As the scramble to establish the dominant global Twenty20 league continues, the Caribbean Premier League continues to be the forefront of the movement.
It has become a global phenomenon since it emerged in 2013 and it could be moving to a new level in 2016 when they play in the United States.
It will be an interesting task, cricket is near the back of the queue for sports that interest American fans.
But with a clamour for cricket to appear in the Olympics, could we about to see a major breakthrough?
Damien O’Donohoe is the Chairman of the CPL, he explains why they have chosen now to make the move to the American market.
“The US has always been in our plans from day one, it’s been a massive sports market that has been deprived of cricket. There’s a large market and we felt we were in a great position to play games there; it’s very difficult to build a league from scratch with no players, where as we have players, we’re on the same time zone, so we saw it as a very suitable fit and an interesting extension of our brand.”
“You can see cricket is growing in the US, look at the Warne and Tendulkar showcase, I know it was only a showcase, it was legends and I don’t think that is sustainable long-term because it’s not high-end professional cricket but we have the best players in the world.”
“The American’s love seeing new things but they want to see people who are the best in the world and that is what we do. We bring a great party to anywhere we play and even for non-cricket fans they can come and enjoy the day out.”
While they will begin with the first fixture in Florida, O’Donohoe believes that this is the starting point and he has already mapped out target areas for future matches or even potentially franchises.
“Obviously the only stadium available at the moment is Fort Lauderdale. It’s interesting looking at our ticket sales, about 50% of our ticket sales have come from New York and I think 30% from Toronto, so I think if we were to extend in the US it would be in them markets.
“If we get to the stage of opening franchises it would be in them areas.”
One of the benefits of playing a fixture in the US is opening the sport up to sponsorship from further afield.
This is something that the CPL are hoping to achieve and are hoping that sponsors will flock to them if the match in Florida proves to be a success.
“I think what will be a challenge in the first year from a sponsorship point of view will be that we are the first professional league to play there, but we’re hoping to sign with two sponsors in the next couple of days. People want to see things work first before they sign up so I think that our discussions post-event will be interesting in terms of sponsorship.”
Aside from the US, O’Donohoe spoke about other areas of interest. Asia and India appear to be the biggest areas of interest with talks already underway.
“We’ve been approached by Hong Kong and Singapore, with the franchise model we have, we want to look at this seriously.
“India is such a crucial part of cricket’s success, so there is interest from India, we are putting games on at 9 o’clock at night so people in India can wake up to the CPL, we’re really building our profile in India, so I think it would be smart to look at games on their time zone and build our profile and market share.“
Expanding into new markets is definitely something that is being discussed across all sports, with the NFL playing regular season games in the UK, the NBA playing pre-season games across the globe and the Premier League having spoken about having a 39th game played internationally.
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