February 17, 2025

Global Cricket Investors – For challenging outdated perceptions, bringing the sport to new corners of the world and making a compelling case for a period of astronomical growth for the sport 

No.9: January 2025
Guest author: Professor Simon Chadwick 

Professor Simon Chadwick is a leading researcher, writer, academic, consultant, advisor and speaker whose work focuses on leading and managing in complex environments. His particular areas of expertise are in policy and strategy, international and global markets, as well as business and marketing. With three decades of experience in the global sport, event and cultural industries, particularly in Afro-Eurasian regions, he currently serves as a Professor of AfroEurasian Sport and advises clients worldwide. He has held key roles, including Director of Research for FIFA’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar and Women in Sport, and has collaborated with UEFA for nearly two decades. 

Professor Chadwick has taught at top business schools across Europe, Asia and South America and has founded several research centres and think tanks. His extensive writing portfolio includes contributions to Forbes, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. He has advised major sports organisations like FIFA, FC Barcelona, Adidas and Coca-Cola and frequently appears in global media outlets such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. Recently, he co-edited ‘The Geopolitical Economy of Sport’ and its two companion volumes, published in December 2024.  

In a rapidly evolving global sports landscape, Professor Simon Chadwick demonstrates how stakeholders from the US, India and other regions are driving cricket’s evolution through financial investment, underpinned by effective communication. For challenging outdated perceptions, bringing the sport to new corners of the world and making a compelling case for a period of astronomical growth for the sport, Global Cricket Investors are the JTA Communicators of the Month.   

DIASPORAS AND DOLLARS ARE HELPING TO COMMUNICATE CRICKET’S GLOBAL ASCENT, BUT WILL THE WORLD UNDERSTAND? 

As someone who’s spent a significant part of the last decade trying to inform mystified and often disinterested French business school students about the wonders of cricket, even for me the recent upsurge in cricket investments coming out of the United States has been surprising (albeit validating, I will soon resume my campaign of persuasion in France).  

Given that I have abjectly failed to change the attitudes of a generation of young French sports consumers, I am not in the running for JTA Communicator of the Month. However, the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chelsea Football Club owner Todd Boehly are, as both have just taken significant bets on what a French observer once characterised as being “that great English inactivity”. 

If communication is a cognitive-behavioural phenomenon, then 2023’s announcement that cricket will be included in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles instantly narrowed the gap between perceptions, attitudes and engagement with the sport. Overnight, what for most of its history has been a colonial peculiarity now stands on the cusp of global prominence, which illustrates that sometimes it’s not what or how you communicate but rather the context within which you do it. 

Nadella was part of a consortium that paid £145 million for a 49% stake in The Hundred’s London Spirit team, though he already co-owned US Major League Cricket’s Seattle Orcas team. Meanwhile, Boehly recently agreed to buy a 49% share in the sport’s The Hundred franchise – Trent Rockets in the UK. Cain International, founded by the American and his associates, will pay around £40 million for their stake in the Rockets, valuing the entire franchise at £79 million.  

Retrospectively, perhaps LA28 and the IOC deserve the accolade of being JTA Communicator(s) of the Month, however it is the cricket investors from the US, India and elsewhere who do so. So, what have they been telling us? One interpretation is that they are signalling, market making and speculating, none of which is a major surprise when investors are taking a punt, but what they are communicating, who they are communicating to, and what ultimately this could all mean brings intrigue beyond the commercial posturing. 

Another interpretation is that after decades of sporting underachievement and domestic introspection, India could finally be rising (at least indirectly). Despite now having the world’s biggest population – more than 1.6 billion people – India has only ever won 10 Olympic gold medals, compared to more than 300 for China and more than 1,000 for the USA. Yet India is cricket obsessed, which means that, for instance, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is world cricket’s most valuable cricket board (worth approximately £2 billion). This could finally be India’s time to shine. 

However, the global projection of Indian cricket is not being driven from the BCCI’s headquarters in Mumbai, rather it is its diaspora communities in the US that are playing a pivotal role in the sport’s global surge. There are more than five million people with Indian heritage living there, while in Silicon Valley approximately one-third of people working locally have Indian heritage.  

To illustrate what this means, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and a bunch of his United States-based tech buddies, all of whom are of Indian heritage, have spent £145 million acquiring a stake in English cricket team London Spirit. The move came little more than six months after the T20 cricket World Cup took place in the US, which resulted in an uptick in new users from the US accessing International Cricket Council digital platforms, from 21% during the previous tournament to 61% in 2024. 

The message seems clear: that market size matters, especially large populations of people who potentially constitute a target audience; that diasporas can serve as a means through which information is channelled; and that inter-personal and organisational networks are hugely important in driving investment flows, especially if they involve the movers and shakers of US big tech. 

Even so, upbeat messaging and a belief in the value of one’s proposition don’t necessarily bring success. Last year’s T20 World Cup in the US attracted fewer than 160,000 people to matches held in New York (only India versus Pakistan was a sellout). In places such as China there often isn’t the space for cricket stadium development, let alone much interest in the sport, whilst in France (and indeed elsewhere) the game remains a complete mystery. 

For all the gloss, glitz and hype, the biggest challenge therefore facing Nadella, Pichai, Boehly and others is trying to explain to people across the world what cricket is, what its rules are and what matches involve. That’s a huge communications exercise, which will likely take a generation before it has a tangible impact, implying that recent investment signalling may only begin to yield sustainable returns at some stage during the next decade. 

However, for this month at least, cricket’s new investors deserve the accolade for being great communicators in their attempts to convince the world that the sport is not just an English inactivity or a colonial anachronism designed to baffle the world. Rather, they are telling us that cricket can become the world’s breakout sport during the next decade and that Indian influence in global sport is rising.