GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas — Grand Prairie has transformed into “Cricket City, USA” this week as a new professional sports league launches with some of the biggest names in the sport, even if those players are little known in the U.S.
After spending $20 million renovating the former independent league baseball AirHogs Stadium and recruiting big-name executives to invest in the startup league, bowlers and batsmen take the pitch Thursday for the first match in an 18-day test of whether the fervor for the sport translates across the globe from India and South Africa to the United States.
Six teams, each attached to a city and featuring some of the world’s best cricketers, will compete in an abbreviated form of cricket that decides a victor in about three hours. Top international names like England’s Jason Roy and Sri Lanka’s Wanindu Hasaranga have joined the league. There are 19 matches scheduled over 18 days, including round-robin play and four championship playoff games. Most are played at Grand Prairie Stadium with some in Morrisville, N.C.
Now, with domestic interest in the sport on the rise, USA Cricket, Major League Cricket co-founder Vijay Srinivasan and investors like Anurag Jain believe it’s time for the U.S. to have its own premier cricket product. All are based in Grand Prairie.
“July 13, 2023, is going to be somewhat historic,” said Marty Wieder, Grand Prairie director of economic development. “We can become Cricket City, USA.”
‘This has got legs’
Major League Cricket faces an uphill battle with few venues in the U.S. and low participation at the youth and amateur levels, where interest in the sport is fostered.
The sport’s U.S. governing body, USA Cricket, also faces financial difficulties and has yet to name a CEO after multiple leadership departures. It’s put the organization in continued conflict with cricket’s global leaders.
Sports leagues in general are hard to start, especially in a country with no recent history with cricket.
The sport has been played for centuries in England, and international events have boosted its commercial potential in Commonwealth countries. But the U.S. has rarely been good enough to qualify for international events like the World Cup that would have put the sport on Americans’ minds, as men’s and women’s World Cups did for soccer.
And pro cricket doesn’t have school sports participation to build on like other upstart leagues such as Major League Soccer and the Premier Lacrosse League.
Professional cricket supporters aren’t expecting to challenge the nation’s more established sports overnight.
“Major League Cricket has been very cautious and very conservative,” Wieder said. “We’ll see in this first year, economically, what kind of impact it’ll have. We know it’ll be better than what we had when we had independent baseball.”
Major League Cricket does have some things in its favor. What Americans would think of as professional cricket, usually called franchised cricket, is relatively new globally. The Indian Premier League, now one of the biggest sports leagues in the world, was started in 2008. Popular leagues in other countries began even later.
“When I first came in and started talking about … cricket, I think [my previous city manager] really shook his head and wondered about me,” Wieder said. “But I think he even realizes, yeah, this has got legs. This is going to be big for Grand Prairie.”
Minor League Cricket, a developmental league, has already played two seasons, and the U.S. has already been chosen to co-host the 2024 T20 World Cup with the West Indies. Some of those matches are expected to be played in the newly converted stadium.
‘A way of life’
The Indian Premier League is by far the most popular venue for cricket, earning nearly $17 million per match, the third-most of any sports league in the world. Its opening match this season garnered 130 million viewers, more than the 2023 Super Bowl.
The sport’s popularity is mostly concentrated in Commonwealth countries made up of the United Kingdom and its former colonies. It’s the dominant sport in nations such as India, Pakistan and Australia and an estimated billion people watched India and Pakistan play in the 2015 World Cup.
“Cricket is not just a sport,” the investor Jain said. “Cricket is a way of life.”
Cricket has been played in the U.S. as far back as the Revolutionary War. But in the late 1800s, it lost the battle to baseball as America’s favorite bat-and-ball sport.
A wave of South Asian immigrants in the 1990s brought their appetite for cricket with them to the United States.
Major League Cricket co-founders Sameer Mehta and Srinivasan capitalized on that and created one of the world’s first subscription sports live-streaming sites: Willow.tv in 2002. In 2010, the service expanded to a satellite TV station, and then to cable in 2012, using a subscription model like HBO or NFL Network.
In 2016, they sold the station to the Times Group, an Indian media conglomerate.
“We were reaching a few million households,” Srinivasan said. “And we had realized that in broadcasting cricket to an audience here in the U.S., for so many years, one of our biggest frustrations was that we had never actually broadcast any matches that happened in the U.S.”
Meanwhile, after tumult regarding its predecessor as the U.S.’s sanctioning cricket body, USA Cricket solicited proposals to bring cricket to the states.
Lovkesh Kalia, a Dallas-area hospitality businessman and former board member of USA Cricket’s predecessor, contacted Grand Prairie’s economic officials. Kalia said Grand Prairie could become the hub for cricket in the U.S.
