The first night of MLC 2026 in Texas produced some first-time ticket-buyers who were also in town to watch the FIFA World Cup, but nowhere near enough of them. It begs the question: how hard did MLC try to connect with them?  

Photo credit: Peter Della Penna

By Peter Della Penna (Twitter/X @PeterDellaPenna)
 
For those lucky enough to be in America over the last two weeks for the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, one of the biggest stories of the carnival of world football has been the cultural immersion experiences from traveling supporters that continue to take place well beyond each World Cup match day. 
 
Arguably the most viral individual story has emerged from German soccer fan “Freddy”, whose X social media handle “FreddyLA7” has had its follower count mushroom from a few thousand people to more than 688,000 since he first set foot on American soil on June 5. His posts from the start of his road trip, one that began in Atlanta and has continued through the southern states into Texas, document what are seemingly mundane experiences to most Americans – getting late night food at Waffle House, wandering into a Buc’ees gas station, having lunch at Raising Cane’s, browsing the gun and fishing racks at a Bass Pro Shops superstore – but have resonated with the masses purely because of the Everyman appeal of Freddy as he becomes exposed to these things for the first time and how it has changed his perspective on American culture. 
 
Beyond the typical food stuff, Freddy has also struck a chord with sports fans and into pop culture for his embrace of all the various sports teams and figures he has come across while driving and who he has connected with after they’ve reached out on social media to offer invitations to host. Just in Louisiana alone, Freddy was able to tour the 102,000 seat Tiger Stadium on the campus of LSU and also get tours of the practice facilities for the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans. 
 
By the time he reached Houston to watch Germany’s first World Cup match against Curacao at NRG Stadium, former Houston Texans legend JJ Watt - who also owns a minority stake in English football club Burnley FC - offered to put Freddy and his pals up in a room at one of Houston’s finest hotels, the Post Oak. Upon arrival, Freddy found a swag bag on the bed with a JJ Watt jersey and a number of luxury food goodie bags from local Houston eateries. Coming back to the same hotel room in subsequent days, Freddy found Houston Rockets gear sprawled out on his hotel bed and was invited to get a tour of NASA Johnson Space Center where he spoke to an astronaut currently in space. His discovery of Ella Langley on the radio in his rental car, and loving her music to become one of the legions of “Ella Fellas”, led to him getting a DM from the country music superstar with an invite to drive from Texas and attend one of her concerts on Thursday night in Oklahoma City. Freddy also got the opportunity to meet her backstage after the show. 
 
A much more broad or collective fan group example of a similar endearment to the American sports and cultural landscape took place last weekend in Boston where 50,000 Scotland fans descended on the city to support the national team as they took on Haiti in their first World Cup match since 1998. After Saturday night’s 1-0 win over Haiti, thousands of fans made their way into Fenway Park on Sunday night to see the Boston Red Sox take on the Texas Rangers. With plenty of foresight knowing that Scotland fans would be hanging around for the duration of the week in between the Haiti match before Scotland’s second match also at Gillette Stadium against Morocco on June 19^th, the Red Sox promotional team organized “Scottish Celebration” night at Fenway in which fans were able to get a special Tartan color-themed Red Sox jersey emblazoned with the flag of St Andrew. At one point, fans broke out into a rendition of “Flower of Scotland”, again highlighting how many thousands of Scotland supporters were there at the baseball game. 
 
Taking all of this into account, the start of MLC 2026 (and the whole season for that matter) was scheduled to take place head-to-head with the FIFA World Cup. Rather than see it as a clash and something to fight against, there was a tremendous opportunity to take a page out of the playbook of other American sports franchises and find ways to blend and co-opt traveling World Cup fans into the cricket ecosystem of north Texas. Yet based on the evidence of Thursday night’s fixture between Texas Super Kings and Seattle Orcas, very little effort was made to do so. 
 
