The Ledger Doesn't Change; People Do: Inside and Outside Blockchain in Cricket

One December afternoon I stood at a club ground in Fatullah. The match was over; the crowd, if you counted carefully, was perhaps two hundred. The scorer, a boy of about twenty-six, closed his notebook and pulled out his phone. On the screen was a digital trading card — a catch from that day's game, a token written onto a blockchain, sold for a figure larger than the entire day's gate receipts. He showed it to me, excited. I looked at the empty stands, the two men sitting beside the wet pitch, and the small glowing screen in his hand. In this transfer window we hear every day who is going where, what a player costs. Yet the boy at this ground showed me something else: cricket's new arithmetic no longer lives only in the notebooks of teams and managers. It lives on a decentralised ledger that no single person owns, but that remembers every transaction.

This is where my first question rises. If a ledger remembers everything, will it remember those two hundred spectators who clapped and went home? Or will it remember only the price of that token?

Blockchain has entered cricket through three doors. The first is digital collectibles — so-called non-fungible tokens. Since 2026, many cricketers from India, Australia and England have begun selling their moments, signatures and worn kit in digital form. Sachin Tendulkar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Rishabh Pant, Virat Kohli — each name has become attached to some digital collectible project. Platforms such as Rario and FanCraze are the major players in this market. At the 2026 ODI World Cup, FanCraze was announced as the International Cricket Council's official digital collectibles partner; this is not a rumour but something reported in the international press.

The second door is fan tokens. In European football, Socios and Chiliz launched this model long ago; in cricket it is arriving slowly. Fans buy tokens, vote on certain decisions, receive special access. The third door is the smart contract — code that releases money automatically once conditions are met. A player's contract, a match fee, even the rules for resale of a ticket can be written into that code. Looking at the phones in agents' hands this transfer window tells you how fast the flow of money is changing.

I have watched both the cricket field and the boardroom ledger for thirty-six years. In my experience, this new technology entered cricket at the very moment the game itself was in its deepest identity crisis. On one side, a flood of T20 leagues; on the other, boards' relentless calendars. Blockchain steps into that empty space and says: the power to set value will no longer sit at the centre, it will be distributed. That sounds beautiful. But what I see when I sit in the ground is something else.

The most practical use of blockchain in ticketing is the fight against fake tickets and the black market. If a ticket is a unique token, the same ticket cannot be sold twice. A scanner at the stadium gate tells you instantly whether the ticket is genuine, whether it has already been used. In the age of paper tickets, this ran on luck alone; here there is a kind of reassurance. I have stood at many gates and seen people turn back in tears because a fake ticket cheated them. To them this technology is not fashion; it is protection.

The second use is proving the ownership of memorabilia. Whose bat is this, when was it used, by whom — today this is a matter of groping in the dark. If a ledger holds that history, the object grows in value for the collector. This is also a way of preserving the game's history. But a condition attaches here: who writes the history? If the ledger is run by a corporate platform, the key to the door of history stays in their hands.

The third use is fan engagement. Fan tokens promise to turn the spectator into a stakeholder. Votes on club decisions, early access to special merchandise — the lure of these makes many fans buy tokens. I have seen on both Bangladeshi and Indian grounds how cheaply a fan's emotion can be bought. A fan never really wants a decision; he wants to feel that he matters — that feeling is the true product. Blockchain wants to pour that very feeling into code.

Now to the question least heard in this discussion. Blockchain's message is decentralisation. But where does real power in cricket sit? Boards, broadcasters, agents, league owners — this structure is intensely centralised. A ledger can make transactions transparent, but it cannot hand over the power to decide. In my experience, technology does not divide power; it merely changes the language of power.

Here the shadow of VAR rises before me. The referee's VAR arrived with a promise to remove error. But my experience says the controversy did not shrink; it climbed off the pitch and into the review room, into the grey zones of the rulebook. Blockchain is the same. It says everything will be transparent, every proof will exist. But the real question remains: who wrote the code, and who keeps the account of those left outside it?

