This is the sixth in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. Read part one, part two, part three, part four and part five and get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.

In the last chapter, we met the cricket builders. We saw the first, tentative green shoots of a true Cricket Tech Stack: the tools from ventures like Deep22, StanceBeam, and Kabuni, all quietly engineering the sport’s new foundation. We saw how they could, in theory, fix the game for Raj, the professional player, and Alicia, the disconnected fan.

But a stack is not a system.

Those tools are being built in silos. They are point solutions scattered across continents, fighting for air in a sport that lacks a unifying platform. While cricket's innovators are busy building brick by brick, the rest of elite sport has already built cathedrals.

From the NFL to the NBA, from the EPL to the PGA, the world’s biggest sports have spent the past decade hard-coding innovation into their DNA. They haven’t just built stacks; they’ve built sprawling, interconnected ecosystems. They’ve made data emotional, venues intelligent, and fans indispensable. I have lived and worked in the US so I understand this ecosystem very well.

Cricket, on the other hand, is late to the party. However, instead of being a problem, I believe that this delay is its greatest advantage.

Because this isn't a race cricket has to win from a standing start. The blueprints from those other sports are lying on the table, free to inspect. The most expensive research and development, the billions of dollars burned on ideas that spectacularly failed, has already been paid for by someone else.

Cricket doesn't need to invent the wheel. It needs to steal it.

And second-movers don’t just copy.

They compound.

(Disclosure: The author is an advisor, investor or involved in several cricket technology ventures, including Deep22, Kabuni and StanceBeam. All opinions expressed are independent and focused on broader industry analysis.)

The stack is being built. The system isn’t.

The Cricket Tech Stack is real. AI umpires. Youth development platforms. Highlight-automation startups. Coaching apps.

It’s happening. But it’s happening in pieces.

It's a collection of brilliant, disconnected tools in a sport that desperately needs a system. While an innovator in Chennai builds a world-class coaching app, they have no easy way to integrate with a data platform in Melbourne or a fan-engagement tool in London.

Meanwhile, the NFL uses a unified data system to design primetime storylines. The NBA has turned its highlights into a global digital economy, while golf and the PGA, once a quiet weekend pastime, used technology to make golf a social, gamified, and participatory experience.

The numbers tell the story.

US$58 billion in global SportsTech dealflow since 2020.

56% of that capital originates in the U.S.

Only 7.5% reaches the APAC region. And APAC is the region with cricket’s largest, youngest, and most digitally-native audiences (source: Global Sports Tech Ecosystem Report 25 by SportTechX).

The core issue is integration, not a lack of interest from fans or investors.

Cricket doesn’t need more tools, it needs more imagination.

It needs the institutional audacity to walk into the party late and still leave with the best ideas.

The heist begins

You remember Alicia, from Toronto.

She’s grown up inside the world’s most frictionless sports machine: NFL RedZone (DAZN/NFL Network) on Sundays, fantasy alerts from Underdog and DraftKings, alternate broadcasts like the ‘ManningCast’ (Omaha Productions x ESPN) that feel more like group chats than commentary.

It’s not that cricket doesn’t have versions of these things. It’s that they live in different universes.

There’s Dream11 and MPL for fantasy, sure, but they sit more outside the matchday experience and have current, well documented challenges. There are multiple commentary feeds (Select Dugout, JioCinema’s alternate streams), but nothing yet on the scale of the NFL that blurs the line between broadcast and creator culture.

Alicia can feel the latency.

And then there’s Raj, the Pro.

He streams every EPL match surrounded by Opta Vision and StatsBomb-level data overlays, watches SkillCorner’s AI tracking build player-movement heatmaps from a single camera, and gets post-match biometric reports from Catapult and STATSports that tell him exactly when his body will hit redline.

Cricket has some of that: Opta Cricket (Stats Perform) powers ball-by-ball feeds; CricViz crunches win probabilities; Catapult is embedded across ECB and Cricket Australia high-performance setups.

But beyond that? The stack thins fast.

