“Already Thinking” isn’t just an attitude. It’s a imperfect system.
In my previous article, Already Thinking, I argued that America has spent decades looking at the sports world through a domestic lens. We became so successful building the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NCAA that we stopped looking beyond them. We convinced ourselves that if a sport wasn’t already established in the United States, it probably wasn’t worth our attention.
That mindset doesn’t just exist among fans.
It exists behind the boardroom doors of the companies that largely determine what the American sports landscape becomes.
Over the past two years, I have attempted to reach many of the organizations that shape the business of sports in America—global brands, apparel companies, beverage giants, media companies, private equity firms, celebrities, influencers, and even the White House, and State and local public officials.
One thing became immediately clear.
The decision makers rarely take unsolicited calls.
They rarely answer unsolicited emails.
They rarely make time for someone without a trusted introduction from someone already inside their network.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism (yes, it is!). Large organizations build layers of protection because thousands of people are trying to reach them every day. Gatekeepers exist for a reason.
But there is an unintended consequence.
Sometimes those same walls keep out the next great idea.
Even when you do reach the right person, another challenge often emerges.
Most people evaluate opportunities using yesterday’s framework.
They ask questions designed to validate an existing business rather than recognize the birth of a new one.
No group illustrates this better than private equity.
Private equity firms almost always begin with familiar requests.
“Show me your historical financials.”
“Where are the comparable companies?”
“What’s the five-year operating history?”
“Can we see audited profit-and-loss statements?”
“What do the historical revenue multiples look like?”
Those are perfectly reasonable questions—if you’re evaluating a mature business.
But what happens when the opportunity has never been built before?
What happens when there are no American historical financials because no one has ever attempted to build cricket at scale in the United States?
For all practical purposes, professional cricket, as an American sports business, does not yet exist.
India’s numbers cannot simply be copied.
England’s cannot.
Australia’s cannot.
Different culture.
Different media market.
Different sponsorship ecosystem.
Different fan behavior.
Different economics.
Anyone who understands finance also understands another reality that often goes unspoken.
Pro formas are educated assumptions.
They’re useful planning tools—but they are not crystal balls.
Every experienced executive has watched a beautifully constructed five-year forecast become obsolete within months of launch.
Markets change.
Consumer behavior changes.
Competition changes.
Execution changes.
The spreadsheet changes.
Financial models are important, but they are not vision.
Sometimes they become a substitute for it.
History is filled with businesses that could never have been justified using historical financial statements because there were no historical financial statements.
There was only conviction.
I was reminded of that years ago while working for Ken Fisher.
Love him or disagree with him, his story has always stayed with me.
When Ken first took his investment philosophy to established Wall Street firms, they rejected it.
Repeatedly.
Most people would have interpreted those rejections as proof the idea wouldn’t work.
Ken interpreted them differently.
He saw rejection as evidence of what his future competitors were unwilling to do.
So he built it himself.
Today, Fisher Investments manages hundreds of billions of dollars in assets because one person was willing to see what others could not.
That lesson has never left me.
Transformational ideas are almost never embraced by consensus.
If everyone already agrees, the opportunity usually isn’t transformational anymore.
It has become obvious.
That is exactly where American cricket finds itself today.
The challenge isn’t convincing the rest of the world that cricket matters.
More than 2.5 billion people have already answered that question.
The challenge is convincing America that it has overlooked one of the largest untapped opportunities in global sports.
That requires something no spreadsheet can measure.
Vision.
Every sponsor and strategic partner who has joined the North American Cricket Club had one thing in common.
They didn’t ask whether cricket already existed on an American scale.
They recognized the opportunity to help create it.
They looked beyond today’s reality and saw tomorrow’s possibility.
Their response wasn’t, “Come back when someone else proves it.”
It was simply:
“I’m in.”
That is how America itself was built.
Not by people waiting for certainty.
But by visionaries willing to build something the rest of the world could not yet see.