Cricket will be part of LA 28 Olympics. In July 2028, at a temporary stadium built into the Fairplex in Pomona, cricket will return to the Olympic Games for the first time in 128 years. Six men’s teams and six women’s teams will play a T20 tournament across a fortnight.

The last time cricket was played at an Olympics was in August 1900. The match was between Great Britain and France at the Vélodrome de Vincennes in Paris Olympics. The British side was a touring club from Devon and Somerset. The French side was made up of ten Britons living in Paris and two Frenchmen.

The Paris match is a good summary of how cricket actually spread for most of its history. The English took the game with them. They played it where they emigrated. They taught it where they ruled and otherwise kept it to themselves. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa got cricket through settlers who had no intention of being anything other than British in a new place. India, Pakistan, the West Indies, and Sri Lanka got it through administrators and missionaries who treated the game as moral instruction. Either way, the game travelled with English names attached and Lord’s decided where it went next.

The story of cricket’s global spread is really a story about who held the gate. For most of the years the gatekeepers were English and Australian. They kept the gate shut. The interesting thing about the present moment is not that India has become powerful. It is that the gatekeepers have changed hands and India for reasons of self-interest, demographics and format is actually opening the gate. LA28 is the most visible symptom of the change. It is not the cause.

Argentina, the Netherlands, Denmark, Fiji

Before the Second World War, cricket had real footholds in places the modern map would never suggest. Argentina was the most surprising. The British industrial expansion of the 19th century pulled engineers, bankers, and railway builders to Buenos Aires in numbers that built one of the largest British communities outside the Commonwealth. They recreated English club life wherever they went. The Buenos Aires Cricket Club was founded in 1831. The Argentine Cricket Association was founded in 1913. The MCC toured Argentina multiple times. Between 1911 and 1938, Argentina played thirteen first-class matches against touring sides. Several Argentine players went to England and played in county cricket. The 1937-38 international cricket season included three first-class matches between England and Argentina. The matches played were of the same importance as Australia hosting New Zealand and England touring India.

The Netherlands was a different story. Dutch elite culture in the late 19th century ran through a heavy strain of Anglomania. Cricket arrived in Dutch boarding schools and universities the way Latin had arrived a few centuries earlier as a marker of cultivated taste. By the 1930s, “Gentlemen of Holland” sides were touring England and beating top-tier club opposition. Denmark got cricket from British railway engineers, and it took hold in the country’s oldest academic institutions like Sorø Academy and Copenhagen University. Danish clubs built a tactically disciplined league system that made Denmark the strongest cricket nation in continental Europe. Fiji took an entirely different route. The British administration brought cricket to the islands in the 1870s, and the local tribal chiefs adopted it as a fit with traditional Fijian hierarchies of discipline and team. A Fijian team toured Australia in 1907 and was noted for its aggressive hitting and athletic fielding.

WWII happened and none of these countries was ever granted Test status. The Imperial Cricket Conference which was founded at Lord’s in 1909, admitted England, Australia, and South Africa as founders. The West Indies joined in 1928, New Zealand in 1930, India in 1932. Pakistan was admitted in 1952 only because partition had created it out of an already-admitted India. Sri Lanka had to wait until 1981, Zimbabwe until 1992, Bangladesh until 2000.

The WWII did not invent the gatekeeping. It just made the gatekeeping permanent. The British expatriate communities in Buenos Aires and The Hague departed. The local infrastructure was interrupted. The ICC refused to elevate any of these countries to test nations. What had been thriving was allowed to die. The MCC kept touring them, but as charity exercises, not as competition. The format itself didn’t help. A five-day Test had no commercial logic for any country that did not already love cricket and the amateur ethos. England and Australia kept veto power over almost every meaningful ICC decision into the 1990s, and they used it to keep the membership list short.

