The $1bn gamble to bring cricket back to America

TJ Cawley is having none of it. Cricket, a sport supposedly too complex for homegrown Americans like him to fully grasp, is rather simple, he insists. “Catch the ball if it comes to you, throw it in towards the nearest wicket,” is the small-town mayor’s precis of the 42 laws that govern the centuries-old game he has taken to playing recreationally. When batting, he instructs, “hit it, and if the other person is running at you, run”.

At least a billion dollars is riding on this carefree and infectious embrace of cricket — once far more popular than baseball in the US — spreading across the world’s largest sports market this summer. In the past three weeks, stars including England’s Jason Roy, Australia’s Aaron Finch and Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan have been paid six-figure sums to descend on Cawley’s town of Morrisville, North Carolina, population 31,000, and on a suburb of Dallas, Texas, for the inaugural season of Major League Cricket (MLC). It is the first serious attempt in decades to revive the game in North America.

A six-team tournament modelled on the increasingly lucrative $15bn Indian Premier League (IPL), with the names of US cities and states superimposed on franchises forged in Mumbai and Delhi, the MLC is the brainchild of a group of investors largely of South Asian heritage, including Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. As several IPL copycats popped up around the globe, they spied an opportunity to bring professional cricket back to their adopted home and serve a cricket-starved constituency in the region, which the sport’s governing body claims contains an improbable 30mn devoted fans.

In Morrisville, realising that enthusiasm for baseball was waning, the council decided over a decade ago to commit local woodland, and several million dollars, to a cricket pitch serving the area’s Indian community. That population has grown in lockstep with the expansion of science and tech groups such as IBM and Lenovo in the nearby “Research Triangle”.

The gamble for the town has already paid off, with thousands of cricket fans flocking this week to watch the MLC’s group stage matches at Morrisville’s Church Street Park. Some delighted in witnessing the competition’s first-ever century, scored off 41 balls by South African Heinrich Klaasen. But days earlier, and 1,000 miles to the west, the tournament had got off to a more uncertain start in what even sun-baked Texans deemed a heatwave.

In a shadeless Dallas stadium at that point still known to Google Maps only as the home of the defunct Texas AirHogs baseball team, temperatures reached 42C as Trinidadian spin bowler Sunil Narine, who had just flown in to captain the visiting Los Angeles Knight Riders, won the coin toss to decide which team chooses to bat or bowl first.

“We are not sure what is going to happen,” said Narine, talking of the pitch, but seeming to speak for the organisers of this bold American experiment gathered on a small balcony opposite.

The game’s roots in the country, which date back to the 1750s, are far deeper than those of the three major modern US sports: baseball, basketball and American football. The first international match in history, between the US and Canada, was played in 1844, three blocks from where Manhattan’s Empire State Building now stands. Cricket scores graced the front page of major newspapers well into the 1860s.

The game faded into obscurity after the civil war, in which many of its American players died. The “time occupied in bringing a big cricket match to a conclusion”, as Jerome Flannery, compiler of The American Cricket Annual for 1881, put it, became a drawback in a country where the “leisure class . . . is comparatively so much smaller than in England”.

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Nonetheless, its enthusiasts never abandoned hope of a revival. Cricket was played continuously in hundreds of clubs dotted predominantly along the eastern seaboard throughout the 20th century, and followed by many more. A 1993 match at New York’s Columbia University between a West Indies team led by Brian Lara and “a best of the US” squad attracted 2,000 fans, largely of Caribbean heritage.

While its grassroots remained strong, the game suffered from decades of financial mismanagement, and a 2004 competition involving teams from eight US cities, Pro Cricket, lasted just one season. Still, the zeal of devotees from minority communities in the same period inspired Staten Island Cricket Club player and novelist Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 book Netherland, in which a Trinidadian of Indian descent is determined to “think fantastic” and build a cricket stadium in New York.

It’s America’s oldest, newest game, isn’t it? . . . Every city can get behind its team and it feels like you’re a part of something

A revolution in the game that would lead to the likes of Narine playing to packed stands from Lahore to London and Los Angeles was set in motion the same year, with the introduction of the IPL. Adopting the playbook perfected by American sports, it gathered the greatest exponents of the shortened T20 format of the game, in which each team faces 20 six-ball overs and matches last between three and four hours, rather than days — and paid them as much as $1.5mn to tour the country’s largest cities for six weeks, with a licence to entertain. Then it was only a matter of time, MLC’s backers say, until cricket made a US comeback.

