OAKLAND — A loud and rowdy group of a dozen or so family and friends, decked out in orange, barely let Anand Rajamaran get a word in from the back of the owners’ suite in between chants of “Let’s go Unicorns” and outbursts over wickets, sixes and the like.
Overlooking the playing surface from what would have been the right field line for most of the Oakland Coliseum’s six decades in existence, the VIPs were merely a fraction of the more than 25,000 fans this past weekend to ring in the venue’s newest era: the U.S. capital of cricket.
“I would say it’s a dream come true, but even that would be lying,” Rajamaran said over the noise. “Because I couldn’t even dream that this would happen.”
A rectangular, brown patch of grass, clay and sand (measuring 22 yards by 10 feet) was shipped from New York and installed around where second base used to be, surrounded by manicured grass. Boundaries with LED displays extending some 60 meters from the center encircled what used to be the warning track. Batters with wooden bats and protective helmets prepared to hit round balls in the same dugouts that hosted Baseball Hall of Famers.
The Coliseum’s days as the home of Major League Baseball’s Athletics and the National Football League’s Raiders are long gone, but their departures opened the door to another tenant:
Major League Cricket and its local team co-owned by Rajamaran, the San Francisco Unicorns, one of six squads that make up a league that aims to offer the same level of competition as The 100 in England and the Caribbean Premier League — with many of the same players.
Fans cheer during the inaugural Major League Cricket opener between the San Francisco Unicorns and the Washington Freedom at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, June 12, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)Those who came to the three-year-old league’s first foray on the West Coast — with daily attendance figures that would have rivaled the A’s on most nights, topping out at 7,361 on Friday — were treated to a show by the home team, who set a scoring record on opening night and ended the weekend undefeated after a last-ball six win (the equivalent of a walk-off home run).
The dramatic finish wrapped up the Unicorns’ home schedule — the first of three stages of MLC’s season — but competition runs through Thursday. And there’s much more in store.
“This isn’t cricket in a baseball stadium as a gimmick. This is actually a bona fide cricket stadium and one of the best already in all the Americas. It’s really exciting,” Major League Cricket CEO Johnny Graves said. “And hopefully just the start of lots more to come.”
The head of the International Cricket Council, Jay Shah, was in attendance, and there have been discussions about incorporating the Coliseum into the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, either hosting friendlies in the lead-up or as a potential site for the Games themselves.
The current plan is to erect a temporary venue in Los Angeles for the six-team tournament, the first time cricket will be part of the Summer Games since 1900, though organizers have moved some sports to other areas of the country with more appropriate venues.
Those involved in Major League Cricket believe there is no stadium in the U.S. better-suited for the sport than the Coliseum, with its unique history, dimensions and location.
“This building has so much history; I feel like the walls speak to you,” said Anurag Jain, a co-owner of the Texas Super Knights and co-founder of the league who made his money in the Bay Area, getting his first investment check at the Borders on University Ave in Palo Alto.
“It looks authentic, you know, like like an authentic cricket tournament with quality teams,” added Adam Gilchrist, an Australian cricket Hall of Famer-turned-commentator whose primary association with the setting, like many in the sport, was through the movie “Moneyball.”
The San Francisco Unicorns and the Washington Freedom play during the inaugural Major League Cricket opener at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, June 12, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)The only departure from the cricket Gilchrist was accustomed to, he said, was the in-game entertainment. At one point, a Steve Aoki stadium remix transitioned into Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” while Warriors hype man Franco Finn appeared on the jumbotron to rile up “Sparkle Nation.”
Graves visited the Coliseum in 2022 eyeing it as a potential site for cricket’s 2024 World Cup because, he said, “it was really the only (stadium with a large enough playing surface) where you could have legitimate highest level of cricket being played without compromising the game.”
Just one problem: the A’s.
Installing the pitch at midfield — a process that required shipping it in four pieces on flat bed trucks, ripping up the soccer turf set up for the Roots and using heavy-duty cranes to lay it down — cost in the neighborhood of $1 million, according to Graves.
“It’s still very expensive, still very complicated,” he said. “But it’s significantly easier than if the A’s were here.”
The Unicorns were founded in 2023 but didn’t play a home game until this past week. Because of the lack of viable stadiums, the league has split its first two seasons between a 7,000-seat venue built for the Super Kings in Dallas and a 20,000-seat multipurpose stadium in Broward County, Florida, which doesn’t have a cricket team.
When the A’s announced their plans to leave Oakland, the Unicorns’ CEO, David White, approached the city of Oakland about using the venue. They signed a onetime contract for this week’s games, which were expected to generate $3 million in economic impact for the city.
They didn’t lock in a longer partnership due to the uncertainty surrounding the ownership of the Coliseum, but Graves said, “we’re very, very keen to come back.”
“We certainly want to be part of the future of the Coliseum in its current form and any future form,” he said. “We certainly want cricket to have a home in the Bay Area. Hopefully from what we’re doing we’re going to be growing the fanbase and have reasons not just to come back with Major League Cricket but come back with Team USA and play some of the biggest and best teams in the world here.”
A San Francisco Unicorns bowler practices bowling before the inaugural Major League Cricket season opener against the Washington Freedom at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, June 12, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)The 25,293 total fans over the first four days represented a strong showing for domestic cricket, but it’s only a small sliver of the millions of fans worldwide. Only soccer has a larger global following, and Graves said MLS “gives us a bit of a roadmap.”
One reason why the league targeted the Bay Area market — along with New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, D.C. — was its proportion of high-earning tech workers who immigrated from South Asian countries where the sport is a national pastime.
The challenge, like soccer, is that club teams aren’t necessarily where fans’ primary allegiances lay. For example, when India and Pakistan met in last year’s T20 World Cup finals, they sold out a 34,000-seat stadium in New York with ticket prices reaching four figures.
The week at the Coliseum, meanwhile, will be a money-loser, Graves acknowledged. The league’s owners and investors have sunk about $200 million total so far over the three years, according to Jain, but their eye isn’t on short-term profits.
“Unlike other leagues in the world, we said we’ll do it privately and we said we’ll build it like we build a start-up,” Jain said. “My wife will tell you that is true, that profit has not been a focus, but we’re working on something bigger.”
The San Francisco Unicorns and the Washington Freedom play during the inaugural Major League Cricket opener at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, June 12, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)The goal is to lay the groundwork for cricket to be as mainstream in the U.S. as any other sport. They hope the 2028 Olympics will be a turning point. The Americans scored a major upset over Pakistan in last year’s World Cup, and if they can make an improbable run at a medal in Los Angeles, it could be “a spring board and a catalyst to grow the interest,” Graves said.
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Dating back to at least 2018, those in the sport have believed the U.S. market was ripe for investment. That’s when the largest media rightsholder in the sport approached Rajamaran, the Unicorns’ co-owner, about creating a domestic league.
“Fundamentally,” Rajamaran said, “there was an alignment that the timing was right, and we need to do it now.”
Like Jain, whom he described as his “partner in crime” in the endeavor, Rajamaran was born in India but attended Stanford, eventually founding and selling two tech companies.
It wasn’t without risk. The league nearly failed before it got off the ground. The founding group of owners, including Jain and Rajamaran, needed to raise money from outside investors and navigate a global pandemic.
It was all worth it for the scene playing out in front of the suite’s glass window.
“This is the place I call home,” Rajamaran said. “Silicon Valley has given me everything. I just want to bring the sport that I love to the place that I call home.”
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