After identifying Grand Prairie as home base, Srinivasan and Mehta, under the banner of American Cricket Enterprises, sent their proposal to USA Cricket. The group would create Major League Cricket, but not without the proper support: funding cricket infrastructure across the country, a development league that came to be Minor League Cricket, and cultivating interest among Americans.
According to Srinivasan, 20 groups sent proposals, and six were chosen as finalists. What placed the Texas group and their proposal for Major League Cricket above the rest was the duo’s experience with Willow.
“We had a lot of data relative to cricket live audiences, what are the strongest markets in the U.S., and so on,” Srinivasan said.
The proposal was attractive to investors, too. American Cricket Enterprises has raised $44 million, including backing from Jain, Ross Perot Jr. and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who all joined as team owners or co-owners. Jain and Perot are co-owners of the Texas Super Kings, Dallas-Fort Worth’s hometown team.
In 2021, after being granted USA Cricket’s exclusive sanction, American Cricket Enterprises partnered with Grand Prairie to redevelop Grand Prairie Stadium into a cricket field.
‘Perfect collision’
Previous attempts at professional cricket such as Pro Cricket and the American Premier League used minor league baseball stadiums without making them true cricket grounds.
Few cities in the U.S. have stadiums equipped to handle cricket, with its unique round field.
Then came Grand Prairie. The Texas AirHogs, which played in the non-MLB-associated American Association, struggled to fill its stadium’s 7,000 seats, with average attendance hovering around 1,000. The team officially folded in 2020, leaving the stadium vacant.
After securing the use of the venue, the Major League Cricket group set out to turn Grand Prairie Stadium into the U.S.’s premier cricket ground.
“It’s a lot of stress if you’re me,” said Will Swann, vice president of corporate development and infrastructure and the league’s first hire tasked to redevelop the former minor league baseball field.
The cricket league started work on the stadium retrofit in July 2022, tearing down stands to accommodate the regulation cricket field and then adding more seating to bring it back to its 7,000-person capacity.
All the prior “vertical architecture” is there — suites, concessions, team areas and the sports bar in the outfield — which was the value of renovating an existing stadium in the first place, Swann said.
Major League Cricket spent $20 million on the project. The final product is a uniquely American cricket experience that blends some of the conventions of baseball stadiums with a much different sport.
“It’s almost the perfect collision of cricket and baseball,” said Swann, who was born and raised a cricket fan and player in Australia.
Most of the seats are concentrated in the pavilion area. The field is closer to the stands than it would be had it not been a converted ballpark.
“If you’ve ever been to a minor league baseball game, you get to be really up close and personal,” Swann said. “And imagine that kind of feeling except you have the best players in the world walking out to play.”
For the players, too, it’ll be “pretty phenomenal,” he said. Major League Cricket has 26 to 30 cameras capturing each broadcast at the stadium, giving the broadcasts unique views that haven’t been available to the sport before.
Single-game tickets in Grand Prairie start at $24.
The other venue hosting games this summer outside Raleigh, N.C., seats just over 3,000. Grand Prairie Stadium will be the league’s primary stadium until all six teams can build venues. The league is also building a training field nearby in North Texas that’s expected to be ready before next year’s T20 World Cup.
Grassroots movement
The Dallas area was attractive as the seat for American cricket for a variety of reasons. Dallas has one of the country’s largest airports, DFW International Airport, and year-round warm weather. Jain also cited Dallas’ love of sports as a reason to invest time and money into bringing a cricket league here, especially with Dallas’ large investment community.
“We just get stuff done in Dallas,” Jain said.
The league has offered discounted tickets to local amateur players and worked with youth academies on special nights for them. Some local players were drafted in the upstart league to form a relationship with the community such as University of Texas at Dallas junior and accounting major Ali Sheikh.
Each Major League Cricket team is also partnered with established teams overseas. The Texas Super Kings are paired and named after the Chennai Super Kings in southern India, “the Manchester United of cricket,” as Jain put it. League executives are also counting on fans in India to tune in as they do with the Caribbean Premier League and Australia’s Big Bash League.
Srinivasan also knew from running Willow that there was a large base of people in Dallas who wanted to watch cricket. Dallas-Fort Worth has one of the largest South Asian communities in the country, with more than 212,000 Asian Indians alone in North Texas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s the fourth largest of any metropolitan area in the country. Many are cricket fans and play on Dallas’ numerous club and rec teams. There are also youth academies across the city.
Shreyas Viswanathan, a college freshman at Purdue University and Dallas resident, played in those academies and said he knew many people who moved to Dallas just to pursue cricket. Now, he runs The Cricket Chronicle blog and says he is one of thousands of local cricketers who are excited about Major League Cricket and ready to support it.
Sherwin Fernandes, another local cricketer and fan, said there has been a buzz in the community for the start of the season because of the chance to finally see some of the best cricketers live.
“The who’s who of cricket is in the MLC,” Fernandes said.
