Can Satya Nadella sell cricket in America?

By Bobby Ghosh

When I first heard that a Texas billionaire was bankrolling a new cricket league in America, my first thought was, “Oh, no … I’m not falling for that one again.” Almost exactly 15 years ago, I wrote a story for Time Magazine about a wealth-management tycoon from Mexia, Texas, who had the same idea—and I, having grown up playing the sport in India, the country of my birth, fervently hoped he would establish it in the country of my choice.

Then Allen Stanford got convicted for fraud, and I assumed it would be another 110 years, the length of his initial jail sentence, before anybody took up that task again.

But now here’s Ross Perot Jr of Dallas stepping up to the crease. One of the country’s largest independent property developers, Perot is co-owner of Texas Super Kings, which will play Major League Cricket’s inaugural game against the Los Angeles Knight Riders, in a converted ballpark in Grand Prairie, Texas on July 13.

“It’s going to be explosive,” Perot, son of the two-time presidential candidate, tells me.

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And here I am, falling for it again. Only this time, my optimism about cricket’s prospects in America is not fired by Stanford’s wild-eyed enthusiasm; instead, it’s informed by the stone-cold logic behind the $120 million initial investment that Perot and other owners of the MLC’s six teams are placing into the sport.

They are making two bets. The first is that the Indian diaspora in America has reached the critical mass required to sustain a cricket league in this country. The second is that fans of the sport worldwide will watch televised games from the US.

The first bet is the surer of the two. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, reckons the Indian diaspora is the country’s second-largest after Mexicans, numbering north of 2.7 million, or nearly a million more than when Allen Stanford was breathing the free air. With a median household income of $150,000, Indians are also among the wealthiest immigrants. Although the largest concentrations are in the New York-New Jersey area and Silicon Valley, there’s a substantial community in Texas, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth cluster and around Houston.

It is a cliché, but nonetheless true, that Indians everywhere are obsessed with cricket. Their sheer numbers (remember, India is now the world’s most populous nation) make it the world’s second-most popular sport, after soccer. And where Indians go, cricket tends to follow: North Texas alone has three amateur leagues and over 300 teams.

And it’s not just Indians. There are cricket-loving diasporas, too, from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK, Australia and Caribbean nations. Add them up, and the potential American audience for MLC could top 10 million.

It’s the Indians who have the money, though — and not just to buy tickets or subscriptions to Willow, the pay-TV channel that has the North American rights to major tournaments. Most of the owners of the MLC teams and investors in the league are from the Indian diaspora. Perot says he was persuaded to take a piece of the Texas Super Kings by his business partner Anurag Jain, chairman of Access Healthcare.

Predictably, many of the other investors are from the tech industry, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. As icons of the Indian immigrant community, Nadella and Narayan will draw audiences to the games as much as the star power of the players.

But the league’s profitability will depend on its ability to capture a share of the global TV audience of more than a billion people, most of whom are in the Indian subcontinent. To that end, MLC has courted the Indian Premier League, the world’s most-watched cricket league. “That’s how we’re going to generate interest outside the US,” says Tom Dunmore, head of marketing for MLC.

Four of the six American teams are co-owned by top teams in the IPL and share their names. The Texas Super Kings, for instance, is partly owned by Chennai Super Kings, the reigning champions of the IPL. More important, these connections have allowed the MLC teams to borrow superstar players from their IPL partners. The opening game will feature a number of established stars, including India’s Ambati Rayudu, South African Faf du Plessis, Dwayne Bravo of the West Indies, England’s Jason Roy and Martin Guptill of New Zealand.

The quest for an international audience also explains why the MLC is being played in the middle of the summer in one of the hottest cities in the US: There’s a gap in the international cricketing calendar, so audiences in India might be more inclined to tune in.  

MLC is following the T20 format. A typical match lasts two and a half hours, roughly the duration of a Major League Baseball game. “The T20 package is the right one for this market,” says Bay Area venture capitalist Anand Rajaraman, co-owner of the San Francisco Unicorns. “It’s more athletic, there’s more excitement.”

But if the relative brevity of T20 puts it within the patience spectrum of American sports fans, the complexity of cricket’s rules makes it a hard sell for anyone outside the cricketing diasporas.  

Immigrants with a greater passion for the sport than myself have had more success in luring Americans into the cult of cricket. Others have had their interest piqued by the efforts of YouTube influencers like Jomboy. It is conceivable that the T20 World Cup next year, which will feature several matches in the US, will inspire yet more newbies to sample the sport.

The point, though, is that MLC’s chances of success are not predicated on winning converts. All it needs is for the Indian diaspora to keep growing, in numbers and wealth, and to get a piece of the worldwide TV audience.

The league also hopes to expand its footprint with purpose-built cricket stadiums. This season’s games will all be played in Grand Prairie and Morrisville, North Carolina, but the eventual goal is for the six franchises to all have their own stadiums.

Rajaraman, who’s building one at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose, reckons it will be five years before he sees a return on his investment. “As start-up guys, we enjoy buildings and scaling up,” he says. “And we know there will be a j-curve.”

Can cricket go beyond a profitable niche sport in the US? I put it to you that in a country where pickleball can become an all-consuming passion of millions, anything is possible.