Major League Cricket 2026 is a T20 franchise tournament hosted across the United States from June 18 to July 18, featuring 6 teams and 34 matches in its 3rd season, backed by the same ownership groups that run IPL dynasties. Cricket in America is no longer a curiosity. It is a business. MLC brings T20 cricket to stadiums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Texas, Washington DC, and New York. It targets the 5 million cricket fans already living in the United States and the millions more who discovered the sport when the 2024 T20 World Cup held group matches in New York and Dallas.
The franchise names tell the story of who is driving this experiment. Los Angeles Knight Riders extends the Kolkata Knight Riders brand to the West Coast. Texas Super Kings carries the Chennai Super Kings identity into the American heartland. MI New York is Mumbai Indians on the Hudson. San Francisco Unicorns, Seattle Orcas, and Washington Freedom round out the six, each building local identities while leveraging the global reach of IPL ownership networks. The championship final is on July 18.
The players follow the money and the opportunity. Rashid Khan has been a fixture in MLC since the league’s inception, his leg-spin as effective on American drop-in pitches as it is at Eden Gardens. Travis Head brings Australian aggression to the competition. International stars from the West Indies, South Africa, and Pakistan rotate through rosters, providing the star power that American sports fans expect. Meanwhile, American-developed players are gaining experience alongside world-class cricketers, building the pipeline that the USA cricket team needs for the 2028 Olympics and the 2030 T20 World Cup.
Timezone management across MLC is more complex than any other cricket league because matches span multiple US time zones. West Coast venues in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle operate on Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). An evening match at 19:00 PDT is 22:00 EDT in New York, 03:00 the following morning in London, and 08:30 AM the next day in India. That puts West Coast matches effectively out of reach for European and South Asian live viewers. East Coast matches at 19:00 EDT are more accessible internationally: 00:00 midnight in London and 04:30 AM in India, late but survivable for the committed. For Americans, the domestic scheduling works: East Coast evening cricket sits in primetime, while West Coast matches offer a comfortable local evening. Check whatisthetime.now/los-angeles, whatisthetime.now/new-york, or whatisthetime.now/seattle for current local times across the league’s venues.
MLC 2026 runs concurrently with the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup in England and overlaps with the start of The Hundred. For the American cricket fan, June and July 2026 is the richest period in the sport’s short domestic history. The question is no longer whether cricket can work in the United States. It is whether MLC can grow fast enough to matter before the 2028 Olympics put T20 cricket on the biggest stage in global sport.