San Francisco Unicorns are bringing cricket home to the west coast of the USA

On Thursday night, history will be made at the Oakland Coliseum in California. San Francisco Unicorns and Washington Freedom will launch the third season of Major League Cricket with a rematch of the 2024 final, which will become the first top-level cricket match staged on the west coast of the United States of America.

The Coliseum, which can seat more than 60,000, was until recently the home of the Oakland Athletics (MLB) and Oakland Raiders (NFL) but both franchises have relocated, leaving it without a permanent tenant. Operating at a reduced capacity, it will host the first nine matches of MLC 2025 - including Unicorns' first three home fixtures after two years at neutral venues.

The ICC explored the possibility of using the Coliseum as a venue for last year's T20 World Cup, but plans fell through for logistical reasons. MLC's fixtures will be played on the same drop-in pitches used in the New York (more accurately, Long Island) leg of that tournament, which were transported across the country last month.

"It's a dream come true," Anand Rajaraman, one of Unicorns' co-owners, says. "I'm both excited and nervous. I hope the pitches play better than they did in New York. The curator says they will, because they've had more time to bed in, but fingers crossed. We'll be introducing this sport to new people, and we don't want them to get the wrong idea."

A lack of suitable infrastructure has been a major obstacle to cricket's growth in the US but the Coliseum is unusually well placed to stage matches. "Cricket needs a field with certain dimensions," Rajaraman explains. "The Coliseum is unique in that it was built to host American football and baseball, and therefore it's more oval. That's why the ICC had their eyes on it."

The venue is best known outside the US as the home of Moneyball, the 2011 Brad Pitt film based on Michael Lewis' book of the same name, which explored the Athletics' use of data and analytics to compete with bigger-budget franchises. Fans regularly complained about the upkeep of the venue, and the Coliseum has been described as "baseball's last dive bar" in the New York Times.

The A's have since relocated to Sacramento, temporarily, ahead of a planned move to Las Vegas, and the Unicorns approached the Coliseum last year to discuss the prospect of staging matches in the Bay Area. The project has since been overseen by MLC chief executive Johnny Grave, who started his new role earlier this year following a seven-year stint heading Cricket West Indies.

Rajaraman believes there is a natural affinity between Unicorns and the A's. "In the eyes of the world, they are most famous for Moneyball," he says. "We see ourselves as the team of Silicon Valley, and my background is technology… The way I can contribute to cricket, and enrich the sport overall, is by pushing the envelope in technology."

He believes that cricket's data revolution has a long way to run. "There's been some adoption of data in cricket, which has increased with the IPL, but it's not as deep or advanced as US sports, for sure.

"Whether it's baseball, [American] football or the NBA, they've gone ahead. Technology has not stood still either. With the latest AI, we can do more things with video than we ever could before. I'm very bullish that there is a lot more we can do with data and technology than we are right now."

Rajaraman's background suggests that he should know. He met Venky Harinarayan, his co-owner, while they were studying at Stanford: "He gave me a ride to pick up groceries back in 1993. We founded our first company together in 1996, and we've been business partners ever since." Both men were born in Chennai (then Madras), and have been cricket fans since childhood.

Their first venture, an early price-comparison site called Junglee, was acquired by Amazon during the dotcom boom, and a later company called Kosmix was bought by Walmart; they were also early investors in Facebook. They later founded a venture capital firm, Rocketship, which they still head today.

They were early Cricinfo users while studying overseas. "I could keep in touch with cricket even when I wasn't in India," Rajaraman says. "I remember following the 1996 World Cup with great attention on Cricinfo, and the famous 2001 Test series [against] Australia. Naturally, I couldn't watch the whole days' play, but I followed the rest on Cricinfo." Vishal Misra, one of Cricinfo's founders, leads Unicorns' data analytics team and has a small stake in the franchise.

Rajaraman was immediately enthused by the concept of MLC, and particularly the chance to own a team in the Bay Area. "It's been my home for the last 30 years," he says. "I've invested in enough companies for purely business reasons, and this is certainly not that. I feel like I'm giving back by bringing the sport I love to the region I call home."

The "Unicorns" name brought some pushback from the league itself, but the owners insisted that it was right for them; in the business world, the term refers to a start-up company valued at over $1bn. "We invest in companies at an early stage that become the unicorns of the future," Rajaraman says. "It's emblematic of what makes Silicon Valley great."

Some MLC stakeholders have invested in the Hundred in England, and four IPL franchise owners are involved in the MLC. Unicorns have a strategic partnership with Cricket Victoria, which involves some level of player and coach overlap, but they remain a single-team franchise and have no immediate plans to create a global network of teams.

They were losing finalists under coach Shane Watson last season, their first with Australia captain Pat Cummins in their ranks. Cummins has signed a long-term deal and has expressed his interest in the world of venture capital. "I was blown away by the depth of his interest and knowledge of all things business and technology," Rajaraman says.

Cummins will miss the 2025 MLC season for Australia's Test series against West Indies, but the league's salary offers are hard for others to turn down, as evidenced by Nicholas Pooran and Heinrich Klaasen's recent international retirements. "It's up to the ICC to rationalise the calendar so that there is less conflict between leagues and international cricket," Rajaraman says.

Having fallen in love with the sport through the 1983 World Cup, Rajaraman now believes that ODIs are redundant. "I was at the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne, and there's nothing like it. You want hard-fought Test cricket between balanced teams. T20s have shown that they are the format of the future, and ODIs will have to ride off into the sunset."

But for the time being, his focus is squarely on Thursday night as cricket arrives on the west coast of America.