Ricky Ponting and the 'slow-burn' gamble: US cricket at the threshold of the 2028 Olympics

In an interview with Reuters, former Australia cricket captain Ricky Ponting chose a phrase to describe cricket in the United States: slow-burn. A fire that smoulders. Slow. Stubborn. It makes no promise of flaring up overnight. For a man who is simultaneously head coach of Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket and an investor in Century Cricket Centres, that phrasing is not pessimism. It is honesty, and that honesty is precisely what deserves analysis.

This is not the story of a single week of fixtures. It is the story of a sport searching for a foothold in the largest sports market on earth, where baseball, American football, basketball and soccer have already divided nearly the whole pie. What makes this story worth writing lies in this: the person speaking for it is at once coach, investor, and media face for the very ecosystem he is assessing. When one person holds three roles in the same story, his words are both evidence and marketing claim. The writer's job is to separate the two.

Context: a sport carried by two floats and one deadline

Cricket in the US has never been a mass sport. It has 19th-century roots, a large South Asian diaspora community, and for over a decade a franchise league called Major League Cricket. But its operating foundation still rests on two large floats.

The first float is imported international stars used to sell tickets. Ponting is one of them, in the head-coach chair. The model mirrors what many young football leagues around the world have done: buy credibility from abroad to build a domestic foothold.

The second float is a time-bound event. Cricket has been included in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic programme. A fixed milestone. A deadline with a date on it. In the sports industry, a deadline is always a stronger catalyst than any moral appeal.

Between those two floats sits the United States men's national cricket team. And here is the most important fact this piece wants to reconstruct: at T20 World Cup level, the US team has competed on level terms with countries with long cricket traditions, and in one edition it beat Pakistan — a former champion — at home. For a nation below full ICC membership, that is not mere luck. It is a verifiable milestone.

Based on my experience watching matches, this is the first thing I always check when assessing an emerging sports market: does a concrete, citable, re-watchable result exist to anchor the entire growth story? For US cricket, that anchor is the Pakistan win. Without it, any growth figure is just marketing. With it, the story becomes verifiable.

But I must also say this plainly: a historic win is an anchor, not a foundation. The foundation of US cricket lies elsewhere, and Ponting is the one pointing exactly at it.

Washington Freedom's record: from the top of the podium to the narrow margin

The easiest thing to overlook in this story is the record of the team Ponting actually coaches. Washington Freedom won Major League Cricket in 2026, in his very first season in charge. In the two following seasons they reached the final and lost.

That number carries more weight than it appears to. In short-form franchise leagues, reaching the final two seasons in a row after a title is a sign of a stable operating system rather than a lucky moment. Winning once can be a fluke. Reaching three finals in the first three seasons is structure.

That is a coach's professional floor: always among the league's top tier, rather than a permanent champion. These are different things. And the gap between them is precisely the data blind spot I want to linger on.

Why blind? Because the information released comes with no performance metrics at all. No detailed win rates by opponent type. No data on the efficiency of death-over batting, on bowling allocation, on the conversion rate of scoring in decisive situations. We only have the end results of three seasons, retold in words. For a writer grounded in evidence, that is thin information.

What I can draw cautiously: Washington Freedom is in a subtle transition from winner to near-winner. And in T20 cricket — where three balls can flip an innings — the distance between those two states is often decided not by squad quality but by a moment. Data does not lie, but it does not feel pain either. I write to fill the gap between those two things.

Ponting himself admits things have not been plain sailing. That sentence, from a man who won a World Cup as captain, is worth more than any performance report. It tells us the two final defeats left a real residue, not a footnote in a file.

The counter-intuitive angle: investing in the runway, not the stage

Read only the national-team answers and you would think Ponting is selling a top-down dream. But the answers on grassroots development are the most notable part of the whole conversation.

He says US cricket needs to get into primary schools. It needs to compete with baseball for children. And here, read closely, we see a striking inversion.

Cricket in the US does not lack fans. It lacks players.

This is the core distinction between a demand problem and a supply problem. A sports market can have a huge television audience and still never produce a single international-class player, if there is no development pipeline. The US cricket fan base is large enough to fill a stadium on special occasions. But a national cricket culture is not built by full stands. It is built by a Tuesday afternoon practice at some primary school in Texas.

And it is precisely here that Ponting's argument collides with an internal tension. He speaks of the need to grow the grassroots first. But he also speaks of a successful national team as a catalyst that spreads down through every level. These two claims are not strictly contradictory, but they require an ordering. If the national team must succeed first, where do the players come from? And if the grassroots must be built first, how many years pass before results are enough to feed belief back?

