In October 2023, the International Olympic Committee voted in Mumbai to add cricket to the Los Angeles 2028 Games — the sport's first Olympic appearance since Paris in 1900, a gap of 128 years [source: IOC, 2023]. The format will be Twenty20, the shortest and fastest version of the game, with six men's and six women's teams competing over a fortnight in July 2028 [source: ICC, 2025]. It was a small line item in a long IOC session, but for cricket it marked something larger: a sport that is already enormous is now deliberately trying to become global.
That phrasing sounds strange for a game with an estimated 2.5 billion followers, commonly ranked the second-most-popular sport on earth after football [source: World Atlas, 2024]. But the number hides a paradox. Cricket's vast audience is concentrated overwhelmingly in South Asia — India above all, along with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka — plus a scattering of Commonwealth nations like England, Australia, and South Africa. The sport is huge and narrow at the same time. What is happening now, through the Olympics, a wave of franchise leagues, and a hard push into the United States, is an attempt to break out of that base. This is not the story of a niche sport chasing relevance; it is the story of a giant trying to spread out.
A giant with a narrow base
The scale of cricket's core is real, and it is worth stating precisely rather than rounding up. The "2.5 billion fans" figure is an estimate that circulates widely in sports-business coverage; it is not an audited census, and it should be read as an order-of-magnitude claim rather than a measured headcount [source: World Atlas, 2024]. What is not in dispute is the geographic skew. The commercial and emotional center of gravity sits in India, whose market underwrites most of the sport's economics.
That concentration is the strategic problem the sport's administrators are trying to solve. A fan base clustered in one region is lucrative but fragile: it limits sponsorship reach, caps global broadcast value outside the subcontinent, and leaves cricket absent from the world's largest advertising market, the United States. The felt sense inside cricket — that the game is simultaneously the biggest thing in one part of the world and nearly invisible in another — is exactly what the expansion strategy is built to address. The three levers being pulled are an Olympic platform, franchise T20 leagues, and the American market. They are related, and the connective tissue running through all of them is money generated by one competition in particular.
The Olympic bet
The Los Angeles bid is the most symbolically loaded of the three levers. Cricket at LA28 will be played as T20, the format compact enough to fit an Olympic schedule, with the tournament running from 12 to 29 July 2028 at a temporary venue at the Fairgrounds in Pomona, roughly 50 kilometres from downtown Los Angeles [source: ICC, 2025] [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2025]. Six teams per gender will contest each event, with an athlete quota of 90 per tournament across 15-player squads — 180 cricketers in total, split evenly between the men's and women's competitions [source: ICC, 2025].
The reasoning behind the Olympic push is explicit and, on its own terms, reasonable: an Olympic berth exposes cricket to national broadcasters and audiences in countries where it is otherwise absent, and it can unlock government sports funding tied to Olympic participation. Those are the stated rationales; whether the Games actually convert non-cricket nations into cricket markets is a claim about the future, not a measured result, and it should be held as such. What can be said with confidence is that the format choice — men's and women's tournaments running simultaneously — treats the women's game as a full and equal part of the Olympic proposition rather than an afterthought [source: ICC, 2025]. For a sport seeking to present itself as modern and global, that parity is part of the pitch.
The IPL engine
If the Olympics is the shop window, the Indian Premier League is the engine room. The IPL, a franchise T20 competition launched in 2008, has become one of the most valuable properties in world sport, and its economics set the terms for everything else. When the league's media rights for the 2023–27 cycle were auctioned in June 2022, they sold for roughly $6.2 billion — a figure confirmed at auction, not an analyst's guess, and close to three times the previous cycle's value [source: Forbes, 2022] [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2022]. The rights were split, with Disney Star taking television and Viacom18 taking digital streaming; notably, the digital package out-priced the TV package for the first time [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2022].
One number from that auction became a favourite talking point: on a per-match basis, the IPL's media rights were valued second only to America's National Football League, ahead of the English Premier League and major US leagues [source: Forbes, 2022]. That comparison is a reported figure from the 2022 auction, and it is worth flagging what it does and does not mean — it measures the price broadcasters paid per game, not attendance, global reach, or profit. Separately, valuation firms have put the IPL's enterprise value at around $18.5 billion in 2025; that figure is an estimate produced by a valuation house, not an audited or transacted price, and should be treated as directional rather than precise [source: Gulf News, 2025].
Viewership claims call for the same discipline. The IPL's 2024 season was reported by its streaming platform to have reached 620 million viewers with tens of billions of video views [source: Business Standard, 2024]. Those are broadcaster-reported metrics, defined and counted by the rights holder rather than independently audited, and they are best read as evidence of enormous scale rather than exact figures. The honest summary is that the IPL is spectacularly wealthy and widely watched — and that the wealth is what makes the rest of the global project financially possible.
Franchise cricket goes worldwide
The clearest sign that the IPL's model is being exported is the spread of franchise T20 leagues built in its image, frequently funded by the very same owners. South Africa's SA20, launched in January 2023, is the starkest example: all six of its teams are owned by IPL franchise owners, and the league turned profitable in its second season [source: Forbes India]. The United Arab Emirates' ILT20 followed a similar template, backed by a mix of Indian conglomerates and high-profile investors. The pattern is consistent enough to note as an association: where IPL capital goes, new leagues appear. That is a description of a trend, not a claim that IPL money single-handedly causes each league's success — local boards, broadcasters, and players all matter — but the common thread of ownership is unmistakable.
