We’re unlikely to see USA play the world’s best soon despite a huge potential fanbase in the States

As the 2015 Cricket World Cup begins it is not a bold prediction to claim that the US is a long way from reaching the tournament in the near future. Last year the Americans were relegated to World Cricket League division four, a repository for the likes of Denmark and Italy.

While the national team’s lowly status is obvious, the overall picture is complex. Cricket is thriving, struggling, accessible yet invisible in a country that long ago embraced then shunned a sport closely linked here with two powerful, and sometimes opposing, cultural forces: immigration and nationalism.

Capitalism can be added to the mix, because ESPN spies profit potential in offering cricket on baseball’s home turf. It has the US rights to the World Cup and is offering live streams of all 49 matches for $99 via ESPNcricket2015.com or subscription services on three cable and satellite providers. You can expect to see highlights of notable moments on the network’s flagship show, SportsCenter, which has run a primer for newcomers called Cricket 101.

On Sunday, ESPN is screening a film about Sachin Tendulkar. ESPN The Magazine published a major story about Tendulkar around the time of the last World Cup, headlined Why You Should Care About Cricket.

It’s easy to see why the network cares about a sport that is essentially ignored by mainstream America. ESPN acquired the Cricinfo website from the Wisden Group in 2007.

Figures provided to the Guardian by ESPN show an 85% increase in visits to Cricinfo since 2009. In the US the site on average reaches 1.2 million monthly unique visitors, roughly the same as the websites for the Spanish-language ESPN Deportes and ESPN Radio.

An unusually high proportion of US readers come from the affluent mid-Atlantic states and the site attracts a sought-after demographic: young, wealthy, tech-savvy men. Compared with internet users as a whole, Cricinfo’s user base is three times more likely to be a male aged 18-34, nearly two times more likely to be single and 23% more likely to earn more than $100,000.

“It’s the second-most followed sport in the world, the fans are hyper-passionate, you’ve got an enormous audience,” says Russell Wolff, executive vice-president and managing director of ESPN International.

“When we bought the company in 2007 we did so with an eye on the global potential of the sport and we’ve seen that happen through migratory patterns of south Asians around the world but also with the T20 innovations that have happened. Since we bought Cricinfo the landscape’s become even more exciting than it was.”

Census data shows that the population of South Asians in America grew 81% between 2000 and 2010 to a total of more than 3.4 million people, 3.2 million of them of Indian and Pakistani origin.

Many settled in cities in US cricket hotbeds such as New York, California and Texas. Talk of cricket in Houston is still most likely to refer to the insect or the phone company, but the city has a sizeable amateur competition, with 27 teams who play at nine grounds in four divisions.

The scene at George Bush Park on a typical weekend is emblematic of the sport’s status in the country as a whole. Teams mostly comprised of Asians play on a bumpy pitch hidden behind trees and baseball fields in a remote corner of the park, with staccato bangs of gunfire from a nearby rifle range audible amid the crack of bat on ball. Cricket’s happening - but it’s on the margins and you have to know where to find it.

It was not always this way. Cricket was popular in the US until baseball, which sold itself as a symbol of America’s new national identity, crushed it after the civil war. In some places, notably Philadelphia, it was still played to a high standard until around the time of the first world war. After the second world war, immigrants from Commonwealth countries gave the sport renewed life, but it has remained a niche pursuit because of a lack of funds for youth development, limited facilities and troubled governance.

“I think we need to be better. I will not be probably standing [for re-election] next time, I’ll be frank and say any board that leaves and says it’s done a good job is wrong. It needs to do better. But the whole community needs to step up… we’re too fractionalised across the US, there are too many strange and slightly bizarre infighting processes,” says Michael Gale, first vice-president of the USA Cricket Association, the governing body.

“I look at things like lacrosse which has had incredible growth in the US in the last 10 years… they managed to crush out some of that snobbery, ‘lacrosse is for east coast schools’, and make it much more available to a wider group. We’re just a little bit introspective still,” Gale says. “There’s an enormous amount of people who are very passionate about the sport in this country but they do come from very different backgrounds religiously, socially, economically, and I think they’ve generally found it tough to work together over time.”

Though cricket has gained traction in public schools in New York, programmes elsewhere are limited and there is a dearth of high-quality grounds. The only ICC-approved one-day international facility in the US is in south Florida. Despite the large number of Caribbean-origin residents in the area, and occasional high-profile matches, the 20,000-capacity stadium has been a controversial use of tax dollars.

More than 1,000 miles north, in a bid to highlight its credentials as an international city, Indianapolis has built a $5m World Sports Park that aims to host cricket, hurling, lacrosse, rugby and Gaelic football.

The most obvious way to boost cricket in the US is to start a professional league. The popularity of Twenty20, with its shorter running time, more dramatic action and other superficial similarities with baseball, has given new hope to those who believe cricket can make it in America. Still, various attempts to form a domestic professional competition have stalled, including an ambitious 2012 effort backed by New Zealand’s governing body.

“There are some things you’ll hear about probably in the next month or two that [suggest] that will be rebirthed in another format,” Gale says. “I think we’ll get something going here … What format it looks like I think is going to be debatable but something will happen. They’d be crazy not to. It’s like there’s gold here, sitting on the surface, we just have to correctly pick it up and process it. And that’s part of the challenge - [finding a] white knight.”

For ESPN, Wolff says, “I don’t think having a high profile domestic league is a requirement for us to be interested in cricket. We’re interested in cricket because there’s a large group of passionate sports fans who are interested in it, and for the most part they’re interested in watching the best and most exciting cricket in the world, whether that be ICC events, or the Ashes, or the IPL.”

Still, he adds, “If there was a credible professional cricket league in the US it would only serve to help grow the sport among hardcore fans and casual fans here and we certainly would look at it if it was launched.”

Give demographic shifts, globalisation and the easy access to action and information on the internet, perhaps a mainstream audience might gradually take more interest in cricket and see it as complementary to baseball rather than a competitor; as a sport that reflects the diversity of modern America, rather than a foreign invader of the traditional landscape. But that will require time, a big investment and marketing muscle.

“I think you have a growing audience for cricket in the States and that’s primarily native cricket fans, but I think you have a growing awareness of cricket and casual interest among plenty of these non-cricket fans. How much that grows and where it goes I think time will tell, but it’s certainly growing,” says Wolff.