Future Cricket Venues in the USA: What Is Coming

In the summer of 2024 the United States hosted matches of a men's World Cup at three grounds: a converted baseball park in Texas, a municipal stadium in Florida and a stadium in New York that did not exist eight months earlier and no longer existed eight months later. That is a fair summary of the country's cricket infrastructure at the point when the sport finally had national attention — two usable venues and a marquee.

Two years on the picture has changed more than most people following from outside would guess, and it has changed for a specific reason. Cricket is on the programme of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, which means a venue in southern California has to exist and be capable of holding an Olympic crowd by the summer of 2028. Deadlines like that move money. Everything on this page is either a consequence of that deadline or a consequence of the franchise league needing more than two homes.

What follows is the state of play: what is built, what is under construction, what has been upgraded, and which large American cricket populations still have nowhere proper to watch.

Pomona, and the first purpose-built stadium of the new era

The most significant new ground in the country is at the Fairplex in Pomona, in Los Angeles County, and it is a cricket stadium from the ground up rather than a conversion. The Knight Riders Group, which owns the Los Angeles franchise in the professional league, reached an agreement with the Los Angeles County Fair Association and announced the project in March 2026. Ground was broken on 26 April 2026 and the venue opened on 1 July 2026, with something in the region of two thousand people at the first match.

The reported cost is around twenty-one million dollars, and the design is deliberately staged. Initial capacity is about five thousand. The plan is to take it to roughly twelve thousand during 2027, and to fifteen thousand for 2028. Because the stands are modular, that growth does not require demolishing and rebuilding — it requires more of the same units, which is the whole point of choosing that construction method. The general engineering case for building this way is set out in the guide to modular cricket stadiums.

It also has a resident tenant from day one. The Los Angeles side hosted matches there in the 2026 franchise season, which matters more than it sounds: a stadium with a professional occupant has a maintenance budget and a reason to keep a square in good order between events.

The Olympic clock

Cricket returns to the Olympic programme at Los Angeles in 2028, for the first time since 1900. There will be Twenty20 tournaments for men and for women, each with a full set of medals, and the matches are scheduled across mid-to-late July 2028 at the Pomona fairgrounds, roughly fifty kilometres from central Los Angeles.

The Games requirement is what turned a franchise stadium into a national priority. An Olympic cricket venue has to satisfy broadcast standards, anti-doping and accreditation logistics, athlete access, and a crowd substantially larger than any American cricket ground has held on a permanent basis. Building to fifteen thousand in stages, with a professional team playing in it throughout, is a far safer route to that than commissioning a stadium that opens two months before the opening ceremony. The wider significance of the Games for the sport in the country is covered in the guide to cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Morrisville: a small ground, properly finished

Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina is the opposite kind of project — modest, municipal, and aimed at making an existing cricket ground fit for broadcast rather than at scale.

The town and the league agreed a public-private partnership to add more than two thousand permanent seats, taking the capacity past three and a half thousand, together with broadcast infrastructure, additional parking, and floodlit practice pitches and nets on both natural and artificial surfaces. That last item is the one practitioners care about. A ground with lit nets is a ground where a squad can train after work in the dark half of the year, which is the difference between a match venue and a facility.

Three and a half thousand seats will not host a World Cup fixture. It will host franchise cricket, national training camps and age-group tournaments without anyone having to lay a temporary stand, and the Research Triangle has the cricket-playing population to fill it.

Lauderhill: public money on an asset that already worked

Florida's contribution is a renovation rather than a build. Broward County began a renovation programme worth around eight and a half million dollars at Central Broward Park before the 2024 World Cup, part of a wider spend on the site reported at over eleven million, covering expanded seating, training facilities and a media centre.

The pay-off arrived quickly. The stadium hosted matches of the professional league for the first time in early July 2025, and the county has been explicit that the aim is to convert World Cup infrastructure into a recurring fixture list rather than let it sit. The ground's long history as the only ICC-certified international venue in the country for years is set out in the guide to cricket history in Lauderhill.

Oakland, and the venue you rent rather than own

The Oakland Coliseum is not a future venue in the construction sense. It is a future venue in the contractual sense, which may turn out to be the more important category.

After the Athletics left, the professional league took a block of fixtures there in 2025 and a longer block in 2026, using drop-in pitches lifted from the temporary World Cup ground on Long Island and trucked across the country. When the matches finish, the pitches come out and go into storage. The stadium reverts to being a stadium.

