Cricket’s Rise to Prominence: The Olympics, India, the U.S., and Emerging Markets

Chuck Ramkissoon, the most interesting character in Joseph O’Neill’s award-winning novel Netherland, is a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer who has come to New York to make his fortune.

So far, so normal, but it is how he intends to make his mark that sets him apart from the thousands of other characters in stories about the American Dream because Ramkissoon’s route to riches is cricket.

In a memorable section of a remarkable book, Ramkissoon tells his friend, the story’s narrator, that he wants to build a cricket “arena” in Brooklyn.

Sensing his friend’s incredulity, our hero launches into a sales pitch that starts with the huge South Asian population in New York, moves into a business plan that involves 8,000 fans paying $50 (£39) each to watch 12 exhibition matches every summer, and ends with the kicker, “global TV rights… a game between India and Pakistan… a TV and internet viewership of 70 million in India alone… we’d breakeven in three, at most four years”.

This vision is meant to sound unrealistic, bordering on absurd. Cricket in New York? Attracting paying customers? With tens of millions watching on the other side of the world?

The book was written in 2008 but is set a few years earlier, more than two decades before 34,000 people watched India play Pakistan in the T20 World Cup in New York last month, a game that proved the old adage about truth being stranger than fiction.

The top hospitality tickets at the Nassau County Stadium had a face value of $10,000 (£7,800) and ordinary tickets were changing hands for more than $1,000 on the secondary market. The game garnered 256 million hours of viewing in India, an incredible figure for a contest that finished in the small hours of the morning there.

I was reminded of Ramkissoon last week when the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) revealed it has sent presentations to several owners of National Football League (NFL) teams to alert them to the opportunity of buying stakes in the eight teams that play in The Hundred, one of 17 different “franchise leagues” that have popped up in recent years.

Those pitch decks, which include a video explaining The Hundred’s rules, have also been sent to the owners of teams in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the daddy of those franchise leagues, and pretty much every serious multi-sport investor on the planet.

All have been invited to games in the month-long competition, which started on Tuesday, and various media outlets have reported that high-profile owners of British football teams, such as Wrexham’s Hollywood duo Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, are interested.

“Many of them know cricket very well, know The Hundred very well and may not feel the need to come,” explained the ECB’s director of business operations Vikram Banerjee during a conference call with reporters.

“Others, some of our American friends, for example, may like the idea of what we’ve got but don’t really know cricket at all, so they’ll come along and see what English cricket’s about.”

It is a lovely idea, expressed in quintessentially English fashion, but what the ECB is really selling is something far bigger than English cricket’s latest wheeze for remaining relevant — and solvent — in a fast-changing landscape. It is selling what Ramkissoon was selling: potential.

“Cricket is perhaps the only sport that has a combination of being the most popular game in a market as big as India but is also growing fast in so many new markets, such as the United States,” says Mike Fordham, a former ECB strategist who went on to become chief executive of the IPL’s Rajasthan Royals and now advises governing bodies from the Gulf to the Caribbean on running cricket leagues.

“And if you add the fact it has been added to the Olympic programme for 2028 in Los Angeles, and there is a good chance the 2036 Games will be in India, and look at how fast the women’s game is growing, the sport’s potential is obvious.”

So, after that long preamble, let us explore how cricket became just the ticket for every serious multi-sport investor, how American cricket fits in, and where the sport is heading.

But first, how big is the Indian cricket market?

According to the United Nations, India’s population, now north of 1.4 billion, overtook China’s about a year ago. This means one in six people alive are in India.

There are also millions of Indians living in other countries, including more than four-and-a-half million in the U.S. and more than a million in the UK.

India’s gross domestic product has been rising fast for the past 20 years and its economy is now either the third, fourth or fifth largest on the planet, depending on which metric you prefer. India still has hundreds of millions of very poor people, but the proportion in poverty is falling as its well-educated, urban middle class grows.

Cricket is India’s most popular sport and it is not even close.

It is the same story elsewhere in South Asia. Add the populations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to India’s and you clear the two-billion mark, which means one in four people live in countries where cricket is the number one sport, which does not include the sport’s fans in Australia, England, Jamaica, South Africa and everywhere else the game is loved.

Indian Premier League games are regularly played in front of packed stadiums (R Satish Babu/AFP via Getty Images)

“Obviously any conversation about cricket’s appeal has to start with India, and as India has got bigger and richer, so has cricket,” explains Gareth Balch, chief executive of global sports agency Two Circles.

“There are so many different numbers you can pluck out, from the rising value of IPL franchises to how many people consumed the broadcast of the India-Pakistan game in New York this summer.

“But a really good one is if you look at the total value of cricket’s media rights — it has risen fivefold over the past five years. That is remarkable growth and most of that is being driven by India and the rest of South Asia.”

As Balch notes, there are dozens of metrics you can choose to demonstrate the might of the Indian market, but let us pick out a few more to hammer this point home.

According to Oakwell Sports Advisory, a London-based firm, “India constitutes 90 per cent of the one billion cricket fans aged 16 to 69 globally” and “the Indian market is more than twice as large as the other 11 ICC (International Cricket Council) full member countries (the game’s most established nations) combined”.

When India played Pakistan at the 2019 Cricket World Cup in England, 800,000 fans applied for tickets and the game was watched by 229 million viewers on Star Sports, Disney’s Indian pay-TV network. India’s semi-final against New Zealand in that tournament drew an online audience of more than 25 million, a world record for concurrent live streams. That record has since been stretched to 35 million for another World Cup game between India and Pakistan last year.

