How the UAE Became the Global Center of Cricket
An India-Pakistan game played in Dubai will showcase cricket’s fiercest rivalry, and the United Arab Emirates’ influence on a sport that few locals play.
Illustration: Isabella Cotier for Bloomberg
Look at it from the outside on a game night, and it’s easy to see why Dubai’s International Cricket Stadium is known as the Ring of Fire — its unique lighting system casts an ethereal glow into the desert sky. But viewed from inside, the stadium’s capacity of 25,000 feels modest in comparison with the sport’s great venues in Ahmedabad (132,000), Melbourne (100,000) and Kolkata (68,000).
Still, the International Cricket Council, the sport’s governing body, will not cavil about capacity on Sunday afternoon, when the national teams of India and Pakistan face off in the Ring of Fire for the biggest game in the first round of the eight-nation Champions Trophy. The ICC can be confident it will be among the most-watched contests of the year in any sport. When these two fierce rivals duked it out in October 2023, the game was watched by a TV audience estimated at 500 million, five times that of the Super Bowl.