Cricket may not be as popular a sport in the United States as it is elsewhere in the world, but some high-profile CEOs and investors are trying to change that.
As the men’s T20 Cricket World Cup, co-hosted by the United States for the first time, gets underway, investors have poured nearly $1 billion into their American ambitions.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is among the executives investing in the new US professional league Major League Cricket. Other Cricket investors include Iconic Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and executives from Google.
“What excites me is whether cricket can become a mainstream sport in the U.S.,” said Soma Somasegar, venture capitalist and managing director at Madrona.
Somasegar and Nadella are key owners of Seattle’s cricket team, the Orcas. They are also investors throughout the league.
“Satya [Nadella] and I’ve been talking about bringing cricket to America for many years,” Somasegar told CNBC.
Nadella is such a die-hard cricket fan that Microsoft has a cricket field on its campus in Bellevue, Washington.
Monank Patel of the USA national cricket team celebrates his half-century (50 runs) during the ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup match between USA and Pakistan at the Grand Prairie Cricket Stadium in Dallas on June 6, 2024.
Matt Roberts | ICC | Getty Images
“Many of us immigrants grew up playing this sport. We studied and watched cricket – over and over again,” said Somasegar.
In total, nearly $850 million is currently being invested into building a viable cricket league in the United States, people familiar with the funding said. The people asked not to be identified because the funding information is private.
There are currently six professional teams in Major League Cricket, Each team is expected to spend between about $75 million and $100 million in the coming years. These include the costs of putting together a team, hiring the right talent and building stadiums to host live cricket matches.
Adding further excitement is the T20 World Cup, which takes place throughout June at three locations in the USA and several in the West Indies.
On Thursday, the US team beat Pakistan with a stunning blow in a match near Dallas. Fans are now counting down to the much-awaited India vs Pakistan match on Sunday at the newly constructed Nassau County Stadium in New York.
According to the New York Times, the last time India and Pakistan met, more than 300 million people in India tuned in to watch the game.
Ticket seller StubHub said the average ticket price for Sunday’s rivalry game is $1,300. The average price for the other 54 games in the tournament is $120, the company said.
Venture capitalist Anurag Jain, co-owner of the San Francisco Unicorns Major League Cricket team, said the U.S. national team is made up mostly of players from the league.
“The aim is to make cricket a mainstream sport,” said Satyan Gajwani, vice-chairman of Times Internet, the digital arm of the Times of India. He runs Willow TV, which has the exclusive streaming rights for cricket in North America, including the T20 World Cup.
Gajwani is also one of the investors in the US league. He said his group was targeting the incredibly loyal fans from South Asia who live in the United States
“There are essentially five million really die-hard cricket fans,” Gajwani told CNBC, referring to the South Asian diaspora in the United States
He added that expatriates from Britain and Australia living in the US were also big consumers of cricket.
South Asians, on average, have the highest gross income of any ethnic group in the U.S., according to a study by Indiaspora, a nonprofit community of Indian leaders around the world.
“This leaves a lot of discretionary income that can be spent on sports and entertainment,” said MR Rangaswami, founder and chairman of Indiaspora.
Rangaswami, who said he would be at Sunday’s game, acknowledged that the U.S. sports scene was hard to crack because Americans are passionate about basketball and football. He said a potential entry point could be baseball fans, which have some similarity to cricket.
—CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.
Don’t miss these exclusives from CNBC PRO
Source link
2024-06-08 04:49:37
www.cnbc.com
