Inside the Glazers’ new team... a UAE cricket side

On Wednesday night, Manchester United welcome Leeds United to Old Trafford but Avram Glazer, the majority owner of Manchester United, will be 3,500 miles away in Dubai watching another sports team he owns: the Desert Vipers.

Glazer’s franchise competes in the new International League T20 competition in the United Arab Emirates and his presence in Dubai for the closing stages of the ILT20 is another illustration of the changing face of ownership in cricket.

T20 is attracting a new class of owners. These are multi-millionaires – and, often, billionaires – who see buying a cricket team as an essential new asset in their portfolios. Their presence is a microcosm of cricket’s evolution: from a sport anchored upon international competition to one in which club v club dominates, just like in football and US sports.

Naturally, just like in these sports, privately owned clubs have created opportunities for investment groups. One of those is Lancer Capital, Glazer’s holding company.

On December 1, 2021, Lancer’s bid for a franchise in the new T20 league in the Emirates was confirmed to be successful. Nine days later, Phil Oliver, the chief executive of the cricket analytics company CricViz, received an email. It was from Paul Voigt, the managing director of Lancer Capital: he wanted to arrange a chat with Oliver about using his skills to help build a new team.

Early in 2022, Oliver met Avram Glazer for the first time. “He was certainly familiar with cricket,” Oliver says. The meeting “started with the cricket really, which was almost reassuring for me that that’s the most important thing – getting a good team on the field. Everything else can fall in place around that, but your focus has got to be the cricket performance.”

In the three weeks since the International League T20 began, Lancet Capital’s team – Desert Vipers – have excelled. Appointing Oliver as chief executive was an indication that Lancer Capital planned to put data at the heart of the team's approach, both in recruitment and on-field tactics. Led by Alex Hales’s spectacular form, Desert Vipers won their first three games and finished second in the league stage to set up Wednesday’s play-off match.

All those at Desert Vipers stress that they and Manchester United are independent entities. “There isn’t a United link,” says Oliver. “The only link is an element of common ownership through Avram Glazer being the chairman of Lancer Capital.”

Yet, despite this separation, the Vipers have encouraged comparisons in one obvious way: their kit which, with red shirts and black sleeves, has unmistakable similarities to United's. “The ownership are involved in key decisions – and as part of that, the red that we’ve gone with is distinctive,” says Oliver. He describes Glazer and Lancer Capital as “very engaged from an ownership perspective”: having input in both the team names and the side’s logo, and – without interfering in any cricket matters – regularly seeking updates and information on the team. Glazer is currently in Dubai for 10 days. “It’s great that he’s able to see it up close by being in the stands as well now.”

But to many United fans, Glazer’s presence in Dubai, rather than Manchester, and investment in a new sports team is emblematic of a disregard for the football club. “I’d like to see them pay off the debt they put onto our club,” says Duncan Drasdo, the chief executive officer of the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust.

In many ways, US owners in T20 franchise cricket simply complete the circle: when it was created, in 2008, the IPL’s structure was ostentatiously modelled on the NFL. “I think the investment fundamentals of cricket are highly attractive – especially IPL,” says Manoj Badale, the owner of Rajasthan Royals. Badale welcomes the influx of owners with significant experience of different sports: “learning is always a positive”.

Glazer will not be the last prominent owner of a Premier League team to buy a T20 franchise, predicts Victor Matheson, a leading US sports economist who is Professor of Economics at the College of the Holy Cross. He cites Shahid Khan, the owner of Fulham and the NFL team Jacksonville Jaguars and Fenway Sports Group – whose sport portfolio includes Liverpool and Boston Red Sox – as other potential investors in T20. Glazer and John Henry, the lead owner of Fenway, might soon be tussling not just on the football pitch but also on the cricket field too.  

Now that its calendar is increasingly dominated by club v club matches, “There is no reason why cricket shouldn’t be like any other sport,” Matheson explains. For Glazer and other owners, T20 leagues represent a “huge potential market”. No other sports league has reached $1 billion in valuation or revenue as quickly as the IPL; incomes in India are also growing at a faster rate than those in the USA and many other countries.

To go with Manchester United and the NFL team Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Glazer now owns three sides in three continents in three different sports. “Diversification is good,” Matheson says. “When one sport or reason has a downturn, there is another sport or region that isn’t necessarily affected.”

There remains uncertainty over the long-term economic viability of many T20 leagues attempting to build their own mini versions of the IPL. But the ownership groups involved in the two new T20 leagues to launch already this year – all six teams in South Africa’s league, and three of the six in the ILT20, were bought by companies with IPL involvement too – is promising. There is no “set timeline” for Vipers to start turning a profit, Oliver says: “it’s a long-term vision”.

Even if a profit in the UAE takes years – if ever – to materialise, owning the Vipers gives Lancet Capital essential knowledge of the cricket market if they are to extend their involvement further. The ultimate target, surely, is the IPL. Last year, Lancer Capital made bids for both the new franchises to join the IPL this season; the attempts failed, but further expansion teams are expected in the future. While Lancer Capital did not buy a team in Major League Cricket, which launches in the US this year, it is another potential avenue. In time, so could the Hundred, if it opens up to private investment.

And so, for Glazer and other US owners alike, the new investment in the Desert Vipers looms merely as the start. T20 has brought cricket in line with football and US sports in many ways. Having some of the same owners is, perhaps, the next logical step.