And here comes my deepest worry. To enter the world of digital assets you need a smartphone, a bank account, KYC, internet, and the patience to understand a wallet. How many of my two hundred spectators meet those conditions? The daily-wage worker without a smartphone, the man who understands the language of cricket in Bengali but cannot read an English white paper — for them this new economy is a closed door. Blockchain's greatest claim is openness to all; but in cricket its first result may be the birth of a new elite class.

Think of the relationship between Bangladesh and India. On both sides of the border we love the same game, weep over the same players, carry the same memories. Yet the centre of this new digital economy is in Kolkata or Mumbai, the market in London or Dubai. If a club in Dhaka sells an NFT, the transaction happens in dollars, the platform is foreign, and the bulk of that money does not return to the neighbourhood ground. I do not want to tell a simple story of harmony or simple rivalry here; I only want to name this asymmetry, which politics hides with noise and cricket carries in silence.

Now to what matters most in this transfer window. My long observation is that the enormous signing-on fees given to free agents are more harmful than ordinary transfer fees, because they bypass the very scrutiny that financial rules demand. Transfer fees are at least accounted for; there are rules, there are limits. But signing-on fees, agent commissions, private agreements move in grey space. Now imagine those transactions happening in cryptocurrency, unseen by any bank. In the name of transparency we would build a more opaque world. A technology born outside regulation can never become an instrument of regulation.

At one match I watched a young player tremble as he heard the news of his first big contract. In his eyes there was no money, only his mother's face, the neighbourhood ground, the mornings he bowled alone. When this boy becomes a blockchain fan token, where will the account of the person inside him be kept? The ledger can count his runs, write his price; but his fear, his sleepless nights, his mother's tears — these do not go onto a ledger.

I have another observation about youth cricket. Today's youth coaches chase results, and in the name of physical power they dry out the technical soil of adolescent years. Blockchain money will sharpen that tendency further, because investors want quick returns, glittering names, sellable moments. The coach at the neighbourhood ground who teaches a boy to defend for three unpaid years will not appear in any NFT. Money always seeks the light, but talent grows in the dark, in the dust, in silence.

Am I saying blockchain has no value? No. I am saying its value depends on who uses it. If a board genuinely shuts down the ticket black market, if a coach builds a transparent fund to find talent in the villages, the technology will serve. But that intention does not live inside the technology; it lives in people's minds. Technology is only a mirror. It shows us who we really are.

I did not chase the byline; I chased the people who made it mean something. And those people taught me that there is a small town hidden inside every big headline. However far the light of a World Cup spreads, its roots lie in some neighbourhood ground. If this new digital economy does not water those roots, if it only decorates the upper branches, one day the tree will stand but bear no fruit.

When the stadiums emptied, my notebook learned to listen louder. That day in Fatullah I sat beside a tea seller who has sold tea at that ground for forty-six years. I asked him whether he knew what an NFT was. He laughed and said he knew who won, who lost, and which boy went home crying. His account is not written in any ledger, yet no one remembers more than he does.

Here my central point settles. Blockchain can give cricket a new memory — transparent, permanent, impossible to deny. But a memory that recalls only numbers is incomplete. The soul of a game lives in its noise, its silence, the ache of its failures. If the new ledger remembers only prices and forgets the faces of those two hundred spectators, we may gain a more perfect database but lose the very thing for which we have loved cricket all our lives.

I know this technology will not stop. It will go deeper — into contracts, into broadcasting, into the everyday experience of the fan. My job is not to block it. My job is to keep asking: in this new world, who will count, and who will be left outside the code? If the ledger is truly immortal, will it also remember the face of the tea seller who has stood beside the ground for forty-six years?

The transfer market is a rumour mill, but the player is always a person. Our greatest challenge in this digital age will be not to lose that person inside the numbers. And if one day this ledger truly records the account of the ground, I want it to write on the first page: not how many runs were made, but something larger — how many people loved.