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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6932-9563
Abstract
Convicted Texas financier, Allen Stanford, reportedly fell in love with cricket during his many years living in Antigua. This love of cricket culminated with the infamous “20/20 for $20 million” match where the Stanford Superstars defeated the England cricket team at the Stanford Cricket Ground by 10 wickets in November 2008. A little over three months after the Super Series, Stanford’s cricket ventures dissipated when his companies were placed into receivership. The series was not, however, Stanford’s first foray into cricket. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the totality of Stanford’s involvement in cricket in the West Indies while also placing critical junctures in this involvement in context with Stanford’s wider corporate neocolonialist endeavors. A historical analysis of both scholarly and popular press articles was conducted to provide a chronology of the facts of the past, which were then interpreted conceptually using multiple concepts including Zaheer’s (1995) liability of foreignness, Suchman’s (1995) understanding of organizational legitimacy, Bourdieu’s (1986, 1991) interdependent forms of symbolic, political, and economic capital, among others. As a result, this paper argues that the intent behind Stanford’s cricket endeavors transformed and evolved as he came to understand how cricket could be leveraged symbolically for personal economic gain, a process that was moderated by the state’s progressively less favorable response to public opinion of Stanford.
Recommended Citation
Barrett, Martin
(2026)
"Corporate Neocolonialism, the Liability of Foreignness, and Cultural Extractivism: The Rise and Fall of the Stanford Cricket Empire in Antigua and the West Indies,"
Journal of Global South Sport Studies: Vol. 1:
Iss.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/jgsss/vol1/iss3/1