After many U.S. sports fans got their first taste of elite cricket during this summer’s ICC Men’s T20 World Cup hosted partially in Florida, New York, and Texas, the country’s burgeoning professional competition is making noticeable strides in its second season.
Major League Cricket will finish its 21-match schedule this week before a four-team playoff crowns a new champion. While the league has six teams from coast to coast, all matches have been played at two cricket-specific venues in Texas and North Carolina. Still, attendance is tracking to potentially surpass the 70,000 fans who showed up for the inaugural season in 2023.
MLC’s media rights are held by a niche cricket-focused channel called Willow by Cricbuzz. But the broadcaster struck deals with mainstream regional sports networks in each team’s market in an effort to attract more fans.
- Dallas: Bally Sports Southwest
- Los Angeles: Bally Sports SoCal
- Washington, D.C.: Monumental Sports Network
- San Francisco: NBC Sports Bay Area
- Seattle: Root Sports
- New York: YES Network
Willow took a similar approach during the T20 World Cup to get more exposure.
Money Game
Teams in MLC operate under a $1.15 million salary cap. While that’s well under the roughly $12 million that franchises can spend annually in the world’s richest cricket competition, the Indian Premier League, it’s not far off from other global leagues like Cricket Australia ($2 million) and The Hundred ($1.3 million) in the U.K.
“The money is good. But also the product’s good,” says Liam Plunkett (above, far right), a bowler for the San Francisco Unicorns who was a member of the England team that won the 2019 Cricket World Cup. “I think if the product wasn’t rolled out and the standard wasn’t good, people wouldn’t be that interested in coming across.”
Plunkett has remained impressed with the quality of play two seasons in. “I think there were a lot of teething problems leading up to it, but when the competition started, it felt like you could be playing anywhere in the world,” he says.
Big Ambitions
Before this season, San Francisco made a splash when it signed Australia national team captain Pat Cummins to a four-year contract. Have those moves been difficult to make? “Surprisingly not,” Anand Rajaraman, a co-owner of the Unicorns, tells Front Office Sports. “I think everybody in the cricket world is excited about the possibility of the U.S. market.”
Plunkett echoes that sentiment. “There’s definitely opportunities,” he says of being in the U.S. “Are you looking to play some good cricket? But also, are you looking to do some business deals and build yourself even further as a brand?”
Moving forward, Rajaraman says the next major step for MLC will be building stadiums in every market. The league’s schedule is growing to 34 games in 2025, and plans to expand to 10 franchises are in the works.
