Last week, I did something I’ve found myself doing more of out of morbid curiosity: I watched The Hundred auction.
I only watched the women’s auction, where Davina Perrin went off the board first for a life-changing amount of money while several international players also jumped well into the six-figure salary band. These auctions are, in general, pretty boring; the auctioneers are too deferential to the teams and have less charisma than a ceramic basset hound, while the teams look unprepared when they have to stall for time to look at the spreadsheets they should have been putting together for weeks. The whole event has a profound lack of juice. Americans could do it better, especially American auctioneers. (Seriously, those guys are mesmerizing. It’s like music.)
As an exercise in branding, though, it’s quite effective because it’s transparent about putting the money front and center. Top line salaries snagged major headlines. The top men’s salary nearly doubled from last year, and the leading women’s salary tripled while the minimum salary for 2026 was the maximum salary for the first women’s Hundred in 2021. It sends a clear and powerful message: top end cricketers are worth big bucks, and we will outbid anyone in the country for that talent. The big salaries attract curious casuals and might get them to overlook the fact that there are no elephants in Manchester.
Major League Cricket is… a little behind the curve on that front.
MLC’s draft was held Tuesday morning, and after the 2023 iteration was done in a space museum in Houston and the 2024 and 2025 editions were reduced to live-to-tape Zoom calls with graphics, this year’s draft class was announced with an Instagram gallery. The six teams picked a total of 17 players, eight of whom have played in the league before. Los Angeles went with pacer Carmi Le Roux with the first pick, which was not the first overall pick (they passed on that one). Le Roux will be 33 when the season starts and ran an economy in the 10s in a tumultuous and abbreviated MLC 2025 campaign with San Francisco. That doesn’t exactly scream franchise cornerstone, but if that weren’t enough, they later drafted Nitish Kumar, who played for LAKR last year and was not retained for 2026.
The reasoning for that could be explained if the league told fans what they were looking at. The most insightful analysis readily available is the Wikipedia page for the 2025 draft, which showed the slot values for each round - thus explaining why teams would pass on the entire first three rounds of the draft before the Knight Riders picked up Le Roux for $50,000, or why LA would redraft a player they released at a spot where they could pay him less. In that respect, MLC’s draft is more like the MLS Re-Entry Draft or MLB’s Rule 5 draft than the entry drafts that are so synonymous with the concept in American sports.
With that framing, some of the draft strategies come into focus. LA also needed a locker room guy, so they grabbed Jahmar Hamilton, a man who is comprised more of good vibes than flesh and bone and should liven up Dwayne Bravo’s Windies crew. Seattle is hoping older players will give them more stability after taking three guys with an average age of 34.7. Texas needed domestic-eligible pacers, and they got two pretty good ones in Amshi Da Silva from Kings XI Dallas and Abhimanyu Lamba from the otherwise dreadful St. Louis Americans. San Francisco had my favorite draft, a sickos-friendly haul of five players that included former Texas pacer Zia-ul-Haq as well as breakout wicketkeeper Saideep Ganesh and young leg spinner Anirudh Immanuel of New Jersey. Immanuel was economical with the ball for the New Jersey Stallions and knocked a clutch 31(31) against the Atlanta Fire in the MiLC Super Eights that saved a collapsing innings and ultimately proved decisive in beating the eventual champions. Saideep had a monster year for the East Bay Blazers and has a good chance to play as a 25-year-old rookie. With Tim Seifert leaving, he could very well be the first choice wicketkeeper.
Those picks were outliers, though, and young players in Minor League Cricket largely got ignored. Immanuel was the only pick from the youth-heavy East Division, and he got picked late. U19 captain Utkarsh Srivastava, who will spend time as an overseas pro in England this summer went unpicked. International centurion Nitish Sudini and leggy Sahir Bhatia - who took the same number of wickets in 10 games last year as he has years on this Earth - have yet to earn the attention of the country’s richest teams. This comes back to an that isn’t unique to MLC when it comes to franchise cricket: the system doesn’t reward long-term planning and roster construction. There is no benefit to building a team that could win multiple championships versus building the oldest team possible that might get you into the playoffs where, as MI New York demonstrated, anything can happen. Playing the kids to see what they have, as I have implored teams to do, offers little reward. Teams either win now or fail.
That’s a problem, and not just because of the limitations on opportunities for young players at a time in the talent pool’s growth where they would benefit from those opportunities. It also feeds into the impression that MLC is less of a permanent fixture and more of a pop-up shop: something that will only be here for a little while and may or may not return each year, with multiple grounds having fallen by the wayside heading into year four. That puts a limit on the willingness of people to commit and on what MLC can achieve in a crowded American sports market. Worse, it raises the singular, uncomfortable question lurking near the heart of the project:
Who is Major League Cricket for?
MLC is based in the United States, but three of its teams are co-branded with IPL franchises, and two of those are demonstrably little more than off-season content farms for the parent club back in India - including the reigning champions. On-site merch at games is limited at best, and a quick stroll through the team shop/walk-in closet at Grand Prairie Stadium shows some teams put more thought into what they sell than others. Player jerseys for sale are largely those of current or former IPL stars: Narine, Russell, Pollard, Klaasen, Warner, etc. The most common yellow shirt at the two Texas Super Kings games I attended last year was MS Dhoni, who has not and probably never will play for Texas but has been a fixture with Chennai from day one and, hey, that’s close enough, right? There was zero hype for Saiteja Mukkamalla even though he had centuries in both white ball formats coming into his first year in MLC. Even the media presence is well outside the mainstream, with little shoulder programming or ancillary content to keep people engaged in the league’s workings. Games are confined to a pay TV channel and streaming service aimed squarely at middle-aged Indian men with a gallery of commentators who, with a couple of notable exceptions, either sound like they’re exhausted from constant global travel or just winging it. When Lisa Sthalekar is constantly couching her analysis in “for a domestic player…”, that doesn’t sound like someone talking to or for an American audience.
So if it’s not for us, why is it here? I struggle to believe Venky Harinaryan fronted money for the San Francisco Unicorns and partnered with Cricket Victoria to build a high-level cricket ops unit just so he could do some fun B2B marketing. Seattle’s ownership group is serious as a heart attack about growing the game and building a lasting brand in their local market as well as nationally, stadium or no stadium. Their investments are positioned next to LA’s AI slop social media feeds and New York’s eight-month disappearing act after winning an improbable title where the US national team captain and a 22-year-old breakout star from St. Louis played crucial roles that MINY’s off-field branding should have spent all winter cashing in on. MLC has a damn good product on the field in terms of caliber of play, but look too closely and the people, systems, and philosophies inside the operation are poles apart. Their differences in ambition and brand execution could be overlooked when the league was at loggerheads with the governing body, but those days are gone now. Left unaddressed, Major League Cricket will be thrown into an identity crisis at a time when its triumph in the American cricket landscape should be imminent and its leadership in that landscape is necessary.
Cricket’s progress in the United States over the last three years is substantial, but fragile. Complacency will gleefully unravel it, and the organization that offers its most prominent point of engagement is both load-bearing and incomplete as it hurtles down the runway with only one more real crack at fixing things before it launches a 2028 season that it has to get right as a lead-in to the Olympics. To fulfill its considerable potential, MLC has to become a more robust access point for the game here, courting both new fans and those already sold on the sport. That means doing things that other franchise leagues in world cricket do not do because they do not occupy the same place in their respective structures. MLC has to roll up its sleeves and go through these issues one at a time to build a brand its domestic market can relate to.
I know what I’d pick first.