MLC Teams and Owners: Inside Major League Cricket

Major League Cricket launched in 2023 with six teams, a converted minor league baseball park in Texas, and an ownership table that reads like a guest list from Mumbai and Menlo Park. That combination is the whole story. This is not a league that grew organically out of American clubs and worked its way up. It was capitalized from outside, built top-down, and pointed at a diaspora audience that was already watching cricket on its phones at six in the morning.

Understanding who owns what, and under which rules, explains more about the league than any season summary would. The structure is the strategy.

A league built as one company

Start with the piece that surprises people who know American sports. MLC is organized as a single entity. The league itself, operated by American Cricket Enterprises, holds the central commercial rights, and the six clubs are franchises within that company, each backed by its own investor group.

Major League Soccer used the same model in its early years for the same reason: it stops six separately capitalized clubs from bidding each other into insolvency before the product has an audience. Player contracts, central sponsorship and media rights sit with the league. Franchise investors buy into an operating share rather than an independent business they can run however they like.

The league is sanctioned by USA Cricket, the national governing body, and that sanction is what makes MLC matches count as recognized professional cricket rather than exhibition play. The relationship between the commercial operator and the governing body has been the single most consequential thread in the sport's American story, and it is unpacked in full in the guide to how cricket is governed in the United States. For a plain-language walkthrough of the competition itself, the sibling piece on Major League Cricket explained covers the format.

The six franchises at a glance

Franchise	Base	Principal owners	Cricket parentage
MI New York	New York metro	Indiawin Sports (Reliance)	Mumbai Indians
Texas Super Kings	Dallas-Fort Worth	Chennai Super Kings Cricket Ltd, Anurag Jain, Ross Perot Jr.	Chennai Super Kings
Los Angeles Knight Riders	Los Angeles	Knight Riders Group	Kolkata Knight Riders
Seattle Orcas	Seattle	GMR Group with Satya Nadella, S. Somasegar, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Samir Bodas, Ashok Krishnamurthi	GMR co-owns Delhi Capitals
San Francisco Unicorns	Bay Area	Anand Rajaraman, Venky Harinarayan	None
Washington Freedom	Washington DC area	Sanjay Govil	None

Four of the six carry an Indian Premier League lineage. Two do not. That split is not cosmetic, and it shapes how the teams recruit, brand and think about the long run.

The four teams with IPL parents

MI New York

Indiawin Sports, the Reliance subsidiary that owns Mumbai Indians, took the New York franchise. Mumbai Indians is the most systematically built multi-club operation in cricket, with sister teams across several leagues, and the New York club was folded into that structure from day one. The naming convention gives it away. It is MI New York rather than New York anything, which tells you the brand equity is meant to flow from the parent outward rather than being grown locally.

The advantage of that approach is a working scouting network, an established coaching philosophy and instant recognition among the millions of American households that already follow Mumbai Indians every spring. The cost is that a club named for a foreign parent has a harder time convincing a Long Island ten-year-old that it belongs to them.

Texas Super Kings

The Dallas-Fort Worth franchise pairs Chennai Super Kings Cricket Ltd with two local investors: Anurag Jain, a Dallas software entrepreneur, and Ross Perot Jr., the real estate developer and son of the presidential candidate. That local component matters more than it looks. Perot's involvement gave the venture credibility with municipal partners in a way an offshore investor group could not have managed alone, and the franchise plays in the league's flagship ground a short drive from downtown Dallas.

Chennai Super Kings brings the most durable fan culture in Indian franchise cricket, built around continuity and a yellow shirt that people wear years after the players they associate with it have retired.

Los Angeles Knight Riders

The Knight Riders Group, which operates Kolkata Knight Riders, holds the Los Angeles franchise. Knight Riders has been the most aggressive of the IPL groups about international expansion, with clubs carrying the same name in multiple leagues, and the multi-club model gives it something genuinely useful: a player pathway that can move a young cricketer between competitions in different hemispheres across a single calendar year.

Seattle Orcas

The Seattle club is the most interesting ownership table in the league because it mixes both models. GMR Group, the Indian infrastructure conglomerate that co-owns Delhi Capitals, sits alongside a group of Pacific Northwest technology figures including Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, S. Somasegar, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Samir Bodas and Ashok Krishnamurthi. The result is a franchise with cricket operating knowledge from India and deep local business roots in a metro area with one of the highest concentrations of South Asian software engineers anywhere in the country.

