India keeps building grander cricket arenas, but somewhere along the way, the people who fill them stopped being part of the story.
For a nation that breathes cricket, it’s strange how invisible the fan has become. Stadiums rise like monuments, press releases flow like confetti, and the roar of progress drowns out the quiet frustration of those who actually make the game come alive.
Because in modern Indian cricket, the architecture keeps getting better but the experience keeps getting worse.
A Stadium Every Month, but Who Is It Really For?
It has become almost routine now. A new cricket stadium announced, another ribbon cut, another headline about India “ushering a new era for sports and tourism.” The Rajgir International Cricket Stadium, with its 45,000 seats and futuristic pavilions, is the latest entrant in this endless parade of “world-class” dreams.
But beneath the shining steel and press releases, a simple question remains unanswered: who are these stadiums being built for?
If you have ever been one of the tens of thousands who line up for a match in India, you know the answer is not “the fan.”
The fan, after all, is the only person in this ecosystem who pays for passion with time, money, sweat, and patience, yet gets the worst deal in return.
Cost of Grandeur
In trying to build bigger stadiums, we somehow forgot how to build them better.
A huge capacity feels like progress until you’re sitting on a wobbly plastic chair layered with dust and old stains. Until you realize there is no running water in the bathroom. Until the food stall serves unhygienic snacks at luxury prices.
And you cannot even take a sip of water from home because you are frisked like a criminal at the gate. Coins, pens, bottles, even erasers are confiscated in the name of “security.” Yet somehow, tobacco still finds its way in.
Getting into the stadium is a test of endurance. Getting out is an act of survival. Once you are inside, you are trapped, with no re-entry, no refund, and no reprieve.
This is not an isolated incident. This is the default experience at most new Indian stadiums. The bigger they get, the worse the maintenance becomes. Every seat added multiplies cost: cleaning, upkeep, plumbing, policing. Somewhere between the concrete and the applause, the fan experience has turned into a chore.
Power of Neglect
Indian cricket’s power did not appear overnight. It was built on the sheer number of people who never stopped watching, talking, or caring. Millions fill the stands and screens, giving the BCCI an influence that no other board in the world can match. It can outbid, outnegotiate, and outmuscle any other board because it represents the planet’s most valuable audience.
And yet, those very fans, the beating heart of the game, are treated as expendable.
There is no department in the BCCI tasked with fan welfare. No body that audits stadium hygiene or ticketing transparency. Nobody to ensure a person paying a thousand rupees for a seat gets a clean one, or that a child’s first cricket match is not an experience of chaos and nausea.
It is a strange kind of arrogance, to be built entirely on people’s passion and then forget the people.
The Hollow Majesty
Take the world’s largest stadium in Ahmedabad. It can hold over a lakh people, yet it often feels like an empty museum. The rows of orange seats seem endless, but the soul that gives them purpose is missing.
From the sky it looks grand, but up close, it feels strangely soulless. The noise that makes cricket come alive is missing, replaced by the quiet of a crowd that never came.
More seats do not mean more passion. Passion does not need space, it needs care.
And yet, the obsession continues. New venues rise in places where even public transport cannot reach. Fans are asked to travel miles without cabs or buses, queuing for hours under heat and dust just to enter a facility that will fail them at every basic level.
The Afghan team once called the Greater Noida facilities a “huge mess” after a match was abandoned despite clear skies. They swore never to return. The embarrassment was momentary. The lesson, if any, was fleeting.
The Illusion of Progress
This entire infrastructure boom makes sense only if it opens the game to more people, for domestic matches, for women’s cricket, for local leagues. But we are not doing that either.
These days, regular fans can’t even walk in to watch most domestic matches. A viral video of India A match attendance becomes a PR victory, while those same officials ignore the absence of live coverage.
Ironically, countries with a fraction of India’s wealth regularly live-stream their domestic games for free. India, with dozens of sports channels, cannot be bothered to broadcast its own next generation.
We love the spectacle of cricket. We just do not love the people who make it one.
Fan Reduced to a Number
Somewhere along the way, Indian cricket stopped treating its supporters as people and began treating them as numbers. The fan is now a metric: attendance, viewership, engagement, instead of a living part of the game.
We have turned living, breathing loyalty into data. It looks good on paper but means nothing in the stands.
Numbers do not queue outside gates for hours. Numbers do not sing songs in the stands or hold banners through the heat. People do. And those people are being slowly erased from the story of the game they built.
The fan is no longer someone to serve, just someone to count.
Final Over: Who Still Cares About the Fan?
Every time a new stadium is announced, it is celebrated as a symbol of progress. But progress means nothing if the people who love the game are left standing outside, unheard and unseen.
A country that can produce the richest cricket board on earth can surely afford to provide clean toilets, affordable food, and safe, welcoming stands. Yet nobody in authority seems interested, because fans never threaten walkouts. They keep showing up.
That is the ultimate power imbalance, when you can treat your biggest supporters with disdain and know they will still return.
We are mistaking concrete for progress.
A stadium is not a shrine unless it serves the faithful. And Indian cricket’s faithful are tired, tired of being frisked like criminals, herded like cattle, and forgotten like background noise once the camera pans away.
The fan built this empire. The fan made cricket a religion. But in the temple of the game, the fan is no longer a devotee, just a statistic, a seat number, a face in a crowd that no one cares to comfort.
If cricket in India continues to grow by ignoring the people who sustain it, the seats may keep multiplying, but the soul of the game will keep shrinking.
Because someday, when the music fades and the cameras turn away, the echo that remains in those massive empty bowls will not be applause. It will be the silence of a fan finally giving up.