Rewind back to Wednesday when England took on Croatia at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, which is just six miles from Grand Prairie Stadium. An estimated 50,000 England football supporters were part of the 70,389 official attendance. Many of those England fans are ardent sports fans. Roam around the internet and it’s not hard to find videos on YouTube and other places on social media showcasing England fans (not to mention thousands of Japan fans who had been in town to see Japan play the Netherlands on Sunday) going to see a Texas Rangers game during their home series against the Minnesota Twins: either Tuesday at 7 pm on the eve of England’s match vs. Croatia or subsequently on Thursday afternoon at 1:30 pm. 
 
Wisely, the Rangers scheduled an off day on Wednesday – rare for an off day to be configured in the middle of a home series – so as not to have any logistical issues against the World Cup match (Globe Life Field borders AT&T Stadium as part of the same Texas Live sports complex), let alone lack of competing fan interest on the same day. MLC didn’t exactly do the same. Officials decided to schedule an MLC captains press conference to take place at 10 am on Wednesday. Not only were England fans already storming their way toward AT&T Stadium by then ahead of the scheduled 3 pm local time start, but so was the majority of Dallas sports media. According to multiple sources, only two credentialed media showed up to the MLC captains media day curtain-raising event. Why MLC chose to schedule it for Wednesday morning rather than on Tuesday is a head-scratcher. 
 
Many of England’s traveling supporters are not just football fans, but broadly sports fans. Not only were they interested in going to see the Texas Rangers while in town, they were also interested in watching professional cricket. That is, if only they had known about it happening, and there was very little evidence on offer at Grand Prairie Stadium on Thursday night that demonstrated the word had got out, whether to traveling England fans or anyone else. A request to MLC for an official attendance figure did not result in a response, but a rough estimate is that approximately 1,500 fans were in attendance, or less than 25% of capacity.
 
Talking with some fans and administrators in the ground, one excuse that was offered up for the lack of England crossover fans in particular was that a large portion of England fans left Dallas on Thursday morning immediately after the Croatia match. True, many fans have left, but they’ve done so at a slow pace. Scotland plays Morocco on Friday in Boston, the site of England’s next match on Tuesday June 23. It means that Boston hotel rooms are still blocked up by the fans of the Scotland and Morocco teams, and that hotel room booking availability in Boston was sparse for England fans until Scotland’s match is complete. Many fans factored this into their travel plans several months ago. The ones who have left Dallas are taking a meandering route: some are going to New York to sightsee for a few days, some driving three hours to Houston to explore there, others to New Orleans or Chicago – two cities that aren’t even hosting World Cup matches.  
 
Yet thousands of other England fans are still lurking around Dallas. Plenty went to see a Rangers game on Thursday afternoon. Others have gone to see the rodeo. The opportunity was there to lasso them into the cricket, but MLC officials were slow to ready a rope. It’s a shame too, because the few England fans who did venture into Grand Prairie Stadium had a blast watching Tim Seifert and Faf du Plessis score centuries for Orcas and Super Kings respectively. 
 
“This has been the best experience of the World Cup, other than the football,” said Connor Brown, from Wolverhampton, England, who came with his brother Kieran and friends Luke Yates (who came to the match wearing an England Test cricket jersey) and David Cotton. “We’ve done baseball, football and cricket. This is second to England Croatia. We go to Edgbaston four or five times a season to watch Warwickshire. I’ve been following MLC and was aware there would be fixtures while we were here for the World Cup. This is unreal.”
 
The group of four friends are spending big during their three-week trip to the USA. They started off in New York and have already been to see the New York Mets play at Citi Field (Yates was wearing a Mets bucket hat he had purchased at Citi Field) at the start of their American road trip and also have bought tickets to watch the Yankees v Red Sox at Fenway Park during their time in Boston to see England play Ghana. They’ll round out their trip going to see the Yankees play the Tigers at Yankee Stadium as well as a US Darts Masters event at Madison Square Garden on the eve of England’s final group match against Panama at MetLife Stadium.
 
“This is better than the Rangers game, apart from there not being air-con,” said Cotton, referencing the heat outdoors at Grand Prairie. “The A/C at Globe Life is fucking unreal! And why are the bars shut? The game isn’t finished. There’s cricket still going on. But seeing Faf du Plessis has been amazing. They’re hitting sixes left, right and center here. The actual standard of cricket is much higher than I thought it would be.”
 
