141st IOC Session, Mumbai, 16 October 2023. Photo credit: IOC Media on Flickr
The 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup is underway and into its second week. While crowds for some early matches have been lacklustre, digital engagement has been healthy, peaking at 261,778,305 engaged social fans today, October 17th 2023.
With a month still to go the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup is already the third most digitally engaged sporting event of the decade behind the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup (506m), 2021 Olympic Games (362m) and ahead of the Super Bowl (261m), Tour de France and (Men’s) US Golf Open (both 251m) and four times bigger than the 2023 Men’s Rugby World Cup which concludes this month (60m).
Daily Active Users (peak) 2020-23 Source: Meta (Instagram/Facebook deduplicated)
Cricket also made the news yesterday when it was formally included, alongside squash, lacrosse, baseball, softball and flag football in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) session in Mumbai.
By including cricket the IOC has been eyeing an incremental audience opportunity, especially in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka where cricket is the number one sport.
Generate Digital analysis: Daily Active Users October 17th 2023, Meta (Instagram/Facebook deduplicated)
Not only are there 221m fans in these four countries engaging with the men’s Cricket World Cup today that are not currently engaging with the Olympics but there also over 3.7 million fans in the US who might engage with the Olympics in LA in 2028 for the first time. The debut of Major League Cricket this summer and an ICC Men’s T20 World Cup which will be partially hosted in the US in June 2024 will only whet the appetite of US-based cricket fans further.
When the Olympics is firing on all cylinders next summer and in the summer of 2028 the overlaps between audiences will of course be bigger but there is clearly an incremental opportunity given there are only two hundred thousand Americans and seven million global fans that are both Cricket World Cup and committed Olympic fans. Add in a wider pool of 196m global digital cricket fans (13.7m in the US) not currently engaging with the Cricket World Cup the possibility of an Olympics that outperforms the FIFA World Cup digitally is real.
The inclusion of cricket will not only widen reach but should bring commercial opportunity for the LA 2028 organising committee. There is high audience affinity among digital cricket fans in the US with sponsor categories that are not yet fully sold and with aspirational brands that might be eyeing a domestic partnership.
Generate Digital analysis, October 2023
Generate Digital analysis, October 2023
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