Cricket is one of the world’s most widely attended, broadcast, streamed, and bet on sports, making it a multi-million-pound business. However, it is often overlooked in sports business discourse in comparison to the giant of football, and in markets like the US where it is still a fairly niche scene.
As SportBusiness Media’s Editor, Imran Yusuf, observed at the SPORTEL Monaco conference this week, cricket is the seventh most valuable sport in the world, ahead of Formula One, tennis and golf, but a glance at the average sports page in Western media at least suggests that its visibility is not as extensive as these scenes.
Cricket has an undeniably varied geographical breadth. Fans come from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Caribbean, but there is one country in particular that has contributed the most to its rising value – this of course being India.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) has changed the game for cricket. Founded in 2007 and consisting of 10 teams, it is the 13th most valuable sports league in the world, the sixth most attended in the world and its 2023 final was the most streamed live event on the internet.
“The IPL has consistently solved what the fundamentals of a sports business should be,” Gaurav Mehta, Co-Founder of Quidich Innovation Labs, a sports broadcast and filming company based in Mumbai, said at SPORTEL Monaco.
“It has made commercial value for all stakeholders, [has] big businesses around it, and continues to do so.”
Something the IPL has done well is take into account the entertainment value, adopting the more fast-paced T20 code of cricket into a format featuring 10 city-based teams to develop fierce local fandoms.
Though the league has also of course benefited greatly from India’s love for the game of cricket – the country is the first ranked in both T20 and One Day International (ODI) cricket for a reason – its grandeur and watchability have undoubtedly helped catapult it to international success.
“What it does for the fans is bring competitive cricket consistently,” Mehta added. “The way the league is structured, the auction system, the salary cap, the purse, it allows for suspense. You can’t predict who is going to win, they all have enough firepower to compete.
“That suspense brings the fans closer to it, and the demand for that kind of cricket, there is a lot of room for the supply to increase from what it is right now.”
The IPL has emerged not just as the top cricket league in the Indian subcontinent but the top league globally, with talent from across the world moving to India to compete in the widely viewed, high-paying league.
This does not seem to concern the cricket authorities of other countries, at least that impression was given at SPORTEL. Kate Ingber, Executive General Manager of Legal and Business Affairs at Cricket Australia, asserted on the stage that the governing body sees the Indian league as posing ‘very good opportunities for our players’ and that ‘we support them playing in the IPL’.
However, on a wider scale, cricket has not gained any new stronghold territories, for the most part. The UK, Oceania, West Indies, parts of Africa and South Asia continue to demonstrate the most appetite for the sport – but are new markets on the horizon?
From England to India to the US
Cricket’s history is one of global growth, having emerged in Southeast England in the 1700s before being exported to Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Oceania, largely via the influence of the British Empire.
Finding new territories has been on the agenda of the sport’s governors a lot lately. The decision to hold the 2024 T20 World Cup in the US and West Indies, combining a new target market with a traditional stronghold, was a notable part of this effort.
This tournament saw the US compete in the World Cup for the first time, by virtue of being a host country. Four months after the tournament concluded, cricket stakeholders seem confident that the sport can continue gaining ground in the US.
It’s not like something like this hasn’t been achieved before. Some sports that are considered ‘non-traditional’ for American audiences, as Nic Goard, Head of Sport and Content Partnerships at FOX Sports Australia put it, have been finding a place in the country.
Major League Soccer (MLS) has been growing in popularity steadily, to the point where it is considered by some to be the fifth major US league after the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL.
Meanwhile, Formula One has challenged the dominance of NASCAR in American motorsports, buoyed by the popularity of the ‘Drive to Survive’ docuseries.
“Is it going to be as big as the NFL? No, but it is growing in the US,” Goard summarised his view on where cricket’s stateside journey is heading.
For growth to continue, cricket needs to lean on its assets. One of these is data, something which cricket has in abundance with stats available around innings, runs, the number of fours and sixes scored, highest scores, centuries, half centuries, run rates and batting averages, to name a few.
This data can be used to support storytelling and develop content – perhaps with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), another big talking point on the stages and show floors at SPORTEL this year – but also to support betting lines.
The betting industry has exploded in the US, with companies like FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM courting tens of millions of customers across the nation. Working with these bookmakers, and the data suppliers in between, could play a role in cricket’s stateside ambitions.
“Every league and every broadcaster is trying to tell a story in their own way,” Mehta emphasised. “The story is about suspense and unscripted content taking place on the ground, taking that back to screens is where the technology will evolve. Whether it’s on the broadcast side, the data side, that’s about transferring that to television.”
Cricket’s international assets
Another notable asset is cricket’s roster of international tournaments. This includes the two World Cups, the ODI and T20 versions, but also bilateral tournaments, like the Ashes – a historic fixture.
There is nothing like a global phenomenon, invoking feelings of national pride, to drive engagement with a sport, whether niche or not. In England, for example, the number of people participating in cricket in the year of the 2019 ICC World Cup, an ODI tournament, was 292,000 according to Statista.
Though the pandemic subsequently got in the way, in 2022 this figure stood at 353,000 and in 2024 at 340,000. The fact England hosted and won the 2019 tournament is no coincidence.
Though football and cricket are difficult to compare, the FIFA World Cup continues to generate massive fandom despite the popularity of the Premier League and Champions League, among other domestic tournaments. Cricket organisers will likely hope for the same with their World Cups.
FOX’s Goard noted the continuing popularity of bilateral tournaments among Australian audiences. This is of course driven by the Ashes against England, but he added that the outlet ‘would love to see all the bilaterals do really well within the cricket ecosystem’. Perhaps bilaterals with cricket’s target markets are the key to unlocking more potential.
“It’s the unpredictability of the winners and losers that makes it interesting,” said Ingber, discussing what bilaterals and other internationals mean for the fans.
The main challenge cricket may have in this regard, however, is the format of the sport itself. Being divided across different formats – first-class, ODIs, T20, and other forms of limited overs cricket like 100 ball – can prove an obstacle to gaining new fans.
Though it may require some major changes to the sport’s structure and calendar, some form of consolidation among the different styles of cricket may be needed for the sport to reach even more global audiences, and subsequently generate more commercial opportunities.
“I feel like consolidation is going to be the theme over the next few years in cricket as it scales globally,” Mehta concluded. “I completely agree on the fact that cricket is going to command the value it does. That’s probably going to grow, and I think the ICC has a big part to play with the World Cup.”
