Major League Baseball has announced ambitious new expansion plans for US Cricket. The MLC, which started the season with only 19 games, has now been confirmed to expand to 34 games by 2025, a move that will have a major impact on the landscape of professional sport in England. There will be two, and two more soon. The announcement comes just days after the MLC was fully legalized with the news that its game had been granted A-list status by the International Cricket Council.
“It was always intended to be a 10-team league,” MLC chief executive Vijay Srinivasan told the Guardian. “Research shows we are a big enough country with enough population to support 10 teams, so that’s our plan. We played 19 games in the first season and 25 games in the second season. I think our goal next year is to get to 34 and gradually. Expansion continues. The second season begins after the men’s T20 World Cup and will span 23 days, overlapping with the Hundred. Next year’s edition will be significantly longer and start earlier, Srinivasan said the MLC is keen to play in June.
“Ultimately for us, our ideal calendar would be to start much earlier, in late spring or early summer,” Srinivasan said. The tournament was postponed this year as the T20 World Cup was being held at the MLC Stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas. “With the Indian Premier League ending in late May, I think our best time is to start in early June when we have school holidays in the U.S. and then go into July. That’s how we want to build our window. This It will clash with the T20 Blast season, but the hundred will run from the end of July to August.
English cricket has already had to adapt to sharing the summer with rival leagues. Last year, Jason Roy gave up his England contract so that he could take a job at Los Angeles Knight Riders, while Surrey’s Sunil Narine missed Surrey’s Blast final day as he was also playing for the LA Knight Riders. Playing for Los Angeles. Surrey’s director of cricket Alec Stewart said at the time it was “disappointing and frustrating” to lose a player of Narine’s caliber “so late”. Narine’s decision is a sobering reminder of the status of domestic cricket in England.
The MLC’s expansion plans will also increase pressure on English football to decide whether to bring private investment into the Top 100 competition. The England and Wales Cricket Board, the 18 counties and Marylebone Cricket Club agree this is the “way forward” for the May 10 match, but progress has been frustratingly slow. MLC has a number of powerful investors, including four IPL teams – Kolkata Knight Riders, Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings and Delhi Capitals – as well as major business players such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella figure.
“All these people who joined us five years ago when we were starting out have gone on to great success in various other industries,” Srinivasan said of the transformation. We never expected this to be an overnight transformation. They were very patient and supported us from start to finish. The MLC has established a series of academies and minor league systems to develop homegrown players. Efforts are currently underway to develop more Category A venues.
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“We’re not here to play in the league and leave every year,” Srinivasan added. “We feel our role is to build the infrastructure for cricket in the United States. The MLC is a means to an end, if you will. I think ten years from now you’re going to see a very different cricket landscape in the United States. We There’s going to be a very strong set of venues across the country, we’re going to have a home and away format for the MLC, and we’re going to have a lot more players in the system and hopefully that means we’re going to have a very strong US team as well. .These are our ambitions.