There’s no equivalent to SkillCorner automating movement data from broadcast video. No Wyscout-style global player database. No integrated Hudl-tier feedback loop for semi-pro or youth players.

Raj doesn’t need more numbers. He needs the network around them: the ecosystem that football, basketball, and golf have already stitched together.

Room 1: Data & performance

What we’re stealing: football’s applied-analytics playbook.

In elite football and golf, data is no longer a post-match report; it's the everyday infrastructure of performance.

Football’s data economy alone attracted $7.7billion in investment since 2020 (source Football Tech Report by SportTechX), with AI-tracking firms like ReSpo.Vision, Kinexon, and Veo now embedded across elite academies and even grassroots leagues.

In most top-tier clubs, the live video feed is the dataset with every run, sprint, and pass automatically captured, tagged, and analysed. Cricket has similar potential (every delivery already on camera, every player tagged) but the technology to stitch that footage into performance systems still hasn’t arrived.

In 2024, Europe channelled 64% of its SportsTech funding into these athlete-focused tools.

Cricket’s share barely registers.

This is the great irony. Cricket is a sport defined by data. We have recorded every ball, every angle, and every amateur livestream for decades. The footage is there; the feedback loop isn’t.

Raj, our pro player, lives in this gap. He imagines uploading a ten-minute net session from his phone and getting back instant, actionable data: his swing-plane analysis, his workload tracking, a red flag on his back-lift, even a direct comparison to a county pro's technique under pressure.

This technology is already available, it just needs to be reapplied to cricket.

This tech exists, today, in other sports. But in cricket, Raj is still relying on ‘feel’ and the intuition of a coach who is stretched thin. The anxiety of not knowing if his practice is working is a mental tax that players in other sports simply don't have to pay. Cricket just needs to plug in.

Room 2: Fans & monetisation

What we’re stealing: America’s emotional API, that is, the system the NFL and NBA built to let fans, creators (Jomboy), fantasy platforms (DraftKings), and broadcasters (ManningCast) "plug directly in" to the game's emotional core and build new experiences.

No market on earth monetises attention like North America.

The fan isn’t a spectator: they’re a stakeholder.

This single stat explains cricket’s entire problem:

52% of U.S. SportsTech funding goes to fan-focused solutions.

47% of APAC funding goes to executive tools. (GSTER 25)

The U.S. builds for the fan. APAC builds for the back-office.

This is the fundamental divide: U.S. sports are product-obsessed businesses built to serve fans, while many international sports are still federation-run entities built to serve tradition. Cricket is a case in point.

The NFL doesn’t just count eyeballs; it converts participation. It understands that fans who play fantasy or make micro-predictions watch, on average, 19 more games per season.

This should be understood as smart game design, not as gambling.

Football’s already proven the model. Platforms like Sorare and OneFootball alone have raised over $1.2 billion between them, turning digital fandom into a marketplace for collectibles, media rights, and community ownership.

By contrast, cricket’s fan apps remain single-purpose, a fantasy team here, a live score there, with none of the networked monetisation that keeps fans engaged long after the match ends.

The next frontier is Fantasy 2.0: real-time prediction markets, compliant micro-plays, and social wagering. It's the low-stakes, second-screen connection that makes every ball of a five-match T20 series matter.

We’ll dig deeper into that in a future piece.

Then there’s content.

Cricket hasn’t yet built its Jomboy, its ManningCast, or its Dude Perfect. The audience is there (hyper-digital, meme-literate, and desperate for connection), but the pipes aren’t.

Alicia doesn’t want another stiffly-cut highlight package with sterile commentary.

She wants personality, chaos, and context. She wants a 'ManningCast' for the IPL, where two retired legends, say, AB de Villiers and Kevin Pietersen, just pull apart the game with the irreverence of a private text thread, live.

Why doesn't this exist? Because federations see it as a loss of control, a dilution of the brand. The NFL and NBA see it as brand expansion. They license irreverence (ManningCast and Jomboy - MLB) because it brings in a new, younger audience that finds the main broadcast stale.

Until cricket stops fearing that irreverence, it’ll keep losing attention to everything that isn’t cricket.