That arrangement lets a competition put cricket in a major metropolitan market without owning anything in it, and it scales to any large venue with a serviceable outfield. It also has an obvious weakness: a rented stadium can be lost at a landlord's convenience, and pitches that live in storage do not develop the character that a settled square acquires over a decade. The economics of American cricket turns on precisely this kind of trade.

The inventory, as it stands

It helps to see the whole set at once, because the national map is still small enough to fit in a table.

Ground	Where	Standing
Grand Prairie Stadium	Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas	Converted baseball park, permanent home of a franchise, expandable with temporary stands
Broward County Stadium, Central Broward Park	Lauderhill, Florida	County-owned, recently renovated, the largest crowd the country can seat once temporary stands go in
Church Street Park	Morrisville, North Carolina	Municipal cricket ground, mid-expansion, small but properly equipped
Knight Riders Cricket Ground	Pomona, California	Newest ground, purpose-built, staged growth towards Olympic capacity
Oakland Coliseum	Oakland, California	Rented for blocks of fixtures, pitches trucked in and removed afterwards

Five entries for a country of that size is the honest measure of where the sport is. Grand Prairie remains the most complete of them and its own build-out is not finished; the original redevelopment plan included practice nets and batting lanes alongside the stadium itself, and a ground with a resident squad training on site is worth more to American cricket than another few thousand seats would be.

What the table also shows is the concentration. Two of the five are in California, both arrived in the last two years, and both exist because of decisions taken in a Los Angeles Olympic bid and a franchise ownership group. Take those two out and the national inventory looks much as it did a decade ago.

The hole where New York should be

The largest gap in the national map is the most obvious one. The New York metropolitan area has, by a wide margin, the biggest concentration of cricketers in the country, a league structure going back generations, and no permanent stadium.

The 2024 World Cup made the problem visible. An original proposal to erect a temporary ground in the Bronx ran into local opposition and was dropped, and the tournament ended up at Eisenhower Park on Long Island in a stadium assembled for the purpose and taken apart afterwards. What happened to that structure, and the argument about whether any of it should have been kept, is examined in the Nassau County stadium legacy.

The blockers are not cricketing. Land in and around the city is expensive and contested, parkland is protected and politically sensitive, and a stadium proposal that puts floodlights and twenty thousand people next to a residential neighbourhood will attract organised objection whatever the sport. Until somebody solves that, New York cricket will keep producing players who have to travel to Texas or Florida to be watched.

New York is the largest example but not the only one. The second-tier competition has for years run fixtures across Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Virginia, Connecticut and Washington state, which is a reasonable proxy for where organised American cricket actually is. None of those states has a stadium-grade cricket ground. Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, northern New Jersey and the Seattle area all have long-established leagues, weekend fixture lists that fill their parks, and nothing a broadcaster could take a camera to. The current building programme is following franchise ownership and an Olympic deadline rather than following that map, which is a rational way to spend the money available and not the same thing as serving the existing playing population.

What makes a venue worth building

There is a consistent shape to the projects that have gone ahead, and it is worth naming because it is not the shape most fans expect.

Feature	Why it recurs
Capacity of five to fifteen thousand	Matches realistic American crowds; anything larger needs temporary seating anyway
Modular or expandable stands	Lets capacity follow demand rather than betting on it
A resident professional tenant	Provides the maintenance budget and the reason to keep a square
Broadcast infrastructure early	A ground nobody can televise cannot pay for itself
Lit practice facilities	Turns a match venue into a place where players actually develop
Public-private funding	Cities supply the land, cricket money supplies the fit-out

Nobody is building a sixty-thousand-seat cricket stadium in the United States, and nobody sensible is proposing one. The bet across all these projects is that a spread of mid-sized grounds in cities with existing cricket populations is more useful than one monument.

For what already exists rather than what is coming, see the survey of cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA and the shortlist of the best cricket grounds to visit. The one permanent conversion of a baseball park is described in the Grand Prairie Stadium guide, the franchise competition driving the demand in the guide to Major League Cricket, and the wider national picture on the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

Construction costs, capacities, groundbreaking and opening dates come from the announcements of the parties involved — the Knight Riders Group and the Los Angeles County Fair Association for Pomona, the Town of Morrisville and the league for Church Street Park, Broward County and the City of Lauderhill for the Florida renovation — together with ICC and LA28 material for the Olympic schedule and venue. Capacity figures for staged projects are the announced targets rather than measured seat counts, and the later stages remain plans. Where a figure has been reported in more than one form, the range is given rather than a single number. The concluding assessment of what these projects have in common is editorial, not a computed finding.