The two teams built on tech money

San Francisco Unicorns

Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, longtime business partners who sold companies to Amazon and Walmart and later ran a venture fund together, own the Bay Area franchise outright. No IPL parent, no borrowed crest. The name is a joke about the region's startup vocabulary and it lands, which is more than most expansion-team names manage.

Owning without a cricket parent means building a recruitment and coaching operation from scratch. It also means every decision is made with the American market as the primary consideration rather than as a secondary one, and the Unicorns have generally been the franchise most willing to experiment with how the sport is presented to people who did not grow up with it.

Washington Freedom

Sanjay Govil, founder of an information technology services company and an owner in cricket ventures elsewhere, holds the capital-region franchise. Freedom is the only name among the six that reaches for straightforward American iconography rather than a cricket reference or a tech in-joke, and the club has leaned into the Washington identity harder than most.

Why the money came from where it came from

The obvious answer is the audience. Several million people of South Asian origin live in the United States, concentrated in exactly the metro areas the six franchises occupy, and they were already a large and largely unmonetized cricket television market. A league that plays in the northern summer also fills a gap in the global calendar when most other domestic competitions are dark, which makes overseas players available.

There is a defensive motive too. The IPL groups that bought in were not only chasing a new revenue line; they were protecting the value of what they already own. Franchise cricket has been spreading into new territories for a decade, and an owner who sits out an expansion market watches rivals build brand recognition, scouting relationships and player contracts there instead. Buying a club in a league that might never work is cheap insurance against a league that does. Several of these groups now operate teams on four continents, and the shared back office across those clubs makes each additional franchise cost less than the last.

The less obvious answer is the Olympics. Cricket's return to the Games gives every stakeholder a fixed date to build toward and a reason for civic authorities to take the sport seriously, and the implications of that are laid out in the piece on cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The broader case for why capital has moved this direction at all is covered in why cricket is growing in America.

The grounds

Venue scarcity is the league's hardest constraint, and the ownership group knew it. American Cricket Enterprises announced a program of roughly $110 million across eight newly built or renovated cricket facilities, with west coast projects budgeted near $30 million each and capacity targets in the ten to twenty thousand range.

Ground	Location	Approximate capacity	Note
Grand Prairie Stadium	Grand Prairie, Texas	7,200, expandable	Converted minor league baseball park
Church Street Park	Morrisville, North Carolina	3,500	Town-owned, renovated for the league
Central Broward Park	Lauderhill, Florida	25,000 including berms	Long-standing international venue

Grand Prairie is the flagship and the most instructive case. It opened in 2008 as a minor league baseball park, home to the Texas AirHogs, and sat idle after the 2019 season. American Cricket Enterprises took a long-term lease in November 2020, broke ground in April 2022 and had the venue rededicated by the city in July 2023, in time for the league's first ball. The conversion reportedly ran past $20 million. A ballpark's geometry does not naturally suit a cricket oval, and the compromises made to fit one inside the other are visible from the stands.

Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina came the other way. It was already a cricket ground used for regional qualifying before the league's investment gave it permanent seating past 3,500, better parking, broadcast infrastructure and floodlit practice areas. It is small, municipal and unmistakably a park rather than a stadium, and a lot of people prefer it for exactly that reason. Both grounds, plus everywhere else worth traveling for, are described in detail in the guide to the best cricket grounds to visit and the wider survey of cricket grounds and stadiums.

The draft

The league allocates players through a draft rather than an auction, which is a deliberate divergence from the IPL model. An auction rewards the deepest pocket. A draft, in a single-entity league where the pockets belong to the same company anyway, distributes talent and controls cost.

MLC's founding draft ran in a serpentine format, sometimes called a snake: the pick order reverses each round, so the team choosing last in one round chooses first in the next. American fans will recognize it from fantasy leagues. The inaugural draft ran nine rounds, eight general and one reserved exclusively for players under 23, with a salary band attached to each round that stepped down from roughly $75,000 for a first-round selection to a few thousand at the bottom.