Room 3: Venues & experience

What we’re stealing: the smart-stadium revolution.

SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles personalises digital sponsorships and food orders in real time.

Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas uses AI-driven heat-maps to manage crowd flow, eliminating lines before they form.

The same transformation is happening across football. Clubs like Tottenham Hotspur built their stadiums as integrated tech stacks (powered by HPE, Samsung, and AWS) where crowd flow, catering, and content all run on live data.

Qiddiya City’s upcoming mega-stadium in Saudi Arabia, designed by Populous, takes it even further: AI-led wayfinding, LED-integrated seating, and real-time fan analytics. Cricket’s biggest venues, even the newest ones, are still built around broadcast sightlines, not fan UX.

Since 2020, investors have poured $1.2 billion into tech-enabled social venues. 81% of that money was in the U.S., and 55% was golf-driven (think Topgolf, Drive Shack).

Cricket is finally joining the club, but on the fringes.

Century Cricket Centres, just launched in Houston, blend AI coaching bays with data capture and community play. It's a digital-physical loop built for repeat visits.

Imagine: you walk into a centre that knows your name, books your lane, tracks your improvement, and sends you a personalised, shareable highlight reel by the time you get home.

This elevates the simple practice net into a true, data-driven network.

Raj doesn’t dream of packed stands anymore.

He dreams of instrumented ones.

The getaway car: Mindset > model

Alicia doesn’t think about "technology" when she’s at SoFi Stadium.

Everything just… works.

Tickets sync automatically. Face-scan entry. Real-time seat offers. Food ordered, replay caught, and friends located, all without friction.

The magic wasn't in the technology itself, but in the human-centric design applied at scale.

Then she looks at cricket.

Ticket portals that crash. Concession lines that last three overs. WiFi that doesn't exist.

Let's be blunt. I've walked through SoFi, Allegiant, and worked with people who built the new Spurs stadium. Comparing that experience to any major cricket ground on earth isn't just an upgrade; it's a different reality.

Cricket's dwindling fan experience can be blamed on the calendar or a ‘meaning problem’ but that's the easy excuse.

The harder truth? Fans aren't just tired of the schedule; they're tired of the friction. They are tired of being treated as eyeballs to be counted, not as customers to be served.

Alicia still loves the sport.

But she can feel how much better it could treat its fans.

That is the getaway: the mindset itself. The 'getaway car' isn't the AI or the app. It's a mindset driven by an institutional obsession with removing friction and is one that values the fan's time over the federation's control.

The tools exist. Cricket just needs to steal them, with intent.

The second-mover advantage

Here’s the twist.

Cricket’s delay is its greatest advantage.

First-mover sports burned billions learning what works. Now the blueprints, and, more importantly, the lessons from their failures, are free.

The NFL’s data boom in the 2010s taught everyone hard lessons about player privacy. They got into ugly fights with player unions over wearable data.

Lesson for cricket: Build the data-sharing and privacy rules with the players before you roll out the tech.

The NBA’s creator wave showed the limits of IP control. Their early-2010s ‘DMCA takedown’ era, when leagues sent copyright strikes to fans posting highlights, was a PR disaster. They eventually realised those clips were free marketing, not theft.

Lesson for cricket: don’t send cease-and-desists to teenagers; build a ‘creator API’ and let them fuel the hype for you.

Golf’s tech-venue rise proved that for the modern fan, experience beats broadcast. People will pay more to participate in a high-tech social version of a sport (Topgolf) than to just watch it.

Lesson for cricket: Stop thinking about the stadium as a place to watch a game and start thinking of it as a place to be.

Cricket can copy none of them yet still learn from all of them.

Because this heist is fundamentally about control, not technology.

For decades, cricket’s federations gave structure, but throttled speed. They gatekeep.

In the U.S. and some elite European sports, founders build; federations license.

That’s why those markets sprint ahead.

The heist can't happen until the insiders, the boards, and the federations give the keys to the innovators.

Governance for trust, entrepreneurs for speed.

The APAC arbitrage

Now zoom out.

Where does cricket actually live?

