The Blockchain Ledger and Cricket's Lost Account Books

I still have the photograph of that ledger. The year was 2026. It belonged to a district-level cricket academy in Barishal. On one page, the date of birth of a sixteen-year-old bowler had been pencilled in, then erased and rewritten twice. Three dates, three different handwritings. Nobody can now say which one is true. That ledger taught me a question that has returned in almost everything I have written since: when cricket registers someone as a player, how much of them lives on paper, and how much lives only in memory? That question now stands at blockchain's door. Over recent seasons, new words have entered cricket's economic conversation — distributed ledgers, smart contracts, fan tokens, digital collectibles. The International Cricket Council launched digital cricket collectibles in 2026 through a partnership with FanCraze, and a number of leagues and franchises have walked a similar path around it. But those were the entertainment and marketing layers. The real question sits deeper in the ledger — who keeps the record of a player's identity, a contract's money, and a selection decision, and who verifies it. There is no need to explain to a cricket reader what blockchain is. What is needed is to see which of cricket's problems it actually matches. Cricket's administrative structure is still largely a centralised ledger — one board, one file, one official's signature. In that system, holding information and verifying information are not the same act. On the path from district to national team, a young player's age, address, guardian's consent, even injury history are scattered across several separate books, none of which agrees with the others. In Barishal, across twenty-seven matches, the ledger I kept shows the same bowler's age changing three times in three seasons. That is not a rumour; it is my own notebook's page. The problem is not a story of someone's corruption, but of a system's weakness. Paper is lost, handwriting is disputed, officials change, and there is no independent route to verification. This is where blockchain's core promise lies. A distributed ledger keeps many copies of the same information in many places, and each change is cryptographically linked to the change before it. If someone wants to go back and alter a single page, they must alter the entire chain — which is practically impossible. In cricket's language: the ledger no longer sits in one person's hands, it sits in everyone's. The first place this idea could matter is the player auction. Whether the Bangladesh Premier League or a franchise league abroad, every bid, every contract, every retention is recorded centrally, and the full account stays closed to the ordinary supporter standing outside that record. A smart contract could write the auction's conditions into code in advance — how many players a team may buy, the salary cap, what percentage must reach the player's account directly. The moment a contract is completed, the flow of money is automatically recorded on the ledger, and if anyone tries to break the rule, the system itself blocks them. Consider what would happen if a star like Shakib Al Hasan or Mushfiqur Rahim were bought: the entire history of that contract — who paid what, for how many years, what percentage went to agent commission — would sit in one place with a timestamp. For a supporter, that is not detective work, it is transparency. And for a small player it is protection, because where the contract money is stuck and who took how much can no longer be quietly erased. One more thing deserves mention — the money trail. When a young player gets his first franchise contract out of the districts, nobody today fully records how many hands the money passes through before reaching him. Agent commissions, middlemen's claims, the share sent home to family — these are often settled by word of mouth. Every transfer has a village it never mentions, and a timestamped ledger could keep that village's name too. The second place is age and identity verification. Age determination has never been a new debate in cricket, and here I want to be careful — spreading suspicion is easy, keeping proof is hard. But what can be said is that the problem is often not a lack of information, but a lack of reliable source. Blockchain's idea here is simple: once birth-certificate information is verified and entered on the ledger, it can no longer be altered in a private book, and every change carries a timestamp. Player, board and tournament could all read the same ledger. The third place is corruption and betting surveillance. Anti-corruption units today search vast datasets for suspicious betting movement. If match events, betting data and an official's decisions were all written to the same ledger with timestamps, investigations would move faster, and at the moment of allegation, evidence would work instead of suspicion. Here the ledger stands as a witness. The fourth place is a player's medical and injury record. A young fast bowler's shoulder injury, the length of his rehabilitation, who cleared him to return and when — this information today is scattered across separate books held by the board, the physio and the franchise. Cricket history holds many young players who hid an injury and ruined their own careers because nobody owned their medical record. A shared ledger could make the doctor's clearance, the player's consent and the franchise's demand visible at once. This is a question of protecting the young far more than protecting the stars. The fifth place is fan engagement and tokens. Many clubs and franchises now sell digital tokens to supporters, offering votes, benefits and digital mementoes in return. Cricket is entering this current too. But this is exactly where my deepest doubt sits. And the sixth, the deepest layer — grassroots registration. This one matters most to me, because this is where the weakest ledgers are kept. In Bangladesh, thousands of young players are listed at district and divisional level, yet some climb from that list and others simply vanish. During the 2026 World Cup I collected notes on Iceland's licensing system — how a small nation keeps every coach's qualification and every young player's registration in one place. In Barishal, that is still written by hand at night. If this registration once enters a ledger, every lost player would leave a clear trail. The selection ledger belongs on this list too. Who got a chance, who was dropped, who was chosen on performance — these decisions today are often made through personal preference, recommendation and invisible pressure. Across twenty-seven matches I have watched two players with near-identical statistics, one given an opportunity and the other lost. If the criteria of selection were written down in advance and the decision recorded on a ledger, at least there would be a basis for asking questions. Transparency does not mean everyone is equal; transparency means bias is not hidden. But who runs the ledger itself is a question that cannot be dodged. If only a single board or company runs the node, it is nothing more than a centralised book with the word blockchain attached. Real transparency arrives when many parties — board, players' association, journalists, even independent auditors — hold a copy of the ledger and can verify it. So the question is not only which technology to choose, but how to share power. For small countries and small regions, this idea carries an extra meaning. From Barishal to Dhaka, from Dhaka to a league abroad — a player's journey is now fragmented. A shared ledger could hold every step of that journey together, so that a family can know where their son went and under which contract. That is not control, it is accounting — and without accounting, no family stays protected. The question is this: is the technology making cricket transparent, or only building a new commercial relationship with the supporter? My experience says institutions often use technology to display reform while avoiding reform itself. If a fan token does not actually give voting power, if the supporter has no hand in decisions, then it is not partnership but a new souvenir shop. I have seen institutions use women's leagues or supporter programmes to avoid their own responsibility — staging a festival is easy, sharing power is hard. That danger returns in blockchain too. The bigger problem is the ledger's front door. Blockchain will not allow information already written to be altered — but it does not verify who is writing that information in the first place. If the handwriting in the book is wrong, blockchain makes that error immortal; it does not correct it. If an official is already biased, the ledger only cements that bias. My Barishal ledger carried three dates; blockchain will not choose one of them — whatever data someone supplies becomes permanent. Technology does the work of a witness, not of a judge. One more caution comes from my own trade. I write about young boys who have not yet reached national headlines. In this festival of blockchain and fan tokens, they are the most exposed, because they have no agent, no lawyer, no bargaining power. The technology that gives stars transparency, if built carelessly, could turn a young player's data into one more thing to be used. So the first question this technology should answer is: whose interests do its default settings protect? So the real question is not technology but administration. If cricket does not decide, before entering the ledger, which information is written with whose approval, who verifies it, and who corrects it when an error is found, then blockchain will only dress the old centralised book in a new cover. True freedom for players will come the day the ordinary public can read every page of the ledger. If I asked that sixteen-year-old bowler from Barishal today for his real date of birth, the answer would not be his — the answer would be his ledger's. Technology can hand that ledger back to someone. But the question remains: do we really want the ledger back, or only a new one?