The 2022 Hero Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) gen­er­at­ed a huge eco­nom­ic im­pact for Guyana af­ter the coun­try host­ed the fi­nals for the very first time as part of the new­ly cre­at­ed Crick­et Car­ni­val.

Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment from the or­gan­is­ers on Tues­day, “The to­tal eco­nom­ic im­pact for Guyana in 2022 was US$84,425,587, a 186% in­crease on the fig­ure from the last time the coun­try host­ed Hero CPL match­es in 2019.”

The state­ment con­tin­ued: “The vi­sion of His Ex­cel­len­cy Ir­faan Ali in show­cas­ing the coun­try’s many cre­ative and so­cial at­trib­ut­es whilst mak­ing the coun­try the en­ter­tain­ment cap­i­tal of the re­gion for two weeks in Sep­tem­ber, led to the most suc­cess­ful host­ing of any CPL fi­nals. Busi­ness­es across the coun­try ben­e­fit­ed from the sig­nif­i­cant up­lift of in­bound tourism dur­ing Sep­tem­ber last year, as peo­ple trav­elled to be part of the Biggest Par­ty in Sport. The fans cer­tain­ly didn’t dis­ap­point with al­most 50,000 at­tend­ing the play­off games alone. With CPL spend­ing more time in Guyana than in pre­vi­ous years along with the change to the tour­na­ment struc­ture where all six teams, TV pro­duc­tion crew and tour­na­ment staff trav­elled as one co­hort CPL’s di­rect spend­ing in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly, with one met­ric show­ing a to­tal of 25,783 ho­tel room nights filled across the tour­na­ment, a 236% in­crease on the fig­ure from 2019.”

CPL said that the re­port was gen­er­at­ed by the in­de­pen­dent, world-renowned re­search com­pa­ny, YouGov Sport, with the make-up of the val­ues in­clud­ing the to­tal spent by Hero CPL to put on the 2022 event, the val­ue of me­dia ex­po­sure for the coun­try from the broad­cast of match­es and the mon­ey spent with lo­cal busi­ness by those who trav­elled in­to Guyana for the tour­na­ment.

CPL said that the to­tal view­er­ship for the 2022 edi­tion of the event al­so smashed all records as it in­creased to 721.8 mil­lion. This is the third suc­ces­sive year that the tour­na­ment has gen­er­at­ed a view­er­ship fig­ure of over half a bil­lion.

Mean­while, Pe­te Rus­sell, Hero CPL’s Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) said: “The re­cep­tion for the Hero CPL in Guyana last year ex­ceed­ed any­thing we have seen be­fore, and we are huge­ly grate­ful for the vi­sion of His Ex­cel­len­cy Ir­faan Ali, who mas­ter­mind­ed the Crick­et Car­ni­val con­cept and showed how crick­et can de­liv­er sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic val­ue when planned along­side oth­er en­ter­tain­ment ini­tia­tives. We are so grate­ful for the amaz­ing sup­port we con­tin­ue to re­ceive in Guyana and are thank­ful that we have been able to re­pay the coun­try with these fan­tas­tic num­bers. We can’t wait to make an even big­ger im­pact in 2023.”