Economics of American Cricket: Who Pays for It
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in the United States9 min read
In October 2025 the governing body of American cricket filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the same period, the professional league it had licensed was operating six franchises backed by some of the wealthiest technology investors in the country, playing in a stadium that had cost more than twenty million dollars to convert, on a broadcast deal spanning four continents.
Both of those facts are true simultaneously, and holding them together is the only way to understand the money in American cricket. The sport here has attracted a great deal of private capital and almost no self-generated revenue. The capital is betting on a market that does not yet exist; the institutions that are supposed to develop that market are chronically underfunded and, in the case of the national body, insolvent.
This page follows the money rather than the cricket: where it came from, what it bought, what it pays players, and what would have to change for the sport to fund itself.
The structural problem, stated plainly
Cricket in the United States has no domestic revenue base of the kind that sustains the sport elsewhere. There is no national broadcaster paying for it because it is popular; there is no membership income from historic clubs owning valuable grounds; there are no gate receipts at scale outside a handful of fixtures; and there is no government sport funding of the sort that supports Olympic programmes in other countries.
What there is instead is a large, affluent, culturally committed audience that already consumes cricket from overseas — mostly South Asian and Caribbean American communities, described in the guide to diaspora communities and cricket. The commercial thesis for American cricket is that this audience can be monetised at home rather than merely subscribing to matches played eight thousand miles away. Every investment described below rests on that thesis.
Where the money came from
The pivotal transaction happened in May 2019, when USA Cricket accepted a bid from a new entity called American Cricket Enterprises for the commercial rights to develop professional cricket in the country. The bid was presented at the time as a billion-dollar investment programme covering a league, infrastructure and support for the national teams — a figure describing intent over many years rather than cash on the table.
The people behind ACE matter more than the headline number. They included Satyan Gajwani and Vineet Jain of the Times Group in India, and Sameer Mehta and Vijay Srinivasan, the founders of Willow TV, the channel that already held US rights to overseas cricket. That combination is telling: Indian media capital plus the company that already owned the American cricket audience.
The money that was actually raised came later and is well documented. In May 2022, Major League Cricket announced it had secured 120 million dollars across Series A and A1 rounds. The named investors included Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen, the entrepreneur Anand Rajaraman, and the Texas developer Ross Perot Jr. This is venture capital raised on a growth story, not sports revenue.
What the league pays
Major League Cricket launched in 2023 with six city franchises — Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Texas and Washington — run as a single-entity structure with individual investor groups behind each team. The ownership map and its heavy overlap with IPL franchise owners is covered in the guide to MLC teams and owners, and the league's competitive design in Major League Cricket explained.
The player economics at launch were unusually transparent, because the inaugural draft published its structure. Each franchise went into the 2023 draft with a purse of over a million dollars, split between an allocation for overseas players and a smaller one for US-based players, with the overseas share the larger of the two. Individual payments were banded by draft round, from a maximum in the region of 75,000 dollars for a first-round pick down to a few thousand dollars at the bottom of the draft.
Two things follow from those numbers. First, a top MLC contract is a meaningful sum for a domestic American cricketer but is not remotely comparable to an IPL deal, which is why the overseas players the league attracts are mostly not first-choice internationals. Second, the bottom of the draft pays less than a part-time job, so most American professionals in the league are not full-time cricketers. What that means for a player trying to make a career is set out in the guide to the domestic player pathway.
Grounds are the capital cost
The most expensive item in American cricket is not players. It is places to play.
Grand Prairie Stadium in Texas, the league's principal venue, was built in 2008 as a ballpark for a minor-league baseball team. Redevelopment for cricket began in April 2022, the ground reopened in July 2023, and the project reportedly cost in excess of twenty million dollars, funded by ACE. Its standard capacity is around 7,200, expandable to about 15,000 with temporary seating — which was done for the 2024 T20 World Cup.
That is the pattern: convert existing American sports infrastructure rather than build from scratch. In March 2022 ACE stated a plan to invest around 110 million dollars across eight new or renovated venues. The Knight Riders Cricket Ground at Pomona in California, which opened in July 2026, cost about 21 million dollars.
| Item | Reported cost |
|---|---|
| Grand Prairie Stadium conversion | Over $20 million |
| Knight Riders Cricket Ground, Pomona | About $21 million |
| ACE venue programme, eight sites (2022 plan) | About $110 million |
| MLC Series A and A1 fundraising (2022) | $120 million |
Read that table together and the venue programme absorbs roughly the whole of the capital raised. Which is the point: in a country with no existing cricket grounds, the ground is the business. A wider survey of what exists is in the guide to cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA.
Eisenhower Park, and what a temporary stadium proved
The most instructive piece of cricket economics in American history lasted eleven days.
