Kolkata Knight Riders have become the first cricket franchise in the world to build and own their own stadium, unveiling the Knight Riders Cricket Ground at Fairplex in Pomona, Los Angeles, on July 1, 2026. The $21 million venue will host Los Angeles Knight Riders’ MLC games and cricket at the LA 2028 Olympics, signalling a bold, infrastructure-led push into the US market.
KKR (Kolkata Knight Riders) has never done things quietly. Three IPL titles in 2012, 2014, and 2024 built a brand that outgrew a single league and a single country. The brand has now etched its name in history as the only cricket franchise anywhere in the world to build and own its own stadium.
On July 1, 2026, Shah Rukh Khan and the Knight Riders Group officially unveiled the Knight Riders Cricket Ground at the Fairplex in Pomona, Los Angeles. It will serve as the home venue for the Los Angeles Knight Riders in Major League Cricket (MLC), and it's also set to host matches at the LA 2028 Olympic Games, when cricket returns to the Olympics for the first time since 1900.
Sharing the news on X, Shah Rukh Khan called it a place built not just for sports but also for entertainment, families, and memories that last forever, describing the years-long project as a dream finally realised.
This is where the story becomes bigger than one franchise. In European football, legacy clubs have long owned their grounds: Old Trafford, the Camp Nou, the Bernabéu are as much a part of club identity as the players. In American sports, franchise-owned stadiums are the norm across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. But in cricket, and especially in a franchise ecosystem built on leased venues and shared grounds, this model barely exists. No IPL franchise owns its home ground. No global T20 franchise has made it this big. KKR just made it a reality and did so in the United States.
The numbers underline the ambition as roughly $21 million (Rs 199 crore) are spent on the project on a 10-acre site where 32000 metric tons of earth is moved, built specifically for cricket, and only the second purpose-built Major League Cricket venue in the country after Grand Prairie Stadium in Texas. The ground hosted its first competitive match on the very day of the unveiling, as the Los Angeles Knight Riders took on Washington Freedom in their opening home fixture of the 2026 MLC season.
For the Knight Riders brand, which already fields teams across the IPL, the Caribbean Premier League, and the International League T20 in the UAE, the Los Angeles venture is the clearest signal yet of global intent. From league titles to league infrastructure, the franchise is building the physical foundations of cricket's expansion.
That's what makes the Knight Riders Cricket Ground more than a stadium announcement. It's a franchise betting on cricket's future in America, with the Olympics as a stage and ownership as the statement. In a sport where clubs rent history, KKR has chosen to build it instead, and, for now, they're the only ones who have.