Major League Cricket – A Sales and Marketing Plan/Prospectus

1. Executive Summary

• With baseball rapidly losing ground in popularity to soccer, the prospects for success of a franchise-based cricket tournament are highly uncertain.

• Major League Cricket (MLC), owned by American Cricket Enterprises (ACE), and sanctioned by USA Cricket, will launch in 2023 with six teams.

• Cricket matches will be of the “T20” variety, i.e., cricket’s most popular shortest format; runtime is similar to MLB baseball at approximately three hours.

• Target markets will include, particularly at first, cricket’s traditional international fanbase translated into the American market: primarily South Asian, Caribbean, British, South African, and Australasian immigrants and expats.

• However, MLC’s ultimate target market is the broader American market, which is how ACE won its bid to run the tournament, i.e., by committing $1 billion to grow the game in the US.

• Likely limited to a single stadium in its inaugural season, MLC’s marketing efforts will necessarily be primarily targeted at maximizing its online viewership through Willow TV, the leading broadcaster/streamer of cricket in North America; Willow TV’s only direct competitor is, on a very limited basis, ESPN+/Watch ESPN, which carries a limited number of international, primarily Caribbean matches per year.

• Overall, due to a mix of already locked-in sponsorship commitments, with Toyota and Willow TV the headliners, as-of-yet limited physical infrastructure, and a readymade target demographic, a surprising aspect of the MLC marketing story is how little is left to be decided; this is why this marketing “plan” is far more a prospectus. Rather, it is the professionalism of its first season’s execution, and the entertainment value of the first season’s matches, that will likely make or break MLC.

2. Situational Analysis

a. Market Summary/Recent history – events, venues, target demographics, soft launch, sponsors and broadcast partners

Owned by American Cricket Enterprises (ACE), MLC aims to launch in 2023. The inaugural season will have six teams prospectively based in large, diverse US cities: New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and/or Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The only city with a team confirmed thus far—just a year out from launch—is Dallas, in great part because MLC “recently received approval to redevelop AirHogs Stadium, a minor league baseball venue” (Thorpe, 2020, para. 8) in Grand Prairie, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas. For perspective, at the time of its acquisition in 2020, AirHogs Stadium seated “5,443 spectators and [had] 13 suites, but developers…[had] been tasked with turning the venue into an 8,000-seater cricket stadium” (para. 7). More recently, in the last week, an announcement was made that Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s sports investment firm, Knight Riders Group, had partnered with MLC to spend $30 million to “construct a brand-new 10,000-capacity cricket venue” (Penna, 2022a, para. 4; Carp, 2020) in the greater Los Angeles area, to be part of the Great Park sports complex, a “1300-acre site of a former Marine Corps Air Station” (para. 7) that “features superior infrastructure capable of hosting large crowds for revenue-generating events” (para. 6). Note, however, that the Grand Park cricket venue is not slated to be completed by 2023, instead aiming for completion in 2024, to host the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup, co-hosted by the US and the Caribbean cricket federation known as the West Indies (para. 3; Gollapudi, 2021).

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