International Cricket Council and Nassau County officials unveiled plans for a temporary, 34,000-seat cricket stadium on Long Island that will hold a few matches in this year’s T20 Cricket World Cup—the first time the tournament has ever been played in the U.S., as the sport hopes to gain stateside popularity.
The modular stadium is currently under construction in Nassau County’s Eisenhower Park roughly 30 miles east of Manhattan, and the International Cricket Council says it will be complete in three months.
The grandstands are the same that were used for the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, repurposed for the T20 World Cup, according to the International Cricket Council.
The so-called Nassau County International Cricket stadium will feature VIP and hospitality suites, a party deck, cabanas, a fan zone and a variety of food and drink outlets, the Council said.
It’s being built by Populous, the architectural firm behind both Yankee Stadium and the Mets’ CitiField, as well as the Narendra Modi cricket stadium in Ahmedabad and the Tottenham Hotspur soccer stadium in London.
The stadium will be bigger than any existing stadium in cricket’s place of origin, the United Kingdom, Chris Tetley of the ICC reportedly said this week.
New York will host eight matches in the tournament, including the highly anticipated showdown between rivals India and Pakistan June 9. Other U.S. venues for the cup include the Central Broward Park and Broward County Stadium in Florida and the Grand Prairie Cricket Stadium in Texas.
Despite being one of the most popular sports in the world, cricket has not historically had the same following in the U.S. But some of the game’s backers are hoping to change that, most notably with the launch of a T20 Major League Cricket league in the U.S. last year. That season culminated in the MI New York team, an offshoot of the Mumbai Indians controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani and his wife Nita, beating out the Seattle Orcas, partly owned by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in the inaugural championship game. The T20 variant of cricket is a shortened version of the traditionally hours- or even days-long game. With a typical T20 match lasting around three hours, some believe the format might be more palatable to American audiences. The game has started to see some new momentum already in the U.S., especially following the influx of new South Asian immigrants to the country.
Cricket was the most searched-for sport on Wikipedia in 2023, with multiple cricket-related articles making the website’s top 25 searches for the year. It’s the first time the sport has ever been included on the year-end list since it first started being produced in 2015 despite its global popularity according to Wikimedia Commons.
