America's professional cricket league held its first draft at NASA's Houston space centre
Cricket has long been a niche sport in the United States, and earlier leagues fizzled after a single season. Major League Cricket arrived in 2023 with a billion-dollar backing deal, Silicon Valley investors including Satya Nadella, and an inaugural player draft staged, fittingly for a moonshot, at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
Earlier efforts failed. Pro Cricket lasted only 2004, and a proposed American Premier League never got going. The old national body was expelled from the International Cricket Council in 2017, and its replacement, USA Cricket, took over in January 2019 aiming to take the game mainstream. That May it accepted an offer from American Cricket Enterprises worth US$1 billion, backed by figures from the Times Group and the founders of Willow TV. The Kolkata Knight Riders' owners, including Shah Rukh Khan, joined as investors in 2020.
The pandemic pushed the launch back twice. A development competition, Minor League Cricket, started in 2021, and a funding round in 2022 raised US$120 million, largely for stadiums, from investors including the Microsoft chief and Adobe's Shantanu Narayen. The first season ran for three weeks in July 2023 at a converted baseball ground in Grand Prairie, Texas, and Church Street Park in North Carolina, with matches scheduled mostly in the evening to dodge Texas heat.
The league is a single entity: American Cricket Enterprises owns all six franchises while investor groups run them, with teams spread from Seattle and San Francisco on the Pacific to New York and Washington in the east, plus Los Angeles and Dallas. In 2024 the ICC gave its matches official status, so records count in formal statistics. The 2025 season nearly doubled from 19 games to 34, moved earlier to avoid clashing with England's Hundred and added the Oakland Coliseum and Florida's Central Broward Park.
Plans include growth to ten teams and a new side formed with New Zealand Cricket by 2027. The Knight Riders opened their own ground in Pomona, California, on July 1, 2026, a venue lined up for cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. After four seasons, the Los Angeles Knight Riders hold the title, having beaten Washington Freedom in the 2026 final.
Source: Major League Cricket