When the IPL’s first eight franchises were sold in 2008, they went for more than $700m, almost double the reserve price. But when two expansion franchises were sold in 2021, they went for more than $1.2billion. Oakwell estimates the IPL’s total enterprise value to be over $15bn. Not bad for 10 teams that only play for two months a year.

These franchises are owned by the richest families and biggest conglomerates in India — the Ambani family, who recently threw a $600m wedding, co-own five-time IPL champions the Mumbai Indians — and the league officially became a “decacorn”, a start-up business that grows to a valuation beyond $10bn, in 2022.

Last year, the IPL sold its domestic media rights to Star Sports and Viacom18 in a five-year deal worth $6.2bn, three times the amount achieved in 2017. The deal means IPL games are second only to the NFL in terms of revenue per match, knocking Premier League fixtures into third place.

You get the picture.

OK, tell me more about The Hundred

Launched in 2021, it is a competition — with men’s and women’s versions — played between eight city-based franchises in England and Wales.

Its unique selling point is that it is even quicker than the Twenty20 (T20) format that has become the most popular version of the sport almost everywhere. The most notable exception to this is England, where Test cricket, which is played between international teams over five days, subsidises everything else, including the grassroots game.

Unfortunately, only cricket fans in Australia and India appear to like Test cricket as much — or in sufficient numbers — as English fans, which is why cricket chiefs have been looking for shorter versions of the game for more than 70 years.

The first was a format that could be played in a day. It is still catchily known as one-day cricket and involves each team getting 50 six-ball “overs” to score as many runs as possible. Every subsequent new format has just reduced the number of overs available, cutting the amount of time each game takes and encouraging players to score quickly.

Ironically, it was the ECB, in 2003, that came up with T20, which, you guessed it, is a 20-over-per-team game. For a time, its mix of big hits, quick wickets (or outs, in baseball parlance) and the excuse it provided for outdoor drinking on summer evenings reversed the gradual decline of the domestic game. But, like so many other English inventions, it was perfected elsewhere, particularly in India.

So, the ECB, knowing it has to diversify from Test cricket and ever conscious of the shadow thrown by football, had another go and came up with The Hundred, a format that is literally 100 balls per team, which knocks 40 balls and about half an hour off the duration of a typical T20 match.

The Hundred has proved popular with fans in the UK (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

This, it believed, would attract more families to the games and persuade free-to-air broadcasters, like the BBC, to find some space in their prime-time schedules. It also decided to give the women’s competition equal billing and prize money from the off, with most games staged as double-headers.

Guess what? It worked. Now in its fourth season, The Hundred has been a domestic hit. Thanks to relatively low ticket prices and a big marketing push, attendances have been younger and more diverse than typical cricket crowds. The audiences on the BBC and Sky, the competition’s main broadcast partner and biggest benefactor, have been solid and the highlight reel-friendly action has done well on social media.

Contrary to some of the gloomier predictions that surrounded its birth, The Hundred has not killed off the older T20 league still played by the 18 counties that constitute English cricket’s traditional professional pyramid or ruined the competitive balance of the wider domestic game, in all its formats, by giving the counties that host Hundred franchises a massive leg-up. Not yet, anyway.

You can probably sense there is a “but” coming, can’t you?

Yes, what is it? 

In short, The Hundred has not resonated beyond England’s shores.

This would not be such an existential threat if it were not for the fact that T20, powered by Indian money, has continued to spread its tentacles, grabbing chunks of the calendar — by far the most valuable real estate in any global sport — and increasing the cost of talent.

For the demographic reasons discussed above, the ECB never wanted to compete pound for rupee with the IPL when it came to attracting the best players, but it did think it could still beat nascent competitions in new territories such as Canada, the United Arab Emirates and U.S. for talent.

Seeing the top Australian players go from their Big Bash League, during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, to million-dollar spells in the IPL and then lucrative stints in America’s Major Cricket League — which has attracted significant Indian investment — was one thing, but when players start pulling out of agreements to play in The Hundred because they can earn the same money in less time in Canada, the need for action is clear.

There is also pressure building within the English game, too, as those 18 counties, most of whom are member-owned, are groaning under almost £200m of debt. The Hundred was initially sold to them as a means to reset the clock.

The ECB rejected an offer of £300m for 75 per cent of the entire competition from British private equity firm Bridgepoint Group two years ago. Given the rising prices of IPL franchises and the sums being spent on teams elsewhere, that was probably a good call.

But there is a right time to cash in on every asset and now looks like that time for The Hundred.

The ECB, however, is not seeing it quite that simply. For the governing body, this sales process, which is for 49 per cent stakes in each franchise, is as much about making sure The Hundred is one of the franchise leagues still standing when the inevitable consolidation comes, as it is about finding a quick fix for the counties’ overdrafts.

So, unlike the auctions that have driven franchise values up in India, the ECB has asked both financial services giant Deloitte and Raine, the American boutique bank which has become sport’s go-to auctioneer, to run what Banerjee described as a “very strange speed-dating” process that will hopefully see The Hundred’s host venues partner up, “in a weird kind of school disco moment”, with an international investor.

On the same conference call, the ECB’s CEO Richard Gould stressed that this is as much about “skill sets