A sell-out crowd at the Grand Prairie Stadium in Texas last week witnessed the opening match of cricket’s latest T20 league, the Major League Cricket (MLC) that is taking place in the United States.
So far, the 200-mark has been crossed twice, a side has been bowled out for 50 and the temperature has crossed the 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) barrier amid a heatwave that hit the US state.
The MLC, founded in 2019 but launched in 2023, kicked off 16 years after the inaugural T20 World Cup and 15 years after the Indian Premier League (IPL), which is now the world’s biggest domestic T20 cricket league.
As the MLC moves from Texas to North Carolina, MLC’s co-founder Sameer Mehta spoke to Al Jazeera on how the league plans to stand out among the crowd, break into the sport-heavy US market and if cricket can win American hearts.
Al Jazeera: MLC is not the first T20 league and definitely won’t be the last. How do you plan on making it stand out in the crowd?
Sameer Mehta: From my time running Willow TV [an online subscription-based viewing service], we realised that the US is a very, very viable market for cricket. There’s a strong audience here, especially the eight million expats. Now we have immense hunger from probably the best investors in the world, we’re building our own stadiums, we’ll be playing in the summer when there’s not much cricket going on and we have the second largest salary cap in the world alongside a few other leagues.
What we really have are the 400 million people in the US that are going to discover the sport at some point. They will fall in love with the sport. For every fan we have, if we can get one more mainstream fan to be a fan of cricket, we will be the second or third biggest market in the world. That’s the ambition.
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