Blockchain Has Entered Cricket's Notebook, But the Net Session Still Writes Its Own Ledger

Tuesday, 9:14 a.m. I am standing at the gate of a training ground in London. The steward had opened the gate at nine, but by the time the tea arrived, seven more minutes had passed. In my notebook, I have the net session timings from the previous day. Suddenly a young batter looks at his phone and tells the bowler, "My trading card went on the blockchain this morning." The bowler pauses and replies, "Does that count as runs?" Someone laughs. I write in my notebook: "Technology has entered, but the sound of the willow is the same."

That short exchange is a picture of today's cricket business. The game is played on the field, but around the field, transactions now happen on digital ledgers. The International Cricket Council partnered with FanCraze to launch "Crictos," a digital collectibles platform where famous match moments are bought and sold as tokens. Franchise leagues are experimenting with fan tokens, blockchain-based ticketing, and smart contracts. Player contracts, image rights, licensed media content—the phrase "immutable ledger" is everywhere.

But the word "immutable" makes me pause. Cricket's own ledger has never been immutable. A scorer, a match referee, a commentator, a statistician—together they frame the truth of a match. If there is an error, it is corrected. Records change. The ICC updates its playing conditions every year. Cricket's ledger is changeable because the game is built inside a circle of human error and correction. The real strength of blockchain lies elsewhere—where trust has to be built between two parties without an intermediary.

Here is my core observation: Blockchain's real potential is not in cricket's entertainment side, but in contracts and governance.

Take one example. The IPL media rights were sold at auction in 2026 for 48,390 crore rupees. In that huge structure, who gets how much, when, and under what conditions is still bound up in spreadsheets and legal contracts. If a smart contract contained the conditions, payments could be released automatically based on television ratings or streaming numbers. If the income accounts of the board, franchise, player, and broadcaster were on one chain, midstream conflict would decrease. Player contracts, performance bonuses, agent commissions—blockchain can be a reliable verification ledger in these areas. The training ground has taught me many times that transparent rule-based agreements are always better than hidden paper contracts. Blockchain can bring that transparency.

But the outside world sees blockchain mainly as fan tokens and digital photo moments. In the heat of fan craze, attention shifts away from the actual game. A digital collectible can rise in price, but a player's on-field performance does not walk alongside that price. Sports data models have an old disease: they over-love young potential and undervalue dressing-room chemistry. If blockchain is marketed simply as "new technology," it will only make that disease bigger.

For me, the question is about identification. A moment is "proven" on the blockchain, but behind the moment created on the field lay net-session labour, physio treatment, and late-night messages. That invisible labour has no token. I have often seen a young pacer suddenly picked for a T20 side because his "data" looked excellent. Behind that data is the silent work of a conditioning coach whose name no one writes in big letters. The training ground told me the truth three days before the transfer market did. The truth was not in the news; it was in the angle of the ball in the nets, the posture of the body, the extra time taken to fix a headband. I wrote it in the third notebook, the one for things I could not prove yet. Blockchain marketing is now on that same page. "Fan craze" was there three years ago, and today many platforms are stuck in place.

At 3:40 p.m., the phone would not stop, and neither would my hands. One cricket-tech firm is sending a press release; another source says a blockchain startup wants to enter a national team's jersey sponsorship. At that moment I wrote down the time in my notebook and asked myself: Is this sponsorship bringing transparency to player payments, or simply changing the logo's position? For the people at the ground, the logo matters less than the contract paper. At 3:40 p.m., that difference helps me reach a decision. Producing news about new technology is easy; understanding real change is hard.

The contrarian truth is this—outsiders think blockchain is entering cricket because the sport wants to be modern. Inside, the situation is different. People at the ground do not think about technology; they know that no smart contract can verify a dressing-room smile, a lie about injury, or a mind broken under match pressure. If blockchain does not respect that invisible human layer, it will make the same mistake as the "data-believing" market. A player's market value does not come from his on-chain record; it comes from on-field reliability. And reliability is not built in hash functions; it is built in hundreds of practice runs, the habit of waking early for the gym, and the mentality of taking risks for the team. These qualities are not meant to be trapped in a blockchain token.

There is another dimension. Cricket's information flow has many layers. On one side is the scorer on the field; on the other, Hawk-Eye, trackers, and streaming-platform data. Every delivery is now recorded in multiple systems. These systems are not always integrated. Ball-by-ball data for one match can sit in different places in different forms. Blockchain can create a single source of truth—where once a record is entered, the history of its correction is also transparent. But that transparency matters only if the data is respected. A player's experience, a coach's observation, a physio's report—these are not always captured in formal data. I have often sat on the field and noticed that local scorers keep handwritten notes that never enter the statistics world. Those notes are no less valuable than a crypto token. The question is whether the new technology will respect those notes—or simply look at the signatures on big documents and declare a solution.

I have also observed that ticket black-marketing, fake memorabilia, and unauthorised brand use are old cricket problems. Blockchain-based ticketing can keep the ownership and transfer history of every ticket. Fake tickets can be reduced. Fraud using a player's image can be prevented. But this requires consent and will across the whole ecosystem—not just technology. Similarly, the risk of match-fixing or confidential-information leaks sits in cricket's most sensitive zone. If blockchain becomes the source of truth for match data, then who saw what information and when can be documented. Time-stamped records of a coach's team selection, a physio's injury report, and a player's fitness test would increase accountability.

The transfer-window noise teaches us that signals are lost in a flood of information. Blockchain can strengthen that signal, if it does not become part of the noise. But right now, the market is moving in the opposite direction—excitement about the new technology is itself creating noise. If technology that could bring transparency is sold as magic, the core message will be lost again. Cricket administrators need trust in people alongside trust in ledgers.

Personally, I believe in ledgers over memory. The training ground notebook is real proof. Blockchain is the digital version of that proof—if it is used honestly. But there is a cultural question. In cricket countries where internet access is still patchy, words like "wallet" and "private key" appeal more to urban staff. Can a fan token ensure medical facilities for a player at a rural coaching centre? That needs thought. The bigger the technology, the more deliberate we must be about including marginal people. In the training grounds I have visited, even old technology often has not arrived properly. Blockchain can come later.

What readers can take from this analysis is that blockchain can change cricket, but not in the way it is being marketed. The first change will come in administrative accounting, contract transparency, and revenue sharing. Smart contracts can even play a major role in player image rights and post-retirement income. But fan-facing entertainment such as NFTs and fan tokens is still experimental. Until that experiment is complete, the main focus should not be on buzzwords, but on where blockchain can actually create structural trust.

The question for the next five years will not be whether blockchain will enter cricket. The question will be whether it will make player contracts, media rights, and revenue-sharing accounts transparent—or whether it will be lost in the noise of "fan tokens" and "NFTs." My bet is still on the training ground notebook. A notebook damp with sweat, the first draft of truth. Blockchain can help that notebook; it can never replace it. Because an immutable ledger does not write the history of a player's trust. Trust is written on the field, in every delivery, in the breath of every run.