The most popular sport in the world after Association Football is cricket with a following of 2.5 billion. The motorsport franchise Formula One (F1) is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world, especially among women, and has over 750 million fans. In Australia, Rugby League (which is also popular in the rest of Oceania and northern England) fiercely competes with the more established ‘Aussie Rules’ Football for the title of the nation’s most popular sport. The 2023 Rugby (Union) World Cup in France was the most successful ever, and despite challenges, it continues to be a highly popular sport in both hemispheres.
The correlation between these stats is that these sports are some of the most popular in the world, but struggle to break into the massive American market where the ‘Big Four’ sports of Baseball, Basketball, American Football, and Ice Hockey dominate. This is a factor all these sports have recognised and have attempted to change to increase their popularity and revenue. However, the size and scale of these attempts to break into the American market vary. Football and F1 have been attempting to for half a century, while Rugby League only began its efforts recently. Football’s efforts to crack the United States have been well-publicised and ongoing since the 1994 FIFA World Cup, but the other four sports have stepped up their efforts recently as part of a global trend of sports not popular in the United States gambling on the vast revenue promised by the US market to spread there.
Cricket, a sport in which games can infamously last five days and end in a draw, may seem anathematic to the American attitude of flashy and highly marketable sports – but this is changing. The United States and the West Indies co-hosted the 2024 T20 World Cup (Twenty 20 is a faster format of cricket in which games last approximately 3 hours), which was a roaring success. The US national team claimed a shock victory against cricketing giants Pakistan, and a game between India and Pakistan was attended by 30,000 in a temporary stadium near New York. This success was possible due to the large South Asian diaspora, which is cricket’s path to growth in the US. For cricket to truly become a major sport in the US, it must increase its appeal outside of this market, but this may not be a realistic goal due to tough competition from the very well-established sport of Baseball, despite itself suffering from declining viewership. As well as the World Cup, there is now a professional T20 cricket league in the US. Major League Cricket follows a model of T20 Franchise leagues that most cricket-playing nations have set up, and in its first season in 2024, it attracted top stars like Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan and Australia’s Steve Smith. It has also received investment from big-money Indian-American backers, but this does not suggest that cricket will easily find a market outside of the aforementioned South Asian diaspora, although, with 5 million Indian-Americans alone this could be a sustainable model albeit on a smaller scale than Major League Soccer for example. Despite these limitations, cricket has developed a foothold in the American market and appears to be there to stay.
Formula One has exploded in popularity in recent years, and this boost has given it an upper hand in the crowded US motorsports market for the first time. This is a breakthrough that F1 has been attempting since the 1960s, but they were outcompeted by the likes of Indycar and NASCAR, while Grand Prix held in the US never made enough money to justify the expense of holding them. The two key catalysts for this status quo change were the construction of the Circuit of the Americas near Austin in 2013, which allowed F1 to sustain its presence, and the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive, which premiered in 2019. Drive to Survive allowed F1 to reach a new audience and use star power, which is a sport where individual drivers’ personalities are so important and has in abundance, to increase their footprint in the US. A reason for this could be the individualistic nature of F1 resonating in the highly individualistic American cultural sphere, where even team sports like Baseball and Basketball have hugely individualistic components. This was immensely successful, and there are now two more Grand Prix in the US (Miami and Las Vegas), while, across five different motorsports, NASCAR (F1’s main competitor in the US) had the smallest growth percentage over the two years after the release of DTS. F1 clearly now has a solid foothold in the US. However, to really become a national obsession it likely needs an American driver to fully exploit how the inherent star power of the sport resonates in the US.
The two codes of rugby are further behind and face more challenges in their efforts to break into the US market. America is a priority market for World Rugby; the governing body of Rugby Union has three big stateside tournaments coming up – Rugby 7s at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, the 2031 Men’s World Cup, and the 2033 Women’s World Cup – and want to raise awareness prior to this. They have a multi-faceted strategy to achieve this, including holding Test Matches in the US, both between high-profile teams like New Zealand and Ireland in November and the US and Tier One teams like England in July, the US’ relatively new professional league Major League Rugby wants to become a top five league in the world, and Netflix premiered a Drive to Survive-esque show called Six Nations: Full Contact. However, Michael Yormak, the president of Roc Sports, a sports agency founded by Jay-Z that now represents Rugby stars like South Africa captain Siya Kolisi and England captain Maro Itoje, believes that ‘star power’ is necessary to truly grow the image of Rugby in the United States. He uses Lionel Messi’s move to the MLS and Ilona Maher, a women’s Rugby player who is the 8th most marketable athlete in the world according to SportsPro, as examples.
While this is, in theory, a good strategy, the MLR faces challenges such as the fact that most Rugby national teams (with the exception of South Africa and the Pacific islands) generally won’t pick players who ply their trade abroad and that Japan has already implemented this strategy and attracted some stars like South Africans Pieter-Steph du Toit and Cheslin Kolbe. As for Rugby League, the sport has recently tried to expand into the US through the Rugby League Las Vegas initiative started by Australia’s National Rugby League last year, who were joined by English sides Wigan and Warrington this year. They sold 45,000 tickets, an increase of 5,000 in 2024, which was a modest success. However, Rugby League faces more challenges than Union, namely that it is a smaller code that’s popularity is constrained largely to the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland, and the ‘M62 Belt’ in northern England. Additionally, while Rugby League is a faster game and may be more popular than Union in America if it had more exposure, the high number of similarities between the codes may make it difficult for casual watchers to tell the difference.
All four sports have a foothold in the US market but have vastly different prospects for expansion. Formula One is in the best position and has more potential for expansion as it is already outcompeting its main rivals. Cricket and Rugby Union both have room for growth and an already solid foothold, but the crowded US sports market and popular established sports like Baseball and American Football are challenges, moreover, the US national teams are second-tier sides and that is unlikely to change any time soon. The complex nature of the rules for both sports may also limit growth. Rugby League has the least potential for growth due to Union having a much larger presence but could find popularity among Pacific Islanders in the same way cricket’s pathway to popularity lies in the South Asian diaspora. Furthermore, these sports all lag behind more established competitors in the world of college sports, which is a highly important development pathway for the Big Four, and further increases their cultural hegemony. Despite these challenges, the US sports market will continue to become increasingly diverse over the coming years as new sports expand in the country as board officials seek to grow their various games.