POMONA, CALIFORNIA — On a bright, warm Wednesday at the Pomona Fairplex — the 500-acre campus that has hosted the LA County Fair for more than a century — the Los Angeles Knight Riders (LAKR) broke ground on the Knight Riders Cricket Field, a purpose-built venue set to anchor professional cricket in Southern California and host the cricket competition at the 2028 Olympic Games.
The April 22 ceremony, hosted by LAKR and Fairplex, featured a cross-section of stakeholders: Venky Mysore, CEO of the Knight Riders Group, who served as host; ICC CEO Sanjog Gupta; Niccolò Campriani, Senior Vice President of Sport at LA28; Pomona Mayor Tim Sandoval; Eric Garcetti, former Mayor of Los Angeles and former US Ambassador to India; Walter Marquez, President and CEO of Fairplex; and Dr. K.J. Srinivasa, the first Consul General of India in Los Angeles. Also in attendance were members of the Pomona City Council and several LAKR players.
Shah Rukh Khan, co-owner of the Knight Riders Group, appeared via a pre-recorded video message filmed from the set of his upcoming film King. “Today isn’t just about breaking ground, but about beginning a dream — bringing cricket, the second most-watched sport in the world, into the heart of Los Angeles’ sporting identity,” he said. “Through our long-term partnership with Fairplex, we aim to create not just a cricket ground, but a space of energy, community, and belonging.”
The project
The Knight Riders Cricket Field will become, on completion, the first cricket stadium built and operated by a global T20 franchise anywhere in the world. Designed by Populous, with field-of-play and pitch curation by LandTek, the facility will open in a modular 5,000-seat Phase 1 configuration in time for LAKR’s first three home fixtures of the 2026 MLC season, scheduled for July 1–5. Full completion is targeted for 2027, with capacity expanding to roughly 8,500, and further expansion to approximately 15,000 planned ahead of the 2028 Olympics. The field of play features an international-standard eight-wicket cricket square alongside dedicated practice wickets, broadcast-ready infrastructure, and integrated hospitality and training facilities.
Mysore: from financial leader to “the two religions of India”
Mysore opened his remarks with trademark self-deprecation — “I almost didn’t recognize the person you were introducing” — before moving into an arc that framed the entire program. The groundbreaking, he said, was the culmination of a sixteen-year run with the Knight Riders, and of a longer personal one.
A cricketer at university and state level in his earlier life, Mysore spent more than two decades in financial services, including a US-based East Coast career, a stretch as CEO and Managing Director of MetLife India, and a run as India Country Head of SunLife Financial. “I was happily doing that as an expat,” he said, when the call came to return to the US. Then, as he put it, “lightning strikes, and I went back to my passion, which was cricket.”
One line from his MetLife years has stayed with him. “There are only two religions in this country,” he recalled being told by the marketing team in India, nodding toward Garcetti as he said it — “Eric knows this really well” — “cricket and Bollywood. And I’m in the middle of both. So when I get invited to speak, I feel sometimes like an evangelist talking about the two religions of India.”
That framing — sport and entertainment as intertwined cultural infrastructure — shapes how the Knight Riders Group has built its portfolio. Alongside running Knight Riders Sports, Mysore has served since 2013 as CEO of Red Chillies Entertainments, the production, VFX, and distribution company co-owned by Shah Rukh Khan. “He owns the franchises, and he also has a film production business on the side,” Mysore quipped of Khan, “so he’s a bit of a superstar.”
Going global, and choosing LA
The Knight Riders Group’s global strategy, Mysore said, followed the same logic that had guided his financial-services career. “The only way you can build this business and scale it is to become global — which was my learning from my previous business as well.” After KKR (three IPL titles in 2012, 2014, and 2024), the Group acquired Trinbago Knight Riders in the CPL — five men’s titles and an inaugural WCPL crown — and Abu Dhabi Knight Riders in the UAE’s ILT20.
When Major League Cricket began to take shape, Mysore recalled, the calculus was straightforward. “The second most-watched sport coming to the number one media market in the world — that’s the opportunity.” He credited MLC co-founders Sameer Mehta and Vijay Srinivasan, both present, for building the league that made LAKR possible.
The choice of Los Angeles — rather than any of MLC’s other markets — was equally quick in his telling. “LA was a no-brainer. Hollywood meeting Bollywood — so we have to come here. And LA and sports, my God.” His own years on the US East Coast, he added, had given him a sense of how deeply sport is woven into American life — “how much that’s part of the mainstream mindset, part of the fabric here.”
What neither he nor his partners fully anticipated, Mysore said, was the infrastructure dimension. “We realized that what we were signing up for was to also build infrastructure. Because existing infrastructure didn’t exist. And so we said we have to build one. We didn’t think much of that until we started realizing what it all meant.”
How Fairplex happened
The path to Fairplex ran through two connections. The first came during Garcetti’s tenure as US Ambassador to India — a meeting at Shah Rukh Khan’s home where Mysore outlined what the Knight Riders were trying to do in Los Angeles. “I said: this is what we’re trying to do in LA — I don’t know where to start,” Mysore recounted. “And he very quickly made a few introductions and had phone calls.” One of those introductions was to Jeff Milman a former aide to Garcetti, whom Garcetti later, onstage in Pomona, pulled forward by name for shepherding the Fairplex partnership into existence.
