USA wakes up to cricket’s marketing potential with India playing West Indies

The baseball diamond has traditionally dominated the USA’s sporting scenes and yet, it seems like a change is in the offing, one that promises great marketing potential and a potentially exotic location for international cricket to be hosted at. Cricket in the United States for all its failures and a rather consistent decline in the ranks of associate cricket owing to a paucity of funds seems to have finally gotten a gist of the huge marketing potential of the game of cricket which has traditionally been viewed more as a sport serving to unify the commonwealth world.

The Americans have failed to correct their perception of cricket, perhaps being overly infatuated with baseball and soccer, they still view cricket as the 5-day long game with tea breaks in between, something exactly opposite to what a new sporting market must provide in this fast paced world with ever diminishing attention spans, no one has the patience rather stamina to stay focused on the proceedings of a 5-day game, let alone a continent starved of exposure to international cricket and the various formats its played in.

Fortunately what works in favor of the international cricketing community eyeing a potentially untapped market for cricket in the United States is the demographics of this vast country which boasts of a humungous number of immigrants from South Asian countries amongst others. For these South Asian immigrants, some of them might be correctly referred to as expats, watching a bunch of retired former greats of the game of cricket, now pot –bellied and visibly unfit take the field for the fast-paced version of the game namely the T20 format was an opportunity to retrace their roots to the land where the euphoria around cricket tops it all.

The Central Broward Regional Park in Florida is one of America’s premier cricketing facilities which stood the risk of being taken over for footballing purposes due to lack of fixtures for the designated sport. The event organization rules in the USA don’t make it any easier and the cricketing pitch was steadily making way for the football ground, perhaps even a baseball mound. Fortunately, the India vs West Indies clash will hope to put the impressive venue in the limelight once again and Lauderhill will follow the path of impressive cricketing facilities in neutral venues. Sharjah led the way from the 90’s onwards, Malaysia and Singapore haven’t been far behind but the South Asian diaspora here in the USA might just tilt the ICC’s preference in favor of Lauderhill.

Fortunately, the India vs West Indies clash will hope to put the impressive venue in the limelight once again and Lauderhill will follow the path of impressive cricketing facilities in neutral venues. Sharjah led the way from the 90’s onwards, Malaysia and Singapore haven’t been far behind but the South Asian diaspora here in the USA might just tilt the ICC’s preference in favor of Lauderhill.

The series between India and West Indies has been organized rather hastily but it seems like what prompted the organizers to make it happen was their want of experimentation with the latent marketing potential that cricket in the USA possesses. Now what better opportunity to test that hypothesis with the Indian team touring, which can unanimously claim itself to be the most marketable cricket team on the planet for the Indian team playing in the USA doesn’t only make the BCCI, which is the world’s richest cricketing board to empty its pockets, it also brings a huge amount of revenue to the host country for the BCCI’s trusted brand of homegrown sponsors tag along.

Also read – USA is a “special” market for cricket: MS Dhoni

Add to that the humungous amount of cricket starved South Asian diaspora who suddenly wake up to the fact that their dream of watching cricket in the USA which until a few days back remained a distant reality, is finally happening, their haste to book their tickets for the weekend affair forces the server to crash. Obviously, a full-house is expected in the stadium with a petit capacity of 15,000, un-comparable to the standards of cricket stadiums in India but they will take it.

The state of cricket in the USA though narrates a dismal tale. The vastness of the country and the paucity of funds ensure that the country is unable to extract the benefits of a well-devised club cricket structure. The problem is that the talent remains segregated at the club cricket level and there is no proper amount of channeling done to concentrate this talent in the national team. Add to that the fact that USA’s cricket administration has had its share of run-ins with the ICC, the USACA has been suspended twice by the ICC for failing to adopt a new constitution and hold elections on time meaning that the ICC grant which is no doubt crucial to the country’s cricketing finances was withheld.

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The country’s sporting think tanks can’t be blamed for the state of cricket in the country considering that the USA already has a host of alternatives to choose from. It’s National Football League is a global spectacle, its football league is well known and credited to the rise of David Beckham, and it leads the medal tally at almost every Olympics which is the biggest sporting spectacle in the world.

Obviously USA dominates more sports than it can count on its fingertips and yet, the intermingling of business and cricket and lucrative business centering around the world’s T20 cricket leagues, the success of the IPL and the Big Bash league, and ICC’s efforts to globalize the sport have made the honchos of sports business and management take notice of the emerging market for the sport of cricket which was initially restricted to the traditional commonwealth.

IPL’s live streaming on YouTube ensured that cricket penetrated the nooks and crannies of the world. The 10 year TV rights deal for the IPL in the USA exceeded 1 billion USD, testimony to the sport’s rising commercial value. Obviously, globalization is gaining a stronghold over the world and cricket is benefiting big time!

Also read – Twitter Reactions: Pre-match Tweets as India take on West Indies in USA

Coming back to the weekend extravaganza about to unfold at Lauderhill, the tickets are priced heftily no doubt, VIP seats have been priced at 250 USD and the grandstand tickets at 150 USD, several times that of the tickets sold for the CPL but courtesy the news of the server for ticket booking crashing, we can expect it to be a full house and seeing the money-making potential of hosting BCCI at Lauderhill, hopefully, the cricket pitch will take center stage once again.