Microsoft Chairman Satya Nadella , Adobe Chairman Shantanu Narayen and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma are padding up for the second season of Major League Cricket (MLC), but they won’t be sweating it out in the dugouts. Rather, they are busy expanding the sport beyond a relatively obscure corner on a foreign field where cricket is rapidly ascending the popularity ladder as Silicon Valley draws top South Asian technology talent—and, in the bargain, die-hard cricket fans that bleed blue.

MLC has about 20 investors, largely of Indian origin . These include Rocketship Venture Capital cofounders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan. Several former and current executives at Google, Dropbox and WhatsApp are also among those associated with the megabucks T20 league in the US, where cricket is still the fifth largest team sport despite more than a century of relative oblivion.

As India is the nerve centre of modern cricket, its backers at home are also invested in the sport across continents. Of the six MLC teams, four are owned by those that also own clubs in the Indian Premier League (IPL). They are Chennai Super Kings (Texas Super Kings), GMR Sports (which owns Seattle Orcas along with Nadella), Kolkata Knight Riders (Los Angeles Knight Riders), and Reliance Industries-owned Mumbai Indians (MI New York). The other two teams are San Francisco Unicorns and Washington Freedom. IPL, the sport’s richest league by far, is now valued at about $15 billion, having begun in 2008 at a valuation just north of a billion dollars, as per reports by Brand Finance and American investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

The idea behind MLC is to turn cricket into a mainstream sport in the US, where baseball and American football are the main team sports.

“We felt there was an opportunity to develop the second most popular sport in the world (cricket) in the largest sports market in the world (US)…. MLC and its franchises are investing in building new, worldclass stadia infrastructure alongside the league, which will create an important physical footprint to evangelise the sport,” says Satyan Gajwani, vice-chairman, Times Internet. Gajwani is one of the four cofounders of American Cricket Enterprises, which promotes MLC. (Disclosure: Times Internet is a subsidiary of Bennett, Coleman & Company Ltd, which publishes The Economic Times.)

MLC’s first season was held in July last year at the Grand Prairie Stadium near Dallas, Texas, and on the Church Street Park ground in Morrisville in North Carolina, generating $2.8 million in ticket sales and attracting more than 70,000 spectators. About 30% of the spectators had flown into Dallas just for the tournament.

HITTING A SIX

It is a good time to grow cricket’s popularity in America, says a global spokesperson of Mumbai Indians. “Each cricket market has an opportunity, and our approach for the US is catered to strategise toward the fans and brands there, focused now on the cricket-loving audience,” says Mumbai Indians’ global spokesperson. “The objective is building a cricket ecosystem.”

Mumbai Indians, owned by industrialist Mukesh Ambani, has also invested in WPL (Women’s Premier League), SA20 in South Africa and ILT20 in the UAE.

A cricket aficionado, Nadella co-owns the Seattle Orcas. He led a total investment of $120 million in two tranches—$44 million in seed investment and an additional $76 million —in the league. The funds will finance the construction of cricket-specific stadia and training centres. On being asked about promoting his passion for cricket in America, and whether it will take roots in his adopted country, Nadella told ET in interview earlier this month: “Cricket was originally a big sport in the US, if history is right. And I hope it comes back.”

Nadella played the game while he studied at the Hyderabad Public School. Seattle, his current home, already hosts three local cricket leagues with more than 3,500 members and is the feeder for the nascent American cricket system.

“The Indian-origin population (alone) in America is approximately 5 million, which is significantly high, and the per capita income is also pretty high. They are passionate about cricket…. So, an economic power with good passion is an opportunity. And if you get to go mainstream, the opportunity gets bigger.… MLC is a new league and hence it’s a startup like IPL was around 2009-10,” says Harinarayan, who, along with his Rocketship VC partner Rajaraman, is the co-owner of San Francisco Unicorns.

The franchisee also counts entrepreneurs and venture capitalists such as Sanjay Govil, founder of Infinite Computer Solutions and CEO of Zyter, and Madrona Venture Group MD S Somasegar among its investors.

These investors are betting not only on the Indian American population but also on expats from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, the UK and the Caribbean. Their aim is to build a new fan base to reach critical mass through televised games, cricket-specific stadia and training centres.

THE BEDROCK

For cricket enthusiast Venu Palaparthi, MD, Patomak Global Partners, and co-chief operating officer, DASH Financial Technologies, MLC was a natural investment, having been involved in grassroots cricket development in the US since 2004. He has also founded and participated in youth cricket programmes since 2007, including the DreamCricket Academy, which co-owns the New Jersey Stallions franchise of the Minor Cricket League (MiLC).