“It’s America’s oldest, newest game, isn’t it?” says Liam Plunkett, a World Cup-winning English bowler who married an American and moved to the Philadelphia area to play and coach cricket a few years ago. With the T20 format, and the IPL’s instantly replicable brands, cricket “got a new lease of life”, he says. “Every city can get behind its team and it feels like you’re a part of something,” adds Plunkett, who is playing for the San Francisco Unicorns. “A franchise model definitely works, especially in America.”

Securing a spot in cricket’s ever more crowded calendar, which now includes T20 tournaments in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia, South Africa, England, the West Indies, the United Arab Emirates, Canada and Nepal — was a priority for MLC’s backers. The decision to play some of next year’s T20 World Cup in the US also added to the urgency, as did the potential inclusion of cricket in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, with America given the automatic right to field a team.

“We wanted to start this year, to put a stake in the ground,” says Sanjay Govil, chair of a large Washington DC-based tech company and the owner of MLC’s Washington Freedom franchise, whose stadium, in Virginia’s George Mason University, will not be ready until at least 2025. “But we are [in this] for the long haul; we fully expect this to lose money for a few years.”

The question of how much money would be lost hung in the stagnant air during MLC’s first game in Dallas, as the first verses of “The Star Spangled Banner” echoed off near-empty stands. Those in attendance could hardly bring themselves to crane their necks towards the blazing sun as a biplane dovetailed towards the pitch, leaving trails of red, white and blue across the sky.

Moments later, however, in a quietly stirring scene, the logic of a US league was driven home, as the Knight Riders’ Ali Khan marked his run-up, and bowled a full delivery to New Zealand batter Devon Conway. Now 32, Khan has one of the most unusual backstories in the game, having been uprooted from Pakistan aged 19 to move with his family to Dayton, Ohio. “I never brought my cricket gear, I never thought there would be cricket in America,” he recalls, only to be enlisted by his uncles to a flourishing local league that turned open spaces into makeshift cricket pitches using rolled-out AstroTurf. 

By the time Khan — now a Texas-based cricketer finally playing on home turf — had deceived New Zealand all-rounder Mitchell Santner into cutting a ball to a fielder lurking on the boundary at around 9pm in Dallas, he was being watched by approximately 7,000 fans. Their entry to the stadium had been delayed by ticketing problems, and a suite full of MLC investors breathed an almost audible sigh of relief as the spectators filtered in.

We are [in this] for the long haul; we fully expect this to lose money for a few years

Any question of who this league was for, at least for the foreseeable future, was answered by the din that soon accompanied every delivery, from a majority south Asian crowd. They had seamlessly transferred their existing allegiances to IPL teams — in this case mostly the Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders — to those franchises’ newly formed US offshoots. Whistles handed out to CSK supporters — known for their “whistle podu” culture in India — were now blown by TSK fans following a familiar, successfully globalised, script. Only the strains of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” playing over the stadium loudspeakers hinted at the historic location of this latest tour stop for cricket’s travelling circus.

The handful of cricket-curious locals who had made the trip — including a councilwoman and Dallas Cowboys fan who had “watched a couple of videos” to grasp the laws of the game, and a baseball enthusiast who said he had learnt about the sport by purchasing Cricket for Dummies — were given little assistance from the big screen or the announcers in understanding the nuances of the format. A trio of MLC games broadcast to a wider audience on CBS’s sports channel later in the tournament deployed terms such as “short extra cover” and “golden duck” with abandon.

Even with eye-wateringly expensive plans afoot to build six MLC-ready grounds in the next three years, few of the league’s key investors seem in a rush to persuade the wider American population of cricket’s charms. The “existing fan base is wealthy, successful and passionate about the sport”, says Vijay Srinivasan, a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur who launched America’s first dedicated cricket broadcaster, Willow TV, some 20 years ago, and co-founded MLC. “Major League Cricket can easily be the number two league in the world,” says Srinivasan, who even corralled some of the globe’s biggest stars to the New York Stock Exchange to generate publicity for the tournament. “That spot is up for grabs at the moment.”