The most ambitious offshoot is in the United States. Major League Cricket, launched in 2023, has drawn investment from American Cricket Enterprises that has surpassed $150 million, and four of its teams are controlled by IPL owners, with the Seattle franchise co-owned by Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2025]. MLC plans to expand from six teams to eight by 2027 and is exploring a move into Canada [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2025]. A telling detail: New Zealand Cricket became the first national governing body to invest directly in an overseas T20 league by taking a stake in a future MLC team — a sign that even traditional cricket boards now see their financial future partly in the franchise circuit abroad [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2025].
America, the hard target
The United States is treated inside cricket as the market that would change everything — the largest media economy in the world, home to a substantial South Asian diaspora, and almost entirely uncovered by the sport. The single biggest step toward it so far was the 2024 ICC Men's T20 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States and the West Indies from 1 to 29 June, the first major ICC event ever staged partly on American soil, with matches in Florida, Texas, and a purpose-built modular stadium in Nassau County, New York [source: USA Cricket, 2024].
The tournament produced exactly the kind of moment expansion strategists dream about. On 6 June in Dallas, the United States tied Pakistan — one of the sport's traditional powers — and won the ensuing Super Over, then advanced to the Super 8 stage, a genuine upset that drew mainstream American attention cricket rarely receives [source: ESPNcricinfo, 2024] [source: CNBC, 2024]. India went on to win the title, beating South Africa by seven runs in Barbados on 29 June [source: USA Cricket, 2024]. Whether that fortnight translates into a durable American fan base is, again, a claim about the future rather than a measured outcome; a single upset and a well-run tournament are a start, not a market. But paired with MLC and the LA28 Olympics, the World Cup was a deliberate down payment on the American project.
The women's game as a commercial frontier
The commercial rise of women's cricket is a distinct thread within this expansion, and it too runs through Indian money. When the BCCI auctioned the five franchises of the Women's Premier League in early 2023, they sold collectively for about $572 million, with the Adani Group paying roughly $158 million for the Ahmedabad team — the highest single bid [source: Sportico, 2023]. The league's media rights went to Viacom18 for around $116.7 million for the 2023–27 window, a valuation for a brand-new women's competition that would have been hard to imagine a decade earlier [source: BCCI, 2023].
These are transacted figures — franchise sale prices and a media-rights deal, not estimates — which makes them a firmer data point than viewership claims. What they show is that investors are willing to price the women's game as a real asset rather than a charitable add-on, and that the same franchise architecture driving the men's global push is being extended to the women's game. The LA28 decision to run men's and women's Olympic tournaments side by side fits the same pattern.
The strain: Tests, the calendar, and players
None of this comes without cost, and the honest version of cricket's global story includes the tension at its center. The money and attention flowing to franchise T20 sit uneasily alongside Test cricket, the traditional five-day format that many players and administrators still regard as the game's pinnacle. As new leagues multiply — the IPL, Australia's Big Bash, the SA20, the ILT20, England's Hundred, MLC, and more — the global calendar has become congested to the point that players increasingly cannot play everything [source: ESPNcricinfo].
The consequence is a set of hard choices. Some players now prioritise lucrative white-ball franchise contracts over national Test duty; others retire early from one format to manage their workload; and senior figures have openly criticised the cramped international schedule and called for more player input into how the calendar is built [source: ESPNcricinfo]. This is a genuine, unresolved tension rather than a solved problem: the same T20 wealth that finances cricket's expansion also pulls players and attention away from the longer formats that anchored the sport's history. Framing this as simple progress would be dishonest. The more accurate reading is that cricket is trading some of its traditional shape for reach and revenue, and the sport has not yet settled how much of that trade it wants to make.
What to watch
A few things will show whether cricket's global bet pays off. First, the LA28 Olympics themselves: watch whether the exposure produces measurable new participation or broadcast interest in non-traditional countries, or whether it remains a showcase enjoyed mostly by existing fans. Second, the American market beyond a single World Cup upset — MLC's expansion to eight teams, its attendance and broadcast numbers, and whether IPL and now national-board investment keeps flowing in. Third, the balance between formats: whether cricket's authorities protect a meaningful place for Test cricket, or whether the franchise calendar keeps expanding until the longer game is squeezed to the margins.
The clear-eyed summary is neither triumphant nor gloomy. Cricket is not a small sport going global from scratch; it is a giant, financed largely by one country's league, deliberately trying to widen a base that has always been narrow. The confirmed facts — the Olympic berth, the $6.2 billion IPL rights deal, the franchise leagues multiplying across continents, the women's game being priced as a real asset — are genuinely striking. The open questions — whether the Olympics converts new nations, whether America sticks, and what happens to Test cricket — are exactly the ones that will decide whether this is a lasting expansion or an expensive experiment. Watch the participation and format numbers, not just the deal values.