For the 2024 men's T20 World Cup, a 34,000-seat modular stadium was assembled on parkland at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York. The design was unveiled in mid-January 2024, construction began the same week, the venue opened on 1 June and closed on 12 June. It was the first temporary venue ever used at an ICC World Cup. Afterwards the stands and modular infrastructure were dismantled; the outfield was retained, with the drop-in pitch replaced by artificial turf to reduce maintenance.
The India-Pakistan match there drew 34,028 spectators, the largest crowd for a cricket match in United States history.
Both halves of that story are economically significant. The demand is real and can fill a stadium the size of a mid-market American arena crowd, given the right fixture. And the sensible way to meet that demand was to rent a stadium for a fortnight rather than build one, because there is no year-round programme that would fill a permanent 34,000-seat cricket ground anywhere in the country. The tournament's wider effects are examined in the guide to the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA.
Broadcast, and who is actually paying
MLC's domestic coverage runs primarily through Willow TV, with regional sub-licensing to sports networks including YES Network, Monumental Sports Network and NBC Sports Bay Area. Internationally, rights have gone to Sky Sports in the UK and Ireland, ARY in Pakistan, and Prime Video in Australia and New Zealand.
That distribution list is worth reading carefully, because it says something about where the revenue expectation sits. A cricket league in America selling rights into Britain, Pakistan and Australasia is not primarily monetising American viewers. It is monetising the global cricket audience's appetite for more Twenty20 content, using American cities as a brand. The domestic viewing options, including what a US-based fan actually has to subscribe to, are covered in the guide to how to watch cricket in the USA.
The governing body's balance sheet
While the league raised nine figures, the national body ran out of money.
By October 2022 USA Cricket had accumulated around 650,000 dollars of debt and had failed to file annual financial reports. Spending had run above budget and sponsorship revenue had come in far below projection. The organisation's difficulties compounded: disputes with ACE over the commercial agreement in August and September 2025, the ICC suspending the board on 23 September 2025 citing failures of governance and reputational damage, and a Chapter 11 filing on 1 October 2025. ACE subsequently pursued legal action over wrongful termination of the agreement.
The full institutional history, including the expulsion of the previous body in 2017, is in the guide to USA cricket governance. The economic point is narrower and it is this: the entity responsible for grassroots development, age-group cricket and Olympic preparation was the one with no money, while the entity with money was responsible for a six-team professional league. Those are not the same job, and the second does not automatically fund the first.
The semi-professional middle
Between the funded league and the unfunded governing body sits Minor League Cricket, which began in 2021 with a large field of privately owned franchises across the country — twenty-six teams organised into conferences and divisions.
Its economics are modest and honest about it. The inaugural season carried a prize pool of 250,000 dollars, rising to 350,000 the following year. Divided among a couple of dozen teams across a full season, that is not a living. Players are compensated rather than salaried, and most hold full-time jobs. The structure and the reality of playing in it are described in the Minor League Cricket guide.
The franchise model matters here. Private owners paying to run a MiLC team are buying an option: a foothold in a market they expect to grow, and a plausible route into a top-tier franchise if the league expands. MLC has stated an intention to grow from six teams to ten, with New Zealand Cricket involved in forming a new franchise. Expansion is where the MiLC owners' investment gets valued.
What would have to be true
The current model is not self-sustaining and nobody involved claims it is. Three things would have to change for that to shift.
Ticket and sponsorship revenue would have to grow beyond diaspora demand for marquee fixtures, which means either an American-born audience or a much longer season. Player development would have to be funded by somebody, because a league that imports its best players does not create the domestic stars that make a domestic audience care — the pathway problem, in economic form. And the governing body would have to be solvent enough to run the parts of the sport that generate no revenue at all: schools, age-group cricket, umpiring and coaching.
The 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles is the deadline everyone is working towards, because Olympic inclusion changes the funding logic entirely by opening routes to sport-federation money that has nothing to do with ticket sales. That prospect is examined in the guide to cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and the wider state of the game is at the cricket in the USA hub.
Sources and method
Financial figures here come from public announcements by American Cricket Enterprises and Major League Cricket, published reporting of the 2023 draft structure, venue development statements, and court and ICC records of the 2025 disputes and suspension. Costs described as "reported" are exactly that: privately funded venue conversions are not audited public projects, and the figures in circulation are the ones the parties released.
Player payment bands are stated as published for the inaugural draft and should not be read as current contract values, which change season to season and are not fully disclosed. The 34,028 attendance at Eisenhower Park is the figure released for that match.
The final section is analysis rather than reporting. It sets out the conditions under which the current funding model would become self-sustaining; it is not a forecast, and no claim is made here about whether the businesses described will succeed.