Cricket’s existing American base is indeed formidable, at least financially. At a recent state dinner hosted by the White House, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi chatted about the game with a group of cricket-loving US-based executives who included the chief executives of Alphabet, Adobe, FedEx and Microsoft, some of whom have backed MLC.

The broader US fan base is large, and growing fast. “We’re selling more homes to Indian families and south Asian families than any other category right now,” says Ross Perot Jr, a Texas real estate mogul and former owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Perot, who invested in MLC alongside his business partner Anurag Jain, is convinced that backing the game, and a local team in America’s fastest growing metropolitan region, “was a very logical path for me to take” — even if he admits that estimates of the number of existing fans in the US have yet to be independently verified.

According to estimates from Saalt, a pressure group, there were roughly 5.4mn south Asians living in the US by 2017, up from 3.5mn accounted for in the 2010 census. Cricket participation is high: the Morrisville area boasts 60 teams and more than 3,000 active players.

“My calculations show around five to six [million US cricket fans], not 20 . . . but it’s not zero, you know” says Washington Freedom owner Govil. “The goal is not just [to appeal to] expats, but we need to have the grassroots . . . to have the sport there.”

Still, MLC is unique in its commitment to the local south Asian population, even at the expense of catering to the billions of cricket fans in other parts of the world. Unlike in previous experiments, the games are played during US evenings, in a timezone that diminishes the tournament’s potential TV exposure in India and the subcontinent.

“Now there is a sport to symbolise the south Asian community,” said Srinivasan, who watched Dallas’s Grand Prairie stadium turn into a celebration of south Asian culture; its hot-dog stands replaced with catering trays full of steaming biryani laid on by a rice brand. 

Such visibility has been a long time coming. While south Asians have flocked to America ever since the country expanded its immigration criteria in 1965, and led some of its largest companies, it was not until 2012 that Mindy Kaling became the first American woman of south Asian heritage to front a TV series. Only in 2017 did The Simpsons finally stop featuring the voice of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, a caricature of an Indian immigrant, with an accent described by Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu as a “white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father”.

Is there a sense of karma in migrant entrepreneurs reviving a sport that was driven to extinction in the US after being, in the assessment of sociologists Orlando Patterson and Jason Kaufman, “cordoned off as an elites-only pastime”?

“There is a lot of cosmic justice happening right now across the world,” is all the ever-polite Govil would allow himself to directly acknowledge. He cites “a British-Indian prime minister in England”, Rishi Sunak, as one example, but hopes the MLC will create a kind of “cricket diplomacy . . . not just between India and the US, but India and other countries”.

In the short term, the league might have an undiplomatic effect, if its success comes at the expense of other domestic leagues. Narine abandoned Surrey’s campaign in England’s T20 Blast to fly to Texas for the opening match, and soon after, Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell pulled out of English cricket’s already beleaguered Hundred tournament, warning that MLC was “going [to be] a lot more attractive to some overseas players” given its lighter and more compact schedule. Plunkett says many of his ex-teammates in England have already been in touch about securing a spot at a US franchise next year.

For Perot Jr, who was among the first to recruit Chinese players to the NBA basketball league, turning America into a force field for the world’s second most popular sport can only be a win-win. A country that prides itself on perennial reinvention has struggled to adapt its own summer pastime to modern tastes, with new rules this year designed to reduce baseball’s many longueurs. “The American business model of sports helped tighten up cricket . . . and make it a shorter, more impactful game,” says the billionaire. “I think T20 could help baseball speed up.”

First, however, Major League Cricket will have to succeed on its own terms. The finalists will battle it out for the league’s first trophy in Dallas on Sunday, amid yet another heatwave, and on a day on which TV schedules will be — as is now the norm — saturated with cricket, including the Ashes, and rival T20 tournaments in Canada and Sri Lanka.

Back in North Carolina, Mayor Cawley has not looked back. “It has put us on the map nationally and internationally,” he says of MLC coming to town. “Now people in India know about Morrisville.”

Joe Miller is the FT’s US legal correspondent

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