Mechanism	How it works
Selection format	Serpentine draft, pick order reverses each round
Rounds	Multiple general rounds plus a dedicated under-23 round
Salary structure	Fixed band per round, descending
Retentions	Teams protect a set number of players before the draft opens
Overseas signings	Handled separately from the domestic draft pool

Retentions sit ahead of the draft. Franchises protect a set number of players from the previous season before the pool opens, which preserves some continuity of identity in a league young enough that continuity is the scarcest thing it has. Overseas signings are handled outside the domestic draft entirely, on separate terms and against a separate portion of the team budget, so the two markets never directly compete for the same dollars.

The under-23 round is the piece worth watching. It is a compliance mechanism, not a courtesy. Left alone, every franchise would field the strongest available eleven and the strongest available eleven would be overwhelmingly foreign professionals, which would produce excellent cricket and develop nobody. A protected round forces roster space onto young domestic players.

Roster rules and the overseas question

Founding squad rules set a roster in the mid-to-high teens, with a cap of nine overseas players on the roster and six permitted in a starting eleven. The rest must be domestic. Those numbers have been adjusted since, and the direction of travel matters more than any single season's figure.

Six overseas players in a team of eleven is a high proportion by global standards. The International Cricket Council has pushed newer T20 leagues toward a cap of four, with exemptions granted to a few competitions, and the pressure on that number is the central tension in MLC's design.

Both sides of the argument are real. A league that fields four overseas players is a substantially weaker product in year one and struggles to sell tickets or rights. A league that fields six develops fewer local cricketers and risks becoming a well-paid off-season for professionals from elsewhere. The national side is where that trade-off eventually shows up, and the state of that team is covered in the guide to the United States national cricket team. If you want a sense of which imported names are worth the ticket, the best cricket players to watch for new fans is the place to start.

The tier below

Minor League Cricket began in 2021, two years ahead of the professional league, and it is the wider base of the pyramid. It has run with around 26 teams split across Atlantic and Pacific conferences, each divided further, playing a T20 season through the summer. Squads are drawn from local club cricketers, and for most of them it is the highest standard they will ever play.

Below that sit the club leagues, which are older than everything above them and largely volunteer-run. Weekend cricket in New Jersey, Northern California, Texas and Florida has existed for decades, played on matting and turf wickets on shared municipal fields. That layer produces most of the domestic player pool, and it did so long before anyone put a professional league on top of it.

What the league is trying to build

The stated goal is a permanent, self-sustaining professional competition with purpose-built grounds, an American-born player base and a place in the global T20 calendar alongside the Big Bash League and The Hundred. None of those things exists yet in full. The grounds are partly built, the player base is overwhelmingly first-generation immigrant, and the calendar slot is secure mainly because nobody else wants July.

Several intermediate markers are worth watching along the way. Whether any franchise gets a ground it owns rather than leases, since a lease is a tenancy and a deed is a commitment. Whether the under-23 slots produce cricketers who later hold a starting place on merit rather than by rule. Whether a second American metro area builds a venue without league money doing all the lifting. And whether the clubs develop supporter cultures that survive a bad year, which is the thing money cannot buy and the thing every successful league eventually depends on.

The honest measure of success is not attendance or a rights deal. It is whether a child who grows up in Morrisville or Grand Prairie plays cricket because a professional team plays there, and then makes a living from it. That takes fifteen years to answer.

The governance problem underneath

Any account of MLC that stops at ownership is incomplete, because the league's commercial operator and the sport's national governing body have been in open dispute. The International Cricket Council suspended USA Cricket's board in September 2025 over governance failures, and USA Cricket filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection days later amid disagreements with American Cricket Enterprises. A professional league whose sanctioning body is in bankruptcy is in an unusual position, and the resolution of that will shape the sport here more than any transfer or result.

If cricket itself is new to you, start with cricket explained for baseball fans and the rules explained for Americans, then work through the rest of the cricket in the USA hub. Practical viewing questions are answered in how to watch cricket, and when you want to test what stuck, the quiz is waiting.

Sources and method

Ownership, venue and structural detail in this article draws on published reporting from cricket news outlets, league and franchise announcements, municipal records covering the Grand Prairie and Morrisville facilities, and encyclopedic references for founding dates and capacities. Draft mechanics and roster limits reflect the league's published founding rules; those rules have been revised between seasons, so this article describes the framework rather than any single season's exact numbers. Competitive context on the IPL ownership groups is informed by CricketTaken's own IPL dataset, which covers every season of the competition. We have no affiliation with Major League Cricket, USA Cricket, the International Cricket Council or any franchise or venue named here.