Ask an American about cricket and you’ll get blank stares. Ask anyone from India, Pakistan, England, or Australia, and you’re talking about their national obsession. Cricket is the world’s second-most popular sport with 2.5 billion fans. The Indian Premier League is valued at over $10 billion, with TV rights deals rivaling the NFL. And now, cricket is coming to America.
Major League Cricket launched in 2023, and the sport will be featured in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Investors are betting hundreds of millions they can make Americans care about a sport they’ve ignored for centuries. The question isn’t whether cricket is big (it absolutely is), but whether it can crack the toughest sports market on Earth.
The Giant Americans Ignore
The scale of global cricket is hard for Americans to grasp. IPL teams are worth over $1 billion each. Top players earn $20 million annually. World Cup matches draw 400 million viewers, numbers the Super Bowl hits routinely for big cricket games. India’s cricket board generates more revenue than most professional sports leagues worldwide.
The barrier in the U.S. has always been the rules and format. Test cricket lasts five days. Even “limited overs” matches take eight hours. But T20 cricket changes everything. It’s fast, action-packed, and over in three hours, perfectly designed for American attention spans and TV broadcasts.
The Smart Strategy
The growth strategy for U.S. cricket is clever: target the diaspora first. There are millions of South Asian and Caribbean immigrants in the U.S. who already love the sport. Major League Cricket is filling stadiums in Dallas and New York with these fans, creating vibrant atmosphere that attracts curious newcomers.
The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will be the real catalyst. Guaranteed primetime exposure will introduce cricket to millions of American viewers who’ve never seen a match. Investors like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are banking on this Olympic showcase to turn niche interest into sustainable viewership.
Can It Work Here?
Cricket won’t replace the NFL or NBA. But it doesn’t have to. If it captures even a small slice of the American market while maintaining its massive global base, it becomes a major media property. The challenge is cultural: overcoming perception of cricket as slow, confusing, and foreign. But with T20, they finally have a product Americans might actually watch.
The economics are compelling. Cricket has one thing most American sports lack: a truly global fanbase. A league that works in the U.S. instantly has access to billions of fans worldwide through streaming. That’s valuable to advertisers and broadcasters in ways purely domestic sports can’t match.
The Bottom Line
Cricket is the biggest sport Americans don’t know. With the Olympics and serious capital behind it, that ignorance is about to end. Whether it becomes mainstream or remains a large niche, cricket is carving out space in the U.S. sports landscape. And for investors betting on it, the global market makes success almost inevitable, even if America never fully converts. For more on sports crossing borders, read about the Saudi World Cup bid and the NBA’s European takeover.
Sources: International Cricket Council, IPL media rights valuations, Major League Cricket investor presentations.
