Usaca Announces Deal For Domestic T20 League
The USA Cricket Association (USACA) has announced a $70m licensing agreement with sports development company Global Sports Ventures to a domestic Twenty20 (T20) league.
It is hoped that the rights will lead to the development of a franchised T20 professional cricket league in the US.
The deal will provide $70m over 15 years, and will also offer the resources to offer central contracts to both men’s and women’s players.
Jignesh Pandya, president and CEO of Global Sports Ventures, LLC said: “The professional sports landscape is a notoriously tough market to break into, but we’re confident in the strength of the consumer demand in the US. This agreement allows us to grow the world’s second most popular sport right here in our own backyard.”
“Global Sports Ventures has entered into a partnership with USACA and it’s a very lucrative one but not lucrative in the sense that it will enrich us but it gives us a chance to survive and to grow,” USACA president Gladstone Dainty said, according to reports on ESPNCricinfo.
“With this agreement, one of our first orders of business is to put a process in place to identify and reward our performing players and our emerging players with contracts. Not token contracts. They will be given contracts to make them professional players. We’ll have a pipeline, we’ll have a winning team. We’ll have a team playing at a really world-class level and those are some of the ingredients we need to take this forward. It gives us an opportunity not only to dream but to live our dreams.”
Currently, the USACA remains under administrative suspension by the International Cricket Council (ICC) and has no sanctioning authority for cricket in the USA, including the ability to issue and receive no-objection certificates to and from other member boards. As such, any foreign player participating in a T20 league under the auspices of the USACA could run into difficulty of respective member guidelines.
