Cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Explained

The last time cricket was played at an Olympic Games, the sport's rules had not yet settled, the tournament consisted of a single match, and the two teams involved were a touring English club side and a group of British expatriates living in Paris. That was 1900. It has not appeared since.

It will appear in 2028, in Los Angeles. That is confirmed, and it is genuinely significant. A great deal about how the tournament will actually work is not confirmed, and this guide is careful about which is which, because a lot of what circulates online about the LA Games treats plans and speculation as settled fact.

What happened in 1900, briefly

Cricket's Olympic history is short enough to summarize in a paragraph.

The sport was on the program for the 1900 Paris Games, one of the sprawling, disorganized early Olympics held alongside a World's Fair, where the boundary between an Olympic event and an ordinary sporting fixture was blurry. Only two teams entered: a British side made up of club cricketers, and a French side consisting largely of British men living in Paris. They played one match over two days. Britain won. Medals were assigned retrospectively, years later, when historians went back and tidied up the record.

Cricket had been listed for other early Games and did not go ahead for lack of entries. After 1900 it disappeared from the Olympic program entirely, for reasons that were partly about scheduling, partly about the sport's governance, and partly about the fact that the countries who played it had their own competitions and did not much care.

More than a century later, that has changed, and the reason is money and reach rather than sentiment.

What is confirmed for 2028

A short list, and everything on it is settled.

Cricket is on the program. The International Olympic Committee approved cricket, along with four other sports, for inclusion at the Los Angeles Games at its session in Mumbai in late 2023. It was proposed by the Los Angeles organizing committee, which under current Olympic rules can put forward additional sports relevant to the host market.

The format is T20. Not the five-day version, not the fifty-over version. T20 is the short form: each side gets twenty overs, which is 120 legal deliveries, and a match runs about three hours. It is the only format that fits an Olympic schedule and an Olympic broadcast window. If the difference between the formats is new to you, Test, ODI and T20 differences explained is the fastest way to get it straight.

There are men's and women's tournaments, six teams each. Twelve teams total across both competitions. That is a small field by cricket standards and it creates most of the complications discussed below.

The Games are in July 2028, in and around Los Angeles. The addition applies to the LA Games specifically. Inclusion at a single Olympics does not guarantee inclusion at the next one.

That is the confirmed list. Everything past this point involves decisions that had not been finalized as this guide was written.

What is not settled

Qualification

This is the biggest open question, and the one with the most invented answers floating around.

Six spots per gender is very few. Cricket has twelve full member nations and a long tail of competitive associate nations. Under almost any qualification system, several established Test-playing countries will miss the Olympics entirely, and there is no precedent for how cricket handles that.

The plausible mechanisms are the obvious ones: qualification by world ranking in the T20 format on a cutoff date, a dedicated qualifying tournament, a regional allocation ensuring geographic spread, a host nation place, or some combination. Each has advocates and each produces a different set of winners. Nothing has been confirmed. Anyone telling you which six teams will be there is guessing.

The host nation question

A related and specifically American issue: whether the United States gets an automatic place as host.

Host nations frequently receive automatic entry in team sports at the Olympics, and it would be commercially sensible here, since an Olympic cricket tournament in Los Angeles without an American team is a hard sell to a domestic audience. It has not been confirmed. If it happens, it would be transformative for the United States national team, which would go from an occasional World Cup qualifier to an Olympic participant in front of a home crowd.

Great Britain, Ireland and the West Indies

Olympic entry works by National Olympic Committee. Cricket does not.

England play international cricket as England, representing England and Wales. Scotland is a separate cricket nation. Under Olympic rules, none of them can enter as such: entry would be via Great Britain, which does not exist as a cricket team and would require the relevant boards to agree on selection, funding and administration. This is not a new problem. It is the same one that has made Olympic soccer awkward for the British nations for decades.

The West Indies is a harder case. It is a single cricket team representing more than a dozen Caribbean nations and territories, each with its own National Olympic Committee. There is no mechanism for the West Indies to enter the Olympics as the West Indies. Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana would have to enter separately, which would dismantle the most storied team structure in the sport for the duration of the Games.

How these are resolved is genuinely undecided, and the answers will shape which countries appear.

The venue

Los Angeles organizers have discussed venue options for cricket, and reporting has pointed to a site east of downtown in the Pomona area. Venue plans for an Olympics regularly change, sometimes late, and this one involves building a cricket ground where none currently exists at Olympic scale. Treat any specific venue claim as provisional until the organizing committee confirms it as final.

The practical problem is the same one described in our grounds and stadiums guide: a cricket field is a large oval with a heavily engineered clay strip in the middle, and the United States has almost no expertise in preparing those surfaces. The 2024 T20 World Cup demonstrated what happens when a temporary pitch is prepared without that expertise, and the criticism was severe. That is the technical risk to watch.

