In the south-east of Brazil, about 250km due north of São Paulo, lies the town of Poços de Caldas, home to about 150,000 people and remarkable for a few reasons: its thermal baths, its magmatic rock structure – the town is home to Brazil’s first uranium ore concentration plant – and its love of cricket.
“You walk down the street and you have people with English shirts, with Australian shirts, people with Test match names and numbers on their white polos,” says Roberta Moretti Avery. “You walk around Poços de Caldas, you feel like you’re in a foreign country with how much cricket stuff is walking around.”
The arrival of cricket in Poços de Caldas was down to pure chance. In 2000 Matt Featherstone, once of Kent – he played six List A games for them – met and fell in love with a Brazilian woman who was studying in London, and she convinced him to try life in her home town. He brought cricket with him. A few years later Moretti Avery also spent time in England. “I actually was there when the 2005 Ashes were happening and I saw it on TV,” she says.
“I thought: ‘Oh my god this is the most boring game ever created.’” Then she met an Englishman and convinced him to move to her hometown. By pure coincidence, both Brazilians were from Poços de Caldas.
Once back in Brazil, Moretti Avery’s husband convinced her to give the game a go. She found she enjoyed it, in time became captain of the national team, and is now president of the Brazilian Cricket Confederation (BCC). From having no organised cricket before Featherstone turned up, the region alone last year had 7,000 people under the age of 30, most under 17, playing it regularly – the town’s mayor has suggested that more people play cricket there than football – and 12,000 across Brazil. The first cricket programme was in an orphanage, and in Brazil it is mainly a game for the underprivileged – hence occasional donations of kit, and people wandering around in England shirts.
The BCC continues to spread the word: across 2023 it ran cricket presentations, competitions and festivals for 44,000 people; in 2024 for 80,000; last year for 100,000, most of them women and girls. It has centrally contracted international teams, most players native Brazilians. It produces its own cricket bats. And about 12,000km away, at the Dubai headquarters of the International Cricket Council (ICC), it is causing some excitement.
“It depends on whether you look at it through a performance lens or a participation lens, but countries that are really exciting us at the moment are Brazil in the Americas region and Nigeria in Africa,” says Will Glenwright, the ICC’s head of global development. “We do an annual census that records all the participation data from all our 98 associate members, and the game’s growing like it’s never grown before.
“We had 24% year-on-year growth in the last reporting period. Countries like Nigeria and Brazil are driving a lot of that growth. Japan’s very exciting, a country with a strong bat-and-ball heritage and actually a very strong cricket heritage, which they’re starting to realise now. And in Europe, countries like Germany and Italy. There’s pockets of energy everywhere.”
The just-completed men’s T20 World Cup was seen at ICC HQ as a potential driver of global interest. “We wanted to leverage the fact that we had this amazing set of circumstances where you have a World Cup in India, India defending champions, all those storylines that were going to make it a compelling event beyond what it would be anyway,” says Finn Bradshaw, the ICC’s head of digital. “To try and reach people who maybe had a passing interest in cricket and grow their interest in the game. We did a few things to achieve that, and probably No 1 was creating content in languages other than English.”
It may seem obvious, given that Pakistan is one of the sport’s traditional giants and there are around 250m people who speak the language, but for the first time the ICC broadcast games in Urdu. The tournament was broadcast in Nepal for the first time, with Nepali commentary. Given strong recent growth in interest in Japan and Indonesia, select high-profile matches were broadcast online in Japanese and Bahasa. The ICC also used AI to produce highlights packages in Arabic and Portuguese. “Maybe one day we can do it in 200 languages at once,” says Bradshaw.
The India v Pakistan game was shown on YouTube in territories without contracted broadcasters; about 30,000 people watched the English feed, and about 20,000 people watched in Japanese. “That was multiples of what we were expecting to see,” Bradshaw says. “And it wasn’t like they were just getting served it by the algorithm and going away – it’s people who were staying. That genuinely feels to us like it came from nowhere in the last couple of years.”
That cricket is growing internationally can be seen from the number of associate member nations – the ICC receives between five and 10 applications each year and tends to admit a couple. Zambia and East Timor joined last year. Its imminent Olympic return is already driving interest. But is the ICC looking for future World Cup competitors, for people who might play socially, or just for monetisable eyeballs for online content?
“It’s all of that, all three of those,” says Glenwright. “We believe cricket is the greatest sport on earth and we want more people to experience that game, either as a participant or as a fan. This has been driven by an aspiration to make cricket more significant in the global sporting landscape.
“That includes how we can make awareness of the game greater in the big sports economies of the world, like Brazil, China and Japan. And as the awareness of the game grows in those countries, our job is to ensure that those who watch the game and decide they want to play it have a pathway.”
In Brazil, for example, they have been helping local administrators for two decades. “The guidance we get from the ICC on how to grow cricket sustainably, and the funding we get once we take these steps, has been of massive importance to us,” Moretti Avery says.
In pure digital engagement, compared with the period during the last T20 World Cup in 2024, the ICC website received an increase of 42% in traffic from the Netherlands, of 52% in South Africa – where there has been a massive surge of interest over the past couple of years – of 72% in Italy, 145% in Japan, 600% in Zimbabwe. “We’re really ambitious and optimistic about how we can use this event as a launching pad to sustain the growth and the fandom and the excitement in those countries,” Bradshaw says.
So far it seems to be working. “I’ve been getting calls from around the country, people saying, ‘Hey, I’m watching cricket!’,” says Moretti Avery. “Now the kids in the community believe they are part of something bigger. Because they’re not only seeing the big countries, they see smaller countries. They feel they are part of this bigger community. Brazilians are starting to understand that cricket is also their sport, and this is a massive step for us.”