London to Mumbai

Sri Lanka winning the 1996 World Cup is usually thought of as the pivot but the real shift was administrative. Jagmohan Dalmiya, India’s representative at the ICC, became its first Indian president in 1997. He recognized that the money and the audiences were in Asia and that nothing was stopping the Asian boards from collectively asserting it. Television rights, corporate sponsorship came from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The ICC moved from a cash-poor Lord’s office to a global business in less than a decade and it moved east while it grew.

The gatekeepers had changed. The point is not which administrators were involved. The point is that the new gatekeepers had a different theory of the game.

The old theory was that cricket was a refined inheritance to be protected from dilution. The new theory was that cricket was a market to be grown. The two theories produce opposite policies. The first one kept Test status scarce and treated Associate nations as charity cases. The second one expands tournaments, invents shorter formats, fast-tracks emerging members, and funds the women’s game on equal terms because every additional player and viewer is an upside.

The expansion of the men’s T20 World Cup is the clearest index of the new theory at work. Twelve teams in 2007, sixteen in 2014, twenty in 2024 and 2026. Each expansion has pulled in Associate nations whose squads are largely populated by players from the South Asian diaspora. USA, Canada, Oman, UAE were four of the twenty teams at the 2026 World Cup, all with squads dominantly South Asian by birth or descent. The 2026 Canada side is captained by a 23-year-old born in Gurdaspur who emigrated in 2020. The 2026 USA captain was born in Ahmedabad. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi now name-checks diaspora captains in his monthly radio address. Even Italy, qualifying for the first time, fielded a multi-diaspora XI built around a South African captain and Indian and Pakistani-origin players raised in Europe.

These teams exist because the new gatekeepers want expansion of cricket. The IPL franchises have extended their reach into Major League Cricket in the US. India’s overflowing domestic system produces players who go on to anchor Associate sides. The game is being deliberately spread by the Indian and South Asian diaspora the same way British expats once spread the game, but with the ICC no longer holding them back.

What happens if you run the curve forward

Three numbers are worth stacking.

The Indian diaspora is around 35 million today, the largest overseas population in the world. 5.4 million in the United States, 3.6 million in the UAE, and 2.8 million in Canada. India’s annual outbound migration is roughly 2.5 million people, the highest of any country. Government projections put the total diaspora between 60 and 65 million by 2056 when you fold in the children and grandchildren of people who are now in their twenties and thirties. That is the cricket-watching population outside India roughly doubling over thirty years.

The continental T20 leagues are filling in the map. The IPL covers the subcontinent. Major League Cricket and CPL cover the Americas. ILT20 covers the Gulf. The Big Bash and SA20 cover Oceania and southern Africa. The European T20 Premier League, ICC-sanctioned and Bollywood-backed, launches in late August 2026 with six city franchises across Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, and stated plans for Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, and Rome. If these leagues mature, cricket starts looking like football. Domestic leagues on every continent feeding a global player market. The national team competition becomes a layer of the game rather than the whole of it.

And the women’s game is finally being built. The Women’s T20 World Cup expanded from eight teams in 2009 to twelve in 2026 with sixteen already approved for 2030. The 2025 ODI Women’s World Cup drew over 500 million digital viewers. The Women’s Premier League launched in 2023 and the 2026 prize pool is the largest in the women’s game’s history. The audience cricket can sell to is no longer half of the addressable population by gender.

Stack the three. The diaspora doubles. The T20 leagues mature into a football-style continental structure. The women’s audience adds itself on top. None of these is hypothetical. All three are happening at measurable rates. Even if each one delivers only half of what its current trajectory suggests then the cricket of the mid-2050s is several times the size of the cricket of today. Most of the growth will come from places that were either invisible or actively kept out for the first hundred years of the sport’s modern existence.

The shape of cricket has always been a function of who held the gate. From 1900 to roughly 1996, the gatekeepers preferred a small game. From 1996 to now, they have preferred a large one. The next thirty years will decide whether cricket finally looks the way football has looked for fifty years. Not as one nation’s inheritance but the world’s.