PTI
MELBOURNE
Australia's domestic T20 cricket tournament Big Bash League has burst into the top 10 most attended sports leagues in the world, according to a report.
A crowd of 80,883 turned up at the MCG for the Melbourne derby between the Stars and Renegades a week ago and the organisers of the T20 tournament, in its fifth edition, were still trying to digest the enormity of the interest in the league, a report in 'Sydney Morning Herald' said.
The upcoming Sydney derby next Saturday is also poised to be an SCG domestic record of up to 42,000, an attendance that will only help drive the average crowd figures further north.
The late-season average of 28,279 has propelled the BBL to ninth position on the list of the world's most attended sports leagues, nudging ahead of Japan's professional baseball league (28,248), Indian Super League football (26,376) and ensuring the Canadian Football League (24,737) and Italy's Serie A (23,001) are absent from the top 10.
The world's biggest league, the NFL, drew an estimated 68,278 people on average in 2015-16 season while German Bundesliga is second with 43,331. India's lucrative Indian Premier League is placed at sixth in the report.
"That's flattering, given that the competition is only five years' old, to be in the company of some of those really established sports leagues," Big Bash manager Anthony Everard was quoted as saying the newspaper report.
