Analysis: Cricket’s best chance of cracking US market could be at the home of Moneyball
Thirteen years after Brad Pitt made the Oakland Coliseum internationally famous, the venue could become cricket’s ‘Moneyball’ moment in the USA, writes BEN HORNE.
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Thirteen years after Brad Pitt made the Oakland Coliseum internationally famous, the soon to be abandoned Major League Baseball stadium could become cricket’s ‘Moneyball’ moment in the USA.
The Oakland A’s will abandon Oakland at the end of the year ahead of a relocation to Las Vegas, a move which suddenly presents cricket officials with a potential solution to the single biggest obstacle the sport has in trying to make a genuine impact in America.
Cricket’s foray into the US at the T20 World Cup was largely an encouraging success, but there is no escaping the fact there are no major stadiums with the dimensions capable of hosting an international match.
The International Cricket Council spent $45 million on a temporary stadium in Long Beach, New York, which has already been packed up and taken away.
Cricket now faces an enormous challenge to try and ram home the inroads made at the World Cup leading into the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where T20 will make its debut and the 55,000-seat Oakland Coliseum shapes as a potential game-changer for an inescapable problem.
Virtually all major sporting stadiums in the US are custom-built to host NFL or baseball, meaning none are capable of going even close to supporting the dimensions of a cricket oval … but the Oakland Coliseum is the exception to the rule.
Despite the fact it isn’t exactly a state of the art facility anymore, the Coliseum is a rare multipurpose venue in the US as it used to also host Oakland’s NFL team before they also moved to Vegas, and its suitability for American football and baseball gives the field similar measurements to that of the small, yet cricket compliant Eden Park in Auckland, which hosts cricket and rugby.
Oakland has added the added significance of its location, with the Bay Area of California home to perhaps the highest concentration of Americans with subcontinental backgrounds – at least outside of New York – giving cricket a genuine, ready-made market in the San Francisco-Oakland region.
There are reported plans to build a boutique cricket stadium in Los Angeles for the Olympics, but it would not be an enormous stretch for matches to be played at the Oakland Coliseum, given it’s also in California.
ICC cricket officials seriously discussed the Oakland Coliseum as a venue for recently completed T20 World Cup, but the A’s were not willing to hand over the keys to its home ground smack, bang in the middle of the MLB season.
But that won’t be a problem next year, because the A’s will move out of Oakland and the Coliseum will host two local soccer teams as its only tenants ahead of long-term plans to repurpose the land for local housing.
Maybe it’s time for cricket powerbrokers to work out how much it might cost to buy a stake in the Oakland Coliseum?
If it hosted Major League Cricket (MLC) T20 matches – now being heavily invested in by Indian Premier League owners – as well as annual cricket internationals, perhaps it could be a worthy investment.
At the very least it’s understood very preliminary discussions have taken place amongst cricket officials about the prospect of hosting a bilateral international series at the Oakland Coliseum.
Given the India and Pakistan World Cup match was a 33,000-seat sellout, with that many spectators again packing into a live viewing site at the home of the New York Mets, cricket could easily fill a 55,000-seat venue for a series played between two big nations.
Playing at a legitimate sports stadium would give cricket the big-time feel it craves in the US, as opposed to the more carnival type atmosphere of playing out of a pop-up ground with temporary grandstands.
Making the Californian time zone connect with prime time in India is a challenge from a TV broadcast point of view, but there are surely ways to make the concept sing.
International players including Pat Cummins are jumping at opportunities to play in the Major League Cricket T20 league due to start again in a couple of weeks, and the ICC would have no trouble convincing cricketers to come to the USA for a big-time neutral series.
India and Pakistan have not played each other in bilateral cricket for decades, but perhaps this is the venue where it could actually work, and spread the game’s gospel to its most important new market at the same time?
Cricket must seize on the imprint created by the T20 World Cup and the USA’s success, and continue to push hard to create a groundswell, perhaps not as big, but somewhat comparable to what soccer enjoyed after the 1994 FIFA World Cup.
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Originally published as Analysis: Cricket’s best chance of cracking US market could be at the home of Moneyball
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