Primarily APAC.

Sports Tech Funding: India $3.1 billion (half from Dream Sports) and Australia $216 million (2020-24). This means APAC = 7.5% of global SportsTech funding. (Source: GSTER 25)

Two of the world’s biggest cricket nations sit inside the most under-capitalised SportsTech region on earth.

What looks like a weakness is, in fact, the decade's biggest arbitrage play.

But it's not just a financial inefficiency. It's a knowledge arbitrage.

It's a glaring market gap, and it's built on a simple wall of ignorance. The North American and European VCs, founders, and engineers who build these best-in-class solutions? They don't understand cricket.

To them, it’s a complex, foreign sport with impenetrable rules. They see messy governance, not the 1.5 billion tech-savvy fans. They’ve already built the "what" (the tech), but they have no idea "where" (cricket) or "how" (the nuance) to apply it.

This is the real heist.

It isn't just about stealing the ideas. It’s about being the "translation layer" that no one else can build.

The opportunity isn't just "copying" the tech; it's in the nuanced adaptation. It’s knowing that a player-tracking system built for a 3-hour NFL game is useless for a 5-day Test match—unless you know how to adapt it for endurance, workload, and spell-length. It's understanding that a fan-engagement app built for the NBA's 82-game season needs to be re-engineered for the hyper-condensed, 8-week loyalty of the IPL.

The strategic imperative is clear: a bridge is needed.

A player is missing from the game: one who can walk into a Boston analytics firm and explain how their NFL-based player-load model can be adapted to prevent fast-bowler injuries. One who can show a LA-based media company how their "ManningCast" tech can be re-skinned for a global T20 audience.

This is the export engine. India brings unparalleled scale and engineering talent. Australia brings elite execution and product rigour. What's needed is the link to connect that engine to the world's best, proven, and mispriced technology.

For investors, that’s the unpriced trade of the decade. You aren't just betting on a sport; you're betting on being the one who can translate the blueprints.

The getaway plan: How to pick the lock

The sport has a central choice. It can continue to build its own tech stack brick by brick, slowly and painfully, in disconnected silos.

Or, it can pull off the heist and work with native cricket tech to exponentially grow the game.

But how does it begin?

It doesn't start with a memo to the ICC or a five-year plan. It doesn't start by asking for permission. A heist like this, one that reroutes billions, starts with a single, audacious act of "Applied Larceny."

The full playbook (how to navigate the rights, the politics, and the entrenched federations) is a blueprint we'll unroll in future pieces. But the first move? It's already there for the taking. It just requires one actor to pick one undefended lock.

What does that look like?

• It could be a single CPL or PSL franchise, tired of its official app, launching a $100,000 ‘Fan Experience Prize.’ They'd open their ticketing and stadium API to any developer on earth and say: "Fix this. The best fan-built app that actually solves the entry lines, delivers food to seats, and syncs replays to your phone, wins." They don't ask the league; they just do it.
• It could be a single broadcaster (say, in South Africa or Bangladesh) holding the rights to a less-hyped bilateral series. Fed up with stale commentary, they give the alternate feed rights to a crew of popular YouTubers and ex-players for $1. They run it live on Twitch and YouTube, proving the "ManningCast" model, not as a $10 million risk, but as a $1 experiment.
• It could be a single players' association (like the World Cricketer’s Association or a domestic one) building its own player-data ‘vault.’ They’d state that, as of next season, all wearable data belongs to the player, not the league, and can only be accessed via their unified, secure API, instantly creating the "Wyscout for cricket" that Raj is desperate for.

The heist doesn't start with a consensus. It starts with one innovator, one team, or one broadcaster deciding to stop waiting for permission to build a better version of the sport.

Ultimately, the Great Cricket Heist is an act of ambition, not of theft. It's about giving the sport permission to build like the NFL, storytell like the NBA, and socialise like the PGA, all without losing the soul of the game.

The blueprints are on the table. The vault is open. The full plan is being written.

The only question left is who is brave enough to make the first move.

This is the sixth in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. Read part one, part two, part three, part four and part five and get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.