This is the question where many emerging sports get stuck. Women's football was stuck in exactly the same way for decades: no investment because no results, no results because no investment. Women's football is not a miniature version. It is a world with its own rules — and its first rule is the rule of the silent spiral. US cricket stands before that same spiral, except it has a deadline named the 2028 Olympics to break it.

Financial structure: an economy built on events and investors

The structurally notable thing is Ponting's dual role. He is the salaried head coach of a franchise team and simultaneously an investor in Century Cricket Centres — a venture that has opened its first indoor training facility in New York, with performance-tracking technology.

Look at the nature of that investment. It is not in the transfer market. It is in real assets, in infrastructure, in the first link of the value chain: the talent development pipeline. A man coaching the elite product while owning the system's entry point. That is vertical integration in the most literal sense.

The question that arises — and I offer it as a hypothesis, not a conclusion — is whether the model can sustain itself. The arithmetic itself has no numbers to verify. No revenue disclosed. No deal structure. No wage figures. With data that thin, any judgement about sustainability is speculation.

But there is one structural signal in the insider's own words. Reliance on a franchise league and a major media event to drive growth shows the US cricket economy currently runs on events and on investors, rather than supporting itself on recurring revenue. When a sport needs an Olympic deadline to keep its momentum, that is a signal it is running on inertia rather than an engine.

There is another aspect rarely discussed but genuinely influential. The participation of a world-class former player as an investor often serves a credibility-transfer function. In emerging sports markets, big investors watch each other before deciding. When a former world champion puts money into grassroots infrastructure, it is a message to other money: this is not a reckless bet. It is an anchor-credibility play, and it works better than any advertising campaign.

The 2028 Olympics: the most beautiful and most dangerous deadline

Never in the recent history of US cricket has there been a fixed, clear, dated milestone like the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. For a sport seeking a foothold, it is a gift. For a data-driven writer, it is the single most important variable in the whole model.

The reason: a dated deadline forces capital to move. Sponsors need time to prepare. Broadcasters need content to sell. Federations are pushed to professionalise their processes around eligibility, anti-doping and youth pathways. An Olympic milestone does not create players by itself. But it creates pressure on the people responsible to create players.

But this is also where the danger lies. The Olympics is a magnifying glass, and a magnifying glass exaggerates both ways. If the development pipeline has not grown in time before 2028, the Olympic spotlight will magnify exactly what Ponting calls the slow-burn — turning it from a neutral assessment into a public indictment. That is a scenario no investor wants.

Transmission: a chain whose weakest link sits at the front

Picture the US cricket value chain as a three-segment line. The front segment is grassroots and children. The middle is the franchise league and the national team. The rear is the Olympics, sponsorship and media rights.

The front segment shows positive intent but no proof. The middle has real competitive evidence: the win over Pakistan, and three consecutive finals for Washington Freedom. The rear holds the greatest potential but depends entirely on the first two.

And here is the central point: in this whole value chain, the weakest link sits at the very front, not at the point of monetisation. People often assume an emerging sport is weak where there is no money. In most cases the reverse is true: money only flows where there is a supply of talent. If US cricket cannot produce young players, capital will only come to buy imported stars, and a sport that forever buys imported stars never becomes its own sport.

I do not cheer from the stands. I type each number and rebuild the match. And in this case, the one number that can be securely reconstructed is baseball's competitive share. Baseball in the US is not merely another sport. It is a cultural ecosystem sunk deep into schools, families and the summer memories of tens of millions. Competing with it is not a competition over rules. It is a competition for the time of a nine-year-old child on a Saturday afternoon.

The biggest opponent of US cricket is not any national team. It is a baseball field in the back yard, where a child plays with their father every weekend.

Governance and concentration risk: when one person stands in three places

There is a common risk in emerging sports models that few analyses mention: concentration risk. When a single individual holds the roles of head coach of the top team, infrastructure investor, and public voice for an entire ecosystem, that ecosystem becomes dependent on one point.

There is nothing irregular about it. But it is a structural weakness, and structural weaknesses usually reveal themselves only when the support point leaves.

Alongside it sits a more delicate question about conflict of interest. When one person coaches a team in a league, invests in that league's development infrastructure, and speaks publicly about the sport's prospects, their public words are both expert opinion and commercial asset. That does not make them wrong. But the reader needs to know in order to weight them properly.

The good news lies in the fact that Ponting is the kind of person who tells the truth even when it does not serve him. When he calls the growth a slow-burn, he is lowering expectations for the very asset he holds a stake in. A pure salesman would not do that. When an actor with a conflict of interest still makes an assessment unfavourable to himself, it is one of the strongest reliability signals a source can emit. That is a point to credit, not to suspect.

The media loop and the expectation gap

Something notable in how this story went out: an international wire service chose to publish a downbeat insider view in a period when enthusiastic press releases about US cricket's growth were plentiful. The editorial choice shows one thing: at this moment, sober assessment has higher news value than cheerleading.

