Billionaire Ambani’s New York Cricket Team Wins First Ever U.S. Major League Cricket Championship

Billionaire Ambani’s New York Cricket Team Wins First Ever U.S. Major League Cricket Championship - 3 minutes read

Topline

A New York cricket team owned by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's family defeated a squad partly controlled by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Sunday in the inaugural championship match for Major League Cricket, the latest attempt to bring the hugely popular international sport into the U.S. mainstream.

Fans in the stands watch the Texas Super Kings and Los Angeles Knight Riders compete in a Major ... [+] League Cricket regular season match in Grand Prairie, Texas, July 13, ahead of the championship Sunday. (AP Photo/LM Otero)Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Key Facts

MI New York came out victorious, beating the Seattle Orcas by seven wickets Sunday at Grand Prairie Stadium near Dallas, Texas.

MI New York is part of Ambani’s cricket empire that started with the Mumbai Indians and now has five teams in cricket leagues around the world under the MI brand, including teams in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The Seattle Orcas is owned by a group of five Indian-American tech magnates including Nadella and fellow Microsoft executive Sanjay Parthasarathy.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Ambani’s net worth to be $91 billion, making him the 15th richest person in the world and the richest man in India, ahead of Gautam Adani ($54.9 billion). Nadella’s shares of Microsoft were worth about $261 million as of Monday.

Key Background

In late 2022, league officials announced the inaugural season of Major League Cricket after years of delays caused by construction setbacks on the league’s main stadium in Texas, where half the matches were played. The season lasted three weeks and featured six teams playing Twenty20 cricket, a shortened version of the sport. The teams, representing cities and states across the country—New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Texas, San Francisco and Los Angeles—played all their matches between two stadiums in Texas and North Carolina. USA Cricket, which has officially sanctioned the league, has said that Major League Cricket is part of its official strategy to turn cricket, which is already incredibly popular in India, Pakistan and Australia, into a mainstream U.S. sport and to become a full member of the International Cricket Council by 2030. It’s not the first effort to create a cricket market in the U.S. though. 2004 saw the first attempt at professional cricket in the U.S. with startup league Pro Cricket. That league folded after just one season. In 2015, a series of exhibition matches were hosted across the U.S. by legendary Australian and Indian cricketers Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar. Meanwhile, this new league comes ahead of the 2024 Twenty20 World Cup, which is being co-hosted by the U.S. and the West Indies. Outside of the United States, cricket is a massively popular—and lucrative—sport: Five-year broadcasting rights to the Indian Premier League sold for $6.2 billion last year, a higher per-game value than any other sports league aside from the NFL.

Tangent

Nita Ambani, wife of Mukesh Ambani and the face of the family’s cricket enterprises, brought a whole couch to the stadium to watch Sunday’s match in comfort, ESPN journalist Peter Della Penna reported.

Crucial Quote

"Just look at the atmosphere here,” Nita Ambani told reporters. “It looks like a festival of cricket. I think MLC is a momentous step in the development of cricket in this region.”