How T10 Cricket Came to America on One O-1 Visa
342 million viewers. $621M in economic impact. One agent-based petition brought the founder — and the O-2s brought the show.
One Visa, Entire Tournament: How Cricket's Great Innovator Brought T10 to America
Cricket is one of the biggest sports on the planet — and for decades, one of the hardest to import into the United States. Not because of talent. Because of structure: leagues need founders, founders need visas, and traditional employer-sponsored visas assume the person coming is taking a job, not creating an industry.
Shaji Ul Mulk's case broke that assumption.
The founder
Mulk is the billionaire founder of the T10 cricket format — the 90-minute, broadcast-native version of the game engineered for streaming audiences. His Abu Dhabi T10 League generated a reported $621.2 million in economic impact, drew 342 million TV and OTT viewers in a season, and grew sponsorship value to $279.3 million, with media rights involving names like Viacom18, Reliance Jio, and Sony ESPN. He is the only Indian member of the Emirates Cricket Board.
The problem
When Mulk moved to establish US Masters T10 and T Ten Global in America, no U.S. employer was "hiring" him — he was the enterprise. The winning strategy: an agent-based O-1B petition that framed his role the way USCIS understands creative leadership. He is, functionally, the director-producer of a distinguished production: he selects the athletes (the cast), shapes the matches (the episodes), and distributes the show to streaming and broadcast partners worldwide. When USCIS pushed back with a request for evidence, the response doubled down on that framing — and argued O-1A eligibility in the alternative, covering both extraordinary achievement in the arts and extraordinary ability in business.
The unlock: O-2 visas turn a visa into a tournament
A cricket tournament isn't one extraordinary person; it's an extraordinary person plus everyone essential to the production. With the principal O-1 anchored, O-2 essential-support petitions could follow for the personnel integral to staging the event. That's the quiet genius of the structure: approve the showrunner, and the show can come with him.
Why this matters to our community
At O1DMatch we usually talk about individuals finding U.S. opportunities. The Mulk case shows the same infrastructure working at enterprise scale: agent-based petitions can carry founders, leagues, productions, and the teams around them. If your ambition is bigger than a job offer, the O-1 was built for exactly that.
Individual results vary; nothing here is legal advice.
Building something in the U.S.? Talk to O1DMatch about agent-based O-1 infrastructure.