUAE
and South Africa which are offering top players around $450,000.

With salary caps to be announced later in the year ahead of a player draft in February, Mehta declined to speculate how much top players would be remunerated but did project confidence it could rival those other nascent leagues.

“We would like the US to be one of the top leagues in the world. We should have a decent salary cap,” he said.

His optimism is well founded with MLC having secured more than $40 million in funding and over $100 million in “handshakes” with private investors including tech giants MicrosoftMSFT
and AdobeADBE
.

The Kolkata Knight Riders, led by Bollywood superstar Shah Ruhk Khan, are a founding investor and helping build a cricket stadium in Los Angeles with the MLC, which is hoped to help cricket’s bid for inclusion into the 2028 Olympic Games.

Playing in June-July, a period generally absent of T20 franchise leagues and marked by Test cricket in the U.K, could prove welcome scheduling, but Mehta believes MLC has an in-built trump card over rivals.

“Players want to come here. There is cache playing in the U.S,” Mehta said with Australia star batter Steve Smith recently publicly stating his desire to one day play in the U.S having grown an affection with New York. “Every cricketer I speak to who passes through here say this is the one place they want to explore.

“We would encourage teams to look at him (Smith).”

But to truly make its mark in the long haul amid such a competitive landscape, and avoid the cautionary tale of the GT20 Canada, officials know they will need American heroes to emerge and capture the hearts of local fans. “We need to create an American product. The focus is what we can do to built for the long term. Our focus is on creating domestic players,” Mehta said.

With Minor League Cricket having been played the last couple of seasons as a feeder system, it’s hoped to create a strong domestic structure and breeding ground. Unlike the UAE’s contentious International League T20, where teams might potentially field nine overseas players, MLC aims to follow the commonly accepted four foreigners per side rule in established T20 franchise leagues.

Several known cricketers have already been lured to play in Minor League Cricket. Silicon Valley Strikers batter Unmukt Chand, a former India U19 captain who has played in the Indian Premier League and Australia’s Big Bash, was unaware of cricket development in the U.S. before being sounded out by MLC officials after he retired from playing cricket in India.

“Americans didn’t know cricket was such a big sport,” Chand told me. The 29-year-old liked what he saw and has settled down in San Francisco with hopes of representing his adopted country for the 2024 T20 World Cup co-hosted by the U.S.

“I always dreamt about representing India but this is a second beginning. I want to be a pioneer for cricket in the U.S.”

Chand, however, believed the influential collegiate system might be the long-term key for cricket. “A college sport is what drives pretty much the success of all sports in the U.S. and that would really be a game changer,” he said.

Mehta concurs and said MLC’s infrastructure had been strategically placed near colleges, which would eventually have access to facilities.

Ultimately, he believed the venerable game of cricket, popular through the British Commonwealth but starting to expand elsewhere, would prove irresistible as it grows a foothold in the American sports market.

“I can’t see cricket not making it in the U.S. because of the quality of the sport,” he said. “The U.S. already has a passionate in-built first generation of fans, who are fairly high income.

“Just doubling that base would make us the second or third largest cricket market in the world.”