Mumbai Indians, owned by Reliance Industries Limited, has announced that it has acquired a fifth cricket franchise – ‘MI New York’ for the New York team of Major League Cricket (MLC).
Major League Cricket will be the first professional Twenty20 cricket championship in the United States. The inaugural season of Major League Cricket will kick off in the summer of 2023. The first season is set to take place over three weeks at Grand Prairie Stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas, near Dallas.
The tournament is a professional Twenty20 cricket operated by American Cricket Enterprises (ACE) and sanctioned by USA Cricket. The league is likely to begin in July and will have six teams named after US cities. The tournament will be a single entity.
Director of Reliance Industries, Nita. M. Ambani said, “I am thrilled to welcome our New York franchise to the growing MI Family. With our entry into the first T20 franchise cricket league in the US, I hope we are able to establish Mumbai Indians as a global brand of fearless and entertaining cricket. This is another new beginning for us and I look forward to the exciting journey ahead.“
This team will be the fifth franchise after Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League, MI Cape Town in the SA20 league, MI Emirates in the ILT20 league, and Mumbai Indians in the Women’s Premier League.
But some of these cricket leagues which have been recently launched have received a lukewarm response from Indian viewers. According to a recent story that Mint wrote, Indian viewers are heavily skewed towards watching only the Indian Premier League and Legends League Cricket only. As per viewership data sourced from Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) subscribers, the opening match of the last Legends League Cricket (LLC)—a T20 cricket tournament featuring recently retired cricketers—recorded a TV rating or TVR of 0.51—the percentage of the audience which saw the entire match. It considered the current TV universe size of 800 million across 210 million addressable TV homes.
