Cricket and Globalization

Cricket has changed dramatically in recent years and now can claim to be a truly global game, thanks in large part to new media technologies which bring a global audience for World Cups and other major competitions. However, the globalization of cricket has not followed a pattern familiar in other sports: concentrations of wealth, media, and marketing leading to the domination of Western countries over the rest, and this fact alone makes it interesting for scholars of the globalization of sport. Cricket has followed a very different global path; the non-Western countries (former British colonies) have begun to dominate and have taken control of the economics and politics of the game. In short, cricket has been "e;Indianized"e;.The globalization of cricket has received a massive boost from the popularity of the newest form of the game (Twenty20) which is helping promote cricket as a mass TV sport. The rise of Twenty20, particularly the Indian Premier League (IPL), is transforming the way cricket is organized, played, and watched all over the world. This development both reinforces the globalization of cricket and also underlines that the "e;movers and shakers"e; within cricket are no longer the traditional elites in metropolitan centres but the businessmen of India and the media entrepreneurs world-wide who seek to shape new audiences for the game and create new marketing opportunities on a global scale.