Major League Crickets expansion plan threatens English leagues | Twenty20

Major League Cricket has announced ambitious new expansion plans for the sport in the US. In a move that will have significant implications for the landscape of professional sport in England, MLC, which started with a 19-match season, has confirmed it will expand to 34 matches by 2025. The league currently includes six franchises, but plans to have two more in the near future, and two more soon after. The announcement comes just after MLC was fully legitimized by the news that its matches have been granted List A status by the International Cricket Council.

It was always intended to be a 10-team league, MLC CEO Vijay Srinivasan told The Guardian. Research shows that we are a big enough country, with a big enough demographic to support ten teams, so that is our plan. We had 19 games in our first season and will have 25 in our second. I think we want to go to 34 next year, and just keep expanding gradually. The second season, which starts at the end of the Men's T20 World Cup, lasts 23 days and overlaps with the Hundred. Next year's edition will last considerably longer and start earlier. Srinivasan said MLC would like to play in June.

Ultimately, the ideal calendar for us is to start much earlier, in late spring or early summer, Srinivasan said. The tournament was postponed this year due to the T20 World Cup, which uses the MLCs Stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas. With the Indian Premier League ending at the end of May, I think our best bet would be to start in early June, when we have the school holidays in the US, and then start in July. This is how we would like to decorate our window. That would clash with the T20 Blast season, but the Hundred would run from late July to August.

English cricket has already had to adapt to sharing the summer with a rival league. Last year, Jason Roy gave up his England contract so he could take a job with the LA Knight Riders, while Surrey's Sunil Narine skipped Surrey's appearance on Blast final day as he also played for LA. Surrey's director of cricket, Alec Stewart, said at the time that it was disappointing and frustrating to lose a player of Narine's quality late on. Narine's decision was a sobering reminder of the status of English domestic cricket.

The MLC's expansion plans will also increase pressure on the English game to decide whether or not to bring private investment into the Hundred. The England and Wales Cricket Board, the 18 counties and Marylebone Cricket Club agreed this was the direction of play for the match on May 10, but there is frustration at the slow progress. MLC boasts a formidable array of investors, including four IPL sides: the Kolkata Knight Riders, the Mumbai Indians, the Chennai Super Kings and the Delhi Capitals, as well as key business people such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

All these people who came on board when we started five years ago have been hugely successful in other walks of life, Srinivasan said. “You know they understand this isn't one of those things where you can just flip a switch. The expectation was never that this would be an overnight transition. They have been extremely patient and supported us all the way. MLC has already established a series of academies and a minor league system to develop local players. It is now working to develop more List A sites.

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We are not here to play a league and go away every year, Srinivasan added. We feel like our role is to build the infrastructure for cricket in the US. MLC is the means to an end, if you will. I think in ten years you will see a very different landscape for cricket in the US. We have a very robust set of locations across the country, we have a sort of home-and-away format for MLC, and we have a much larger player pool in the system as a result. Hopefully this means we will have a very strong kind of American team as well. Those are all our ambitions.