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From the familiar crack of the bat to the eruption of the crowd every time a ball sailed into the stands, it appeared the soundtrack to a summer night at the Coliseum hadn’t missed a beat. But this wasn’t a rehash of baseball’s glory days in Oakland. 

Instead, it was the birth of something new. In the concourse, Indian food trucks dished out dosas and biryani, the scents of cardamom and coriander filling the air. 

The hulking concrete stadium has remained mainly silent since the A’s played their last home game in the venue last September. But over the weekend, a stadium where fans once wore green and gold ballcaps played host to thousands of people who packed in behind the first and third baselines wearing horned bucket hats, waving scarves and flags. 

Professional cricket has come to America and it’s backed by some seriously wealthy superfans. Major League Cricket (MLC), which just started its third season, is tapping into a growing diaspora of cricket-lovers living in the United States and betting that the world’s second most popular sport has legs to fill a major venue in the Bay Area. 

It’s a wager on demographics inspired by the stories of the people who founded the league and own its six teams. Significant waves of immigration from India to the United States during the 1990s and 2000s brought thousands hoping to make their careers in the tech industry. Over the years, this group has become an economic and cultural force that the league’s founders hope can revive a long-dormant cricket culture.   

In 1993, Venky Harinarayan was a homesick 26-year-old graduate student at Stanford University from Chennai, India, who had no way of following his favorite sport. 

Last weekend, he got a chance to sit with his 88-year-old dad — who used to dutifully mail him newspaper clips and box scores of the world’s biggest cricket matches — in a box at the Oakland Coliseum to watch the Unicorns, the team Harinarayan owns with his former classmate and business partner Anand Rajaraman.  

The pair made their fortunes by selling two companies to Amazon and Walmart, and named their team after Silicon Valley’s culture of breeding billion-dollar startups. 

Until last week, the Unicorns had never had a true “home” match since MLC played its first two years at venues in Dallas and Morrisville, North Carolina. This season, the league has graduated to a “traveling circus” model, where the teams tour across the country to play in different markets.

Oakland hosted the first six matches of the 2025 season at the Coliseum over a four-day stretch starting June 12. The Unicorns made their local debut in style, going undefeated in three matches and scoring more runs than any other team. The team even made cricket history when 26-year-old New Zealand national Finn Allen broke the single-game record against the Washington Freedom for the most sixes (cricket’s version of a home run) ever scored in a T20 format.

“I was surprised to see there were even a lot of folks my dad’s age here,” Harinarayan said. “It was special to share this with them. Their generation probably thought this whole experience was impossible not that long ago.” 

In India, cricket has long been the country’s most popular sport, with the top league drawing more fans on average than Major League Baseball does in the U.S. 

Vijay Srinivasan and Sameer Mehta showed that rabid cricket fans could create a profitable business in the Bay Area. The two came to Silicon Valley to partake in the computing revolution and found themselves yearning for the beloved sport they left back home.

The engineers built and launched Willow TV in 2002, a streaming service for cricket matches, and obtained exclusive broadcasting rights to top leagues around the globe and the Cricket World Cup. By the time the pair sold their site to the Times of India Group in 2016 for $100 million, the service had amassed more than three million annual users.

They — along with the Unicorn team owners —were part of the original brain trust that dreamt up what a new, successful professional cricket league could look like in the U.S. 

“We knew it needed big funding, big players, and most importantly, the best product,” said Access Healthcare CEO Anurag Jain, who was also part of the group. Together with billionaire Ross Perot Jr., he co-owns the Dallas team in partnership with the Indian Premier League side Chennai Super Kings. 

The MLC launched franchises in cities where the South Asian, Caribbean, and Australasian diaspora — and cricket fandom — were particularly strong, including one in Seattle co-owned by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. 

“Between all of us, we knew how to build infrastructure and accelerate products,” Jain said. In this case, the product was cricket. 

The dream of a match in the Coliseum dates back to last season’s MLC playoffs when Harinarayan mentioned the idea offhand to David White, the team’s CEO. The Unicorns had toured other sites around the Bay Area, but few had space or inclination to accommodate a cricket field. 

“Where else were we going to find a major league sports stadium without having to build one?” Harinarayan said. 

But the Coliseum’s complex ownership structure, split between the A’s and the City of Oakland, posed its own challenges. Currently, the African American Sports & Entertainment Group has proposed transforming the site into housing and new businesses, but has yet to finalize a deal to take over the property. 

“The property was very much in transition,” Harinarayan said. “Different stakeholders wanted different things, so we just had to keep pushing.”

After months of delays, the Unicorns struck a deal to lease the venue for one year. Harinarayan said the Unicorns would like to play in Oakland beyond this season, but the team needs clarity on the property’s immediate and long-term future. The stadium also serves as the home field for the Oakland Roots soccer team. 

Against the Knight Riders on Saturday, 23-year-old Australian international Jake Fraser-McGurk broke a yearlong slump in spectacular fashion by leading the team in runs and batting for an hour straight. To the uninitiated, it was as if Jose Canseco or Mark McGwire took every at-bat for nine consecutive innings.

Under the sunny skies at the Coliseum on Saturday, fireworks blasted after each six, and the home crowd oohed every time a fielder made an athletic, bare-handed catch. “C’mon Sparkle Army, it’s time to get loud,” the PA announcer beckoned to cheering Unicorn fans. 

For now, the matches at the Coliseum are a better representation of MLC’s ultimate ambitions than its current reality. The A’s averaged more than 11,000 fans at their 81 home games during the team’s final season in Oakland, whereas the cricket matches drew an average of 5,000 per game. 

But the juxtaposition between the A’s intentional neglect of their former stadium and the desire among the cricket league’s founders to invest is a stark contrast. With the series at the Coliseum, MLC wanted to send the message that cricket can thrive in the Bay Area, and its biggest backers saw the weekend as just the beginning. 

“Even if you have the passion and money, we’re still establishing a new sport in a world where there’s already lots of competition for attention,” Harinarayan said. “But selling someone an actual tangible product rather than just a theory of one is a huge difference.”