MiLC—which has 26 franchise-based, privately owned teams—is a developmental league for the MLC. Just like minor leagues for baseball, or the county cricket system in the UK, it offers competitive opportunities to young players, who can then get picked up for major league teams. “The sport needed massive investment to build the infrastructure and to bring it to the mainstream population. For cricket, the inflection point was to come in 2018, when the USA Cricket board announced it was seeking a commercial partner,” says Palaparthi.

Delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, America’s first professional T20 league’s foundation was laid in 2021 with MiLC, and with MLC a year later, in 2022, to take the sport to the masses.

THE INVISIBLE (TECH) HAND

“Successful technology entrepreneurs have been able to dig into their pockets and write cheques in support of cricket. So, technology and social media are an invisible but strong force for the growth of cricket,” says Palaparthi.

As with any franchise-based sport, the implementation phase requires additional investments. Over $1 billion (approximately Rs 8,300 crore) was put in the first year by investors, with more than $100 million spent to build cricket infrastructure in multiple cities.

Most of MLC’s investors are cricket lovers. But an investment needs returns. Rocketship’s Harinarayan says: “Like any startup, we want to focus on the right metrics. We don’t want to focus on revenues on day one but on building the right product.”

Palaparthi thinks of it as a generational investment. “Bringing a new sport to the market is not easy. Early stage investment like MLC or grassroots cricket is a labour of love…we are in it for the long haul,” says Palaparthi. “Having said that, once cricket enters the national sporting consciousness, the cricket GDP will grow rapidly. Already, in its first year in 2023, MLC has seen sold-out stadiums and massive viewership. So, we are on the right track.”

The first season was a “big business positive”. “Now, we have to execute and build on the product the market is excited about. One good thing is top players want to play in the US as it is a desirable destination,” says Harinarayan, whose San Francisco Unicorns has partnered with Australia’s Cricket Victoria and onboarded Shane Watson as head coach.

While individual teams have their sponsorships, the league also has its own sponsorships shared by owners. For MLC, the big pillars of revenue will be ticketing, corporate sponsorships, media rights and concessions—food and merchandise.

CHARTING OWN COURSE

MLC will ride on the success of IPL, but needs to have its own identity. Harinarayan believes that although IPL has changed cricket as a sport, MLC needs a fresh strategy as the league is being hosted in a different country with different challenges.

For one, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has restricted the participation of Indian cricketers. This makes it harder for investors to popularise it in a country where cricket is beginning to reemerge. In the US, cricket was popular as a team sport between 1705 and World War I (1914-18).

The US made its T20 International debut in March 2019. This year, the US will co-host the World Cup T20 with the West Indies. The International Olympic Committee has announced that T20 cricket will be played at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Separately, the Times Group, through its North American cricket business Willow TV, is also the broadcast partner of MLC. Currently, the Times of India Group’s sport footprint is built around Cricbuzz and Willow TV. Cricbuzz is the leading global platform for cricket news, scores and alerts, in India. “In North America, Willow TV is the dominant distributor of cricket, and so, together, there is a powerful presence in that market,” says Gajwani.

‘A GENERATIONAL BET’

“One of the unique things about the US structure is that investors in MLC are also working to drive the growth of the sport overall, partnering with local academies, developing a minor league for emerging talent and working all the way from the grassroots up,” says Gajwani. “As the pool of local talent improves in the US, and the US National Team becomes more competitive, the overall interest in the sport will grow as well. This is a generational bet, driving interest in the sport at younger ages to develop a talent pool as they become adults.” He says the tactics needed to grow interest in a new sport are dynamic and changing.

“We see both technology and social media as core parts to that strategy. We have to grow interest in a game that is unfamiliar in the US market. To do that, we will have to find disruptive ways of engaging and exciting audiences. Fortunately, things that are path-breaking spread virally today thanks to social products, and that becomes an opportunity if we are creative in our marketing and distribution to bring cricket into the homes of more American audiences,” says Gajwani.

CATCH ’EM YOUNG

Palaparthi believes this is a long, hard slog and it will take a concerted effort. “It has to start with schools. There are already some successful school and college programmes, where cricket is still a club sport. An increasingly large number of colleges now are playing the sport,” he says. According to him, streaming has made cricket more accessible to lean-forward fans.

“In the US, there is a passion for cricket, but nothing exists that is catering to them. So, we are pouring water in a parched desert. That is the opportunity we see and is, therefore, a business case,” says Harinarayan.