It’s safe to say that the group of four friends slash siblings enjoyed themselves, and the fans around them also were seen to be cracking up constantly as the English troupe shifted between chants. At times it was the football crowd staples, “Bukayo Saka!” and “Hey Jude” for Jude Bellingham. At others, they broke out into raucous cries of “Du Plessis! Du Plessis” when the Super Kings captain was going wild with sixes on the way to his match-winning century. 
 
However, they would not have known about the event were it not for the Brown brothers, who arranged to buy the MLC tickets several days earlier after having followed the league closely since 2023. The group said much of their awareness of other sporting events on the periphery of the World Cup has been communicated to England fans through various support groups online. One group, called the Free Lions, issued a post to members less than 24 hours before MLC opening night offering a discount code to get 10% off tickets. 
 
The Free Lions Facebook group has more than 6,800 members online and some of the World Cup content shared on the group has generated as much as 8,000 likes and more than 500 shares. But the post with the MLC discount code only received a grand total of four likes. One reason why may likely be due to the fact that the post was sent out at 9:33 pm on Wednesday night, a time when 99% of England fans in Dallas were marauding every open bar and pub to celebrate England’s 4-2 win over Croatia and highly unlikely to be checking their phone for cricket content. Had the MLC discount offer been communicated better and issued earlier in the week, the four fans from Wolverhampton seem convinced that other England fans would have followed them into the cricket ground. MLC’s offer also came off looking incredibly stingy compared to the 25% discount code that the Texas Rangers offered for tickets bought by members in the Free Lions online group.
 
But the extremely last-minute outreach to traveling England fans doesn’t feel like it was just a one-off oversight. Other aspects of opening night also felt like an afterthought. Take the official MLC merchandise shop. It has been commonplace over the first three seasons of the league for the MLC team store to be sparsely decorated with jerseys, hats, other apparel and accessories available for purchase. But Thursday night plumbed new depths. Neither the Washington Freedom nor the LA Knight Riders had any merchandise available on site. Anyone who went inside the shop looking to buy their stuff was instead shown a QR code that they could scan which would redirect them to the official web site. When asked why neither team had any merchandise available on site, event staff said that the shipment of stock for both teams hadn’t arrived but that they were hopeful some would be available on Friday in time for each team’s first match. 
 
Considering that league staff had months of lead time to prepare for opening night, the tardy efforts to engage with traveling England fans combined with the lackadaisical merchandising strategy comes off as complete ambivalence toward creating new fan engagement. As one American cricket fan on social media put it, “MLC never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. Yes, MLC has an established base of fan allegiance centered around the Indian diaspora communities in Texas and California, but judging by Thursday night’s attendance (or lack thereof) it would be unwise for MLC officials to continue putting all their eggs into that one basket. 
 
Having said that, there’s still time for MLC to rectify the issue. After the conclusion of their match against USA in Seattle on Friday June 19, Australia are scheduled to play Paraguay at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on Thursday June 25 at 9 pm. Nobody is expecting them to abandon that World Cup match to attend an MLC game at Oakland Coliseum on the same night. But MLC matches are happening Wednesday and Friday through Sunday. 
 
On the other side of the bay, the San Francisco Giants have back-to-back home series against the Athletics from Tuesday June 23 through Thursday June 25 followed by another three-game set against the Atlanta Braves from Friday June 26 to Sunday June 28. Taking a closer look, the Giants have very cleverly scheduled Thursday’s game for 12:45 pm to avoid any clashes with people who want to take in the World Cup match experience that same evening. Unfortunately, the ship has sailed on MLC attempting to move their Thursday match time to do similarly. No doubt that Giants team officials are looking to capitalize on the thousands of tourists already coming to the Bay Area for World Cup matches. 
 
The question is whether or not MLC officials will bother to do the same for traveling Aussies coming to the Bay. Most of the work has already been done by the franchises, who have delivered a ready-made selling point on a silver platter: are you an Aussie in town who loves sport? Do you want to see Aussie cricket World Cup-winning superstars like Steve Smith, Glenn Maxwell and Marcus Stoinis? Then come on down to the Oakland Coliseum. 
 
But as the saying goes: if you don’t ask, you don’t get.