Is Cricket Finally Becoming a Truly Global Game?

Something remarkable is happening in world cricket right now. As the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup unfolds across India and Sri Lanka, the old order is being shaken in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Zimbabwe have beaten Australia by 23 runs in Colombo, with Blessing Muzarabani’s devastating 4/17 leaving the 2021 champions reeling and ultimately knocked out before the Super 8s. Italy, playing in their first ever cricket World Cup, have already secured a historic win. Canada’s Yuvraj Samra has become the first associate nation player to score a T20 World Cup century, and the youngest to do so in the tournament’s history. If you’re watching cricket in Sri Lanka or India this tournament, you’re witnessing a sport in the middle of a genuine transformation. 

The shift was confirmed in April 2018, when the ICC announced T20 International status to all matches between its 105 member nations (which took effect for men’s cricket on 1 January 2019). Until then, permanent international status had belonged exclusively to the twelve full members — England, Australia, India, Pakistan, South Africa, New Zealand, West Indies, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Ireland. That decision opened the floodgates. Today, over 100 nations feature in the ICC’s T20I rankings, and the World Cup itself has expanded from 12 teams in 2007 to the 20-team format played across India and Sri Lanka in 2026. For anyone planning a cricket spectator tour — whether from the UK, Australia, or elsewhere — this expansion has fundamentally changed what a World Cup delivers. More competitive matches, genuine upsets, and stories that reach well beyond cricket’s traditional heartlands make international cricket tours far more compelling propositions than they were even a decade ago.

What makes the 2026 tournament particularly striking is not just that smaller nations are participating, but that they’re genuinely competitive. The USA, a country where cricket is virtually unheard of, put on a competitive game despite being knocked out at the group stage. Nepal — whose entire cricket budget would barely cover a single IPL player’s annual salary — pushed established sides to the brink. These aren’t heritage squads cobbled together hastily. Nepal’s players came through provincial competitions structured to identify talent in remote mountain regions. The infrastructure isn’t world-class, but it’s real, it’s growing, and it’s producing players who can hold their own on the world stage.

Interestingly, there appear to be many parallels with football. The FIFA World Cup started with 13 invited teams in 1930 and remained at 16 for decades before expanding to 24 teams in 1982, then 32 in 1998. The 2026 football World Cup will feature 48 teams. Expansion has consistently brought richer narratives and true competition. Cameroon’s run to the 1990 quarter-finals changed perceptions of African football overnight. South Korea’s semi-final appearance in 2002, co-hosting with Japan, transformed the sport’s standing across East Asia. 

Zimbabwe’s demolition of Australia at this T20 World Cup sits in that same category — a result that forces everyone to recalibrate their assumptions about where the game is heading. The atmosphere at the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo when Zimbabwe knocked out Australia was something no one who was there will forget. That kind of energy doesn’t emerge from a sport dominated by five or six nations.

Of course, sceptics will point out that many of these “emerging” cricket nations are fielding squads packed with players born elsewhere. Italy’s squad for this World Cup is captained by South Africa-born Wayne Madsen, and their most experienced player, JJ Smuts, qualified for an Italian passport through his wife’s ancestry without ever having set foot in the country. Grant Stewart, born in Australia, qualifies through his mother. Not a single player in the squad was born in Italy. But this is hardly unique to cricket. Portugal’s rugby union side, who qualified for the 2023 Rugby World Cup and secured their first ever win against Fiji, have long drawn heavily on French-based players of Portuguese descent. A number of their squad plays professionally in France, connected to Portugal through parents or grandparents rather than having grown up playing on Portuguese pitches. It is a pattern you see in rugby across Europe and the Pacific Islands. The question, then, is whether this really counts as globalisation or whether it’s simply players shopping for international caps. The honest answer is probably that it’s a bit of both, and that it matters less than purists might think. National team success, however it’s assembled, creates visibility. It gets the sport on television. It brings ICC funding. And crucially, it inspires the next generation of kids who actually are from those countries to pick up a bat for the first time.

The evidence for that top-down effect is already emerging. In Namibia, the Ashburton Kwata Mini-Cricket Programme, which won the ICC’s Development Initiative of the Year in 2024, has embedded cricket into the physical education curriculum of public schools across 14 regions, reaching tens of thousands of students. Nepal’s story is even more compelling. The Nepal Premier League, launched in late 2024, achieved 375 million digital views in its second season, significant jump year on year. Nepal built a youth development pipeline through competitive provincial competitions that has produced internationally competitive players without the enormous costs of western-style academies. New cricket stadiums are currently under construction, and the Cricket Association of Nepal has invested significant amounts in infrastructure. Germany has seen a 300% increase in cricket participation over the past five years. These aren’t just token numbers. In Japan, the 2019 Rugby World Cup triggered a grassroots explosion, with over 769,000 children participating in tag rugby introduction programmes in the first year alone. Iceland’s astonishing run to the 2018 football World Cup, the smallest nation ever to qualify, was built not on expensive elite academies but on a community-driven, amateur youth system that prioritised enjoyment and teamwork. The lesson from both sports is clear: national team success and grassroots adoption are not separate goals. They feed each other. When a country’s cricket team is playing on the subcontinent in a World Cup, children back home notice.

There are structural reasons to be optimistic. The ICC allocated tens of millions of dollars to associate nations in 2024, with $5 million earmarked for grassroots development. Cricket’s inclusion in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics means national Olympic committees will now fund programmes in countries where the sport has been an afterthought. The tournament co-hosting model — this World Cup shared between India and Sri Lanka, with future editions planned for Australia and New Zealand in 2028, and England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in 2030 — deliberately spreads the game’s footprint across multiple continents. For sports travel enthusiasts, this globalisation creates compelling new opportunities. Whether it’s following your national side to an Ashes series in England, watching the T20 World Cup unfold across the subcontinent, or bringing a school cricket tour to experience playing conditions in the Caribbean or South Africa, the breadth of international cricket has never been richer. The sport is genuinely widening, and the destinations where meaningful cricket is played are expanding in parallel.

So is cricket finally becoming a truly global game? The 2026 T20 World Cup suggests yes, with caveats. The heritage player model is a shortcut, not a destination, and the real test will be whether countries like Italy Canada, and the USA can produce homegrown talent over the next decade. But the infrastructure is being built, the funding is flowing, and most importantly, the results on the pitch are capturing imaginations. When Zimbabwe fans danced in the aisles after knocking Australia out of a World Cup, that wasn’t manufactured. When Nepal pushed Test nations to the brink, that was earned. T20 is the vehicle, and from what we witnessed across India and Sri Lanka, the destination looks genuinely global.

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