This is a familiar phenomenon in sport. When an emerging market passes through its early phase, its media cycle tends to have three stages. The first is rising expectation, when early believers see potential. The second is disappointment, when expectation meets reality. The third, if the market is durable enough, is a stable plateau, quieter but real.

US cricket is somewhere between the first and second stages. That is the most delicate position. It is where the prettiest projects often die, and also where the most durable ones tend to survive.

The expectation gap here has one feature: it is asymmetric. For the national team, expectation and reality are fairly close — the side has competed on level terms with major cricket nations. For market growth, expectation is running clearly ahead of reality. For the 2028 Olympics, current expectation is pure speculation, with no data to verify it.

I always start with a number. But when no number is reliable enough, being transparent about the missing data is itself a form of precision. In the US cricket equation, the biggest data gap is youth participation. That is the number that will decide everything, and it has not been published. Every argument about the future of US cricket, including from a former world champion, hangs on that gap.

The imperfect inheritance of an emerging sports model

Looking at how Ponting frames the problem, we see a three-tier model: the national team creates inspiration, the franchise league creates product, the grassroots creates supply. All three tiers must run at once. But in real operation they are rarely synchronised. The franchise tier has money to run fast. The grassroots needs a long time and has no short-term profit. The national-team tier depends on results, and results cannot be ordered.

This is why so many emerging sports get stuck in the middle. They build a league, buy a few stars, stage a few spectacular events. But ten years later, the domestic player list is still nearly empty.

I have spent years looking at data tables from underrated sports. One pattern repeats: what kills an emerging sport is not public indifference, but the impatience of the people putting money in. Money needs returns in three to five years. Grassroots needs a generation. When those two timeframes do not match, the project is usually abandoned at exactly the most important link.

For US cricket, their timeframe is set by the 2028 Olympics. That is both fortune and trap. Fortune, because it creates pressure to deliver before the deadline. Trap, because if people treat 2028 as the destination, they will optimise for an event rather than for a foundation.

A 0-5 defeat is not about the loser; it is about the person who dares to stay and watch until the final minute. For US cricket, what is being tested is not the ability to win a title. What is being tested is the ability to remain after the Olympic roar fades.

Some defeats matter more than wins, if somebody bothers to record them

Washington Freedom's two lost finals carry more information than the first-season title. The title says this team can win. The two defeats say this league has become competitive enough that even a strong team can lose. That is a sign of a league maturing, not of a coach declining.

In T20 cricket, where the margin of victory is compressed into twenty overs, reaching the final three times in a row is an achievement of consistency rather than of peak. And in professional sport, consistency is usually more durable than peak. Peaks come and go. Consistency compounds.

The same applies to the whole ecosystem. The win over Pakistan is a peak moment and will be cited forever. But what keeps US cricket alive is not one win. It is an afternoon practice session with enough children enrolled to keep the class running. That does not make television. Without it, there is nothing.

People told me I did not understand women's football. I opened Excel, entered the data, and rewrote it. With US cricket, I will do the same. Open the data table, enter youth participation rates by state, cross-reference with baseball participation in the same age group, plot the graph year by year. Until that line hits bottom and starts to rise, every story of a boom is still just a story.

Signals to track over the coming seasons

There are four variables I will put on a dedicated watchlist.

First, youth participation. This is the only variable that can confirm or refute the entire slow-burn thesis. If this rate rises continuously year on year, Ponting's assessment will be outdated within a few seasons. If it goes sideways, that assessment will become the standard definition of a whole decade.

Second, Washington Freedom's trajectory in Major League Cricket. Another title would be a signal of coaching value. A season outside the final group would be a counter-signal. With the data available, either is possible.

Third, the national team's results against traditional opponents. One win is a moment. Three competitive matches in a row is a level. The boundary between those two things is the boundary between story and fact.

Fourth, commercial commitments around the 2028 Olympics. When sponsorship and media-rights deals start being announced, they will reveal the market's true conviction — not the enthusiasm expressed in speeches.

An open ending

US cricket stands in a rare position. It has a national team that has just produced a real result. It has a franchise league in operation. It has a fixed Olympic milestone as an appointment. And it has an insider brave enough to say that everything is happening more slowly than hoped.

That slowness is not failure. But it is not success either. It is the hardest phase of any sports project: the phase between the claim and the proof.

The question is not whether US cricket will boom. The question is whether, when the 2028 Olympic lights go out, enough children stay on the practice field to keep playing. If the answer is yes, this whole conversation will be just a small chapter in a much longer story. If the answer is no, then slow-burn will turn out not to describe slow growth. It will describe a fire that was never big enough to warm anyone.