There is a new sport climbing up the popularity ranks in the United States, and it’s one that much of the world is already obsessed with: Cricket.
The bat-and-ball game is generally considered the world’s second-most popular sport. It is now seeing an unparalleled spike in American fans, reported The Week.
America’s obsession with cricket was cemented by the US team’s June 6 win over Test-playing Pakistan at the ongoing T20 Cricket World Cup.
“The win was the biggest in US cricket history and is already being regarded as one of the biggest upsets in the sport,” said CNN.
But even before that stunning victory, which ensured their entry into the Super Eight stage of the tournament, cricket was gaining fans in the US.
According to CBS News, there are at least 400 nationwide cricket leagues. This equates to about 200,000 players, and this figure is expected to continue rising in the coming years.
Also notable are the number of fans attending cricket matches.
The June 9 Pakistan-India match and the June 12 US-India match, which both took place in Nassau County, New York, drew more than 34,000 spectators, according to the International Cricket Council.
More than 400 million people globally watched the Pakistan-India game, compared to the 125 million that watched this year’s Super Bowl.
The names of American cricket stars are “obscure in the eyes of most Americans,” and yet the “potential for cricket’s growth in America has never looked stronger,” said The Atlantic.
This is partially because of a demographic shift over the past century. While baseball was cemented as America’s national pastime by the early 20th century, in the 1960s “increased immigration from the West Indies reinvigorated cricket, in the New York region especially, and in the decades that followed, immigration from South Asia also dramatically increased,” The Atlantic said.
Today, there are “more than five million Americans of South Asian descent, the majority being Indian American,” said The Atlantic, though many of them “have almost nowhere local to play or watch the game.” This has created pent-up demand and a new market for cricket players.
Beyond the average fan of the game, there are also a “coterie of big-money backers including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Access Healthcare chairman Anurag Jain” who are looking to increase cricket’s profile, said Vanity Fair.
All three have invested in Major League Cricket, the US men’s pro league that launched with six teams last year.
The game will also be featured at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “It’s truly a watershed moment for cricket in this country,” cricket writer Smit Patel told CBS.
“There’s a growing embracing of what is a global sport,” University of Colorado professor emeritus Jay Coakley told the Christian Science Monitor. “But I don’t see cricket just entering the US like a waterfall. I see it more like a stream.”
For Major League Cricket organizers, the timing couldn’t be better.On the heels of a T20 men’s cricket World Cup in which the American co-hosts scored a sig
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