Mysore visited the Fairplex campus for the first time roughly two years ago. “I said: wow, this is really well planned. Can you consider giving us a little bit so we can put a cricket team here?” What followed was a multi-year relationship with Marquez and the Fairplex team. “Walter in particular has been outstanding,” Mysore said. “Anytime there’s an issue, you call him up, and he’s calm and very, very collected, and he just finds solutions for us.” Mysore also acknowledged Mayor Sandoval and the Pomona city government, recalling a lunch where the Mayor had been blunt: “All I heard him say was: we’re gonna get this done. And it has to happen.”
“Like an Indian wedding”
With LAKR targeting a July 1 opening — roughly ten weeks from the groundbreaking — Mysore acknowledged the ambitious timeline openly, and with characteristic good humor.
“This is almost like an Indian wedding,” he told the gathering. “In Indian weddings, you first fix the date and time. That’s when it’s going to take place, and then you start working it backwards. And everyone gets super nervous. ‘It’s going to happen, not going to happen.’ Finally it happens. Always.”
The line drew appreciative laughs — and a callback later in the program from Garcetti, who opened his own remarks by deadpanning: “On behalf of the Indians, this started on time, and this is a short program.”
Fairplex: “a quick no, or a long yes”
From Fairplex’s side, Marquez offered a short version of how the partnership came together. The initial call, he said, came from Jeff Milman about two years ago. “Me being a US-born citizen, not knowing cricket, we responded with: Jeff, it’s gonna be a quick no, or a long yes.” That it became the latter, he added, was its own journey — “little did I know that I was about to catch cricket fever. My vocabulary now includes a yorker, a googly.” Marquez located the new venue within Fairplex’s community-facing tradition, framing it as an extension of that mission rather than a departure from it.
The ICC and the Olympic moment
Sanjog Gupta, who became the seventh Chief Executive Officer of the International Cricket Council in July 2025, used his remarks to frame the Pomona groundbreaking within a much longer arc. “What we are breaking ground today is not simply a cricket field,” he said. “We are breaking ground on a promise — a promise that took 128 years to keep.” Cricket last appeared at an Olympic Games in 1900, at the second modern Olympiad in Paris.
Gupta positioned LAKR’s investment as the foundational infrastructure for cricket’s American future, describing Pomona as the intended “nursery for the sport’s future in this country.” (A companion cricexec feature covers Gupta’s remarks in greater depth.)
Campriani, the LA28 sport lead and a three-time Olympian and Olympic medalist in rifle shooting, provided the Olympic context. Cricket at LA28 will feature six teams, 90 men and 90 women — 180 athletes in total — competing in the T20 format. “We’re going to put together the greatest collection of athletes the world has ever seen in the Olympic environment,” he said, adding that his team is “in discussion with the NFL and MLB when it comes to bringing the best players” to the LA28 program. He also recalled presenting cricket’s inclusion case at the IOC Session in Mumbai in October 2023 — the moment that, by his own account, redefined his public identity from the Olympic shooter who won medals to the Olympic official who brought cricket back.
Garcetti: from Ambassador to Olympic architect
Closing out the formal program, Garcetti — who as LA’s 42nd mayor initiated the city’s Olympic bid on his first day in office, and who was in Mumbai as US Ambassador to India when cricket’s LA28 inclusion was announced — offered the broadest historical frame. He traced the bid from an initial letter to the US Olympic Committee through Boston’s withdrawal and the successful pivot to 2028.
“Casey and I sat down,” he said, referring to LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman, “and though there was a long list of sports, it was very clear at the top of that list was always cricket.” He cited four reasons: religious fervor for the sport globally; US viewership, which ranks second in the world for online cricket streaming; the arrival of Major League Cricket in the US market; and the sport’s commercial fundamentals.
For the American attendees unfamiliar with the Knight Riders’ co-owner, Garcetti offered a reference point. Shah Rukh Khan, he said, is “like if you put Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise into one person, then multiplied by five.”
What comes next
MLC will host seven matches at the Knight Riders Cricket Field between July 1 and 5, 2026, including the LAKR franchise’s first three home fixtures of the 2026 MLC season. Several USA men’s national team players were in the audience — the same group, as Gupta noted, that came within a single dropped catch of defeating the eventual world champions at the 2024 T20 World Cup. “All of them play for LA Knight Riders. We are fortunate.”
The full build is scheduled to complete in 2027, with the venue configured to its ultimate ~15,000-seat capacity in time for LA28’s Olympic cricket competition in July 2028. “Between ICC, LA28, Fairplex, MLC, and the role we’re playing as Knight Riders,” Mysore said, “I don’t think we can go wrong.”
“This is a defining moment — not just for the Knight Riders, but for cricket in America,” Mysore said in a statement accompanying the groundbreaking. “We see strong potential to grow the game and connect with the community in Southern California to lead this next phase of cricket’s growth in the US.”