Six teams is the number that causes all the trouble

It is worth sitting with how small the field is, because it explains most of the arguments happening around this tournament.

Cricket has twelve full member nations, the countries entitled to play Test matches, plus a growing group of competitive associate nations, some of whom have beaten full members at recent World Cups. The 2024 T20 World Cup had twenty teams. The Olympics will have six.

That means the tournament will exclude more established cricket nations than it includes. Whichever mechanism is chosen, several countries with long histories, large followings and professional domestic structures will watch the Olympics from home. There is no version of six teams where that does not happen.

The counter-argument, which the sport's administrators have made, is that Olympic tournaments are deliberately small in every team sport, that a compact event is what made inclusion possible at all, and that the growth benefits accrue to the sport globally rather than to the six teams present. That is a reasonable position. It is also going to be an unpopular one in whichever country ends up on the wrong side of the cutoff.

What Olympic cricket would look like on the field

If you have never watched a T20 match, the Olympic version will be the same product you would see in any professional league, which is helpful for a first-time audience.

Each team gets twenty overs. An over is six legal deliveries, so each innings is 120 balls, and the whole thing takes roughly three hours including the break. Ten wickets ends an innings early. The team batting second knows exactly what it needs, which builds tension in the way a two-out ninth inning does, except that it applies to the entire second half of the match rather than the end of it.

A six-team tournament per gender probably means a short group stage followed by knockouts, though the exact structure has not been published. Total match count would be modest, which suits an Olympic schedule where cricket has to share venues, volunteers and broadcast slots with dozens of other sports.

The one genuine unknown is the surface. A newly built cricket square in Southern California, prepared by staff without decades of local experience, is the technical variable that will determine whether the cricket is good or merely present.

Why cricket wanted this

Olympic inclusion is not obviously valuable to a sport whose biggest competitions already draw enormous audiences. The reasoning becomes clear when you look past the established cricket nations.

Funding for smaller countries

In most of the world, government sports funding flows through Olympic structures. National Olympic Committees receive money, and they distribute it to sports on the Olympic program. A cricket board in a country where cricket is not the dominant sport, which is most countries, can go from unfunded to funded purely by virtue of the sport being Olympic.

That is the single strongest argument for inclusion, and it is why associate nations lobbied hardest for it.

Legitimacy in new markets

In China, in much of continental Europe, in parts of Africa and East Asia, "Olympic sport" is a category that carries meaning where "sport played by England and India" does not. Cricket's governing body has been explicit for years about wanting growth beyond its traditional base.

The women's game

The women's tournament may matter more than the men's. Women's cricket has grown very fast over the past decade, driven by professional leagues in India, Australia and England and by international tournaments that now draw large crowds. The Olympics gives it a global stage with parity of billing, which is not something the sport's own calendar has always provided. Women's cricket growth explained covers where that expansion has come from.

Cricket has also already proved it works at multi-sport events. It has been played at the Commonwealth Games, including a women's T20 tournament, and at the Asian Games. Those are useful precedents for the logistics.

Why it matters in America specifically

Three reasons, in descending order of confidence.

Exposure. Olympic broadcasting in the United States reaches an audience that cricket cannot reach by any other means. Millions of Americans who would never seek out a match will watch some of it because it is the Olympics and because Americans watch the Olympics. Whether that converts into lasting interest is unknown, but no other event on the horizon offers the same reach.

Institutional structure. Olympic sports in the United States sit inside a defined system of national governing bodies, development funding and youth programs. Cricket has operated entirely outside that system. Being on the program is the entry ticket. Even if cricket is dropped after 2028, the administrative foothold has some persistence.

Timing with everything else. The Olympics arrives at a moment when Major League Cricket is trying to establish itself commercially, when the country has just co-hosted a World Cup, and when the South Asian population is at its largest. Those factors reinforce each other. Our guide to why cricket is growing in America works through both the momentum and the obstacles that Olympic inclusion does not fix.

What to watch for between now and then

A short, honest checklist of the decisions that will actually determine what the tournament looks like.

Question	Status
Format (T20, six teams per gender)	Confirmed
Men's and women's tournaments	Confirmed
Qualification method	Not confirmed
Automatic place for the United States	Not confirmed
How Great Britain and the West Indies enter	Not resolved
Final venue	Provisional
Inclusion at Games after 2028	Not decided

If you want to get familiar with the sport before then, start with the format the Olympics will use. The Indian Premier League is the strongest T20 competition in the world and plays in the American morning. Australia's Big Bash League runs through the American winter. Between them you will see most of the players likely to be on a plane to Los Angeles, and our player database has the career records to go with the names.

Cricket's return to the Olympics after 128 years is a real event with a lot of unfinished paperwork behind it. The confirmed parts are worth being excited about. The unconfirmed parts are worth being patient about.