Blockchain Has Already Walked Into Cricket, and the Gatekeepers Haven't Noticed

At the IPL auction in December 2026, Mitchell Starc went for 24.75 crore rupees — a record for a fast bowler, in a year when he had barely played any competitive cricket. Pat Cummins went for 20.5 crore in the same room. Every eye was on the paddle; every camera was on the board. Meanwhile, in the same week, cricket-themed fan tokens slid quietly, where no camera goes. I used to think cricket's biggest fault line ran down the 22 yards — swing, footwork, a dropped catch. Then I understood the real fault line sits under the pitch, where money, ownership and contracts are written. And a new layer is settling there now: blockchain. The gatekeepers of cricket are still asleep.

During the 2026-22 crypto fever, cricket caught the wave. Platforms like FanCraze and Rario sold cricket NFTs, the Socios-style fan-token model was translated from football, and a few boards experimented with blockchain ticketing. Then the 2026 crash arrived. Platforms shut, token prices fell more than 90 per cent from their 2026 peaks, and cricket media delivered its verdict: this was crypto bros trying to sell JPEGs, and it is over.

But when I was building a show inside empty stadiums, I learned one thing — once the surface noise ends, the structure becomes visible. That is exactly what happened in cricket. The noise in front of the camera stopped; the rail line behind it kept being laid. Because cricket's economy is now so large and so opaque that keeping its books has itself become a business.

Look at the number. IPL media rights for the 2026-2027 cycle sold for 48,390 crore rupees — announced at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) auction in June 2026. That much money pools in one place, while the layer beneath — from player to fan — is almost dark. Who earned what, which agent took what cut, which board lent how much: there is no centralised, verifiable ledger. That is blockchain's least romantic quality: it is an account book nobody can unilaterally erase.

The received wisdom is simple. Blockchain means selling digital cards to fans; it is a marketing device with no relation to the game. I used to think that too. Then, applying my one-number-one-heresy rule, I sat down to do the sums and saw the argument was happening in the wrong place.

Blockchain's real shock for cricket is not NFTs or fan tokens; it is at the settlement layer — player economic rights and contract settlement, with the power to bypass the intermediation of boards and agents.

I built a show in empty stadiums, so silence became my co-host — and that silence taught me who the biggest intermediary in the whole business is. The answer: whoever holds the money. In cricket, three parties hold the money — boards, broadcasters, agents. The player holds only his own ability. Blockchain is the first technology that lets that ability be released directly into the market.

Look at how this model fared in football. Through Socios fan tokens, clubs like Barcelona and Juventus sold supporters voting rights — which song plays, which design the matchday poster takes. First excitement, then disappointment; many tokens crashed, and fans realised the vote was staged. Cricket does not need to repeat that mistake — give the fan a real economic stake, not a cheap vote.

This is where the parallel with the transfer market becomes clear. Free agents now take enormous signing-on fees, and that money passes through less scrutiny than a transfer fee — slipping past the eye of financial fair play. If a player's economic rights could be sold as tokens directly to fans, the same thing happens on a larger scale: outside central contracts, outside the agent's cut. A transfer saga is a folk tale told by agents with Wi-Fi; a smart contract cuts the tail off that tale.

Imagine a franchise league. Match fees, performance bonuses, a share of image rights — all written into smart contracts, so money flows straight to the player's wallet, not through a board's central clearing. For smaller boards like Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Ireland, this is an opening — because their main tool for holding on to players is the central contract, and the scales of that contract sit with the big three (India, England, Australia).

Remember the design of ICC revenue distribution too. The big three boards take the largest share of central income; smaller members take comparatively little. It is no secret, yet fans forget it. If blockchain lets a small board build its own fan market directly, the foundation of that distribution design starts to shake.

Player associations matter here as well. The Professional Cricketers' Association in England, the Cricketers' Association in Australia — they fight for player rights. But these bodies hold more paper than money. If the settlement layer moves to blockchain, the bargaining power of player associations could shift entirely.

And this is where the Italian lesson applies. I built a show in empty stadiums, so silence became my co-host — but Italian football taught me how the periphery reads the centre. Clubs like Atalanta and Sassuolo went beyond their own bounds and built new business designs; Italy's own cricket, from the margins, learns to question Europe's centre. If cricket's periphery grasps the settlement layer first, it gains a lever to break the ICC's central revenue model. I used to think possession was a moral good. Then I saw that the counterattack is the real sermon — and the periphery's fast counterattack is often sharper than the centre's.

I was born in Bangladesh and work in the UK, and the advantage of reading cricket's power map from both edges is that I can see where the money pools and where the fan waits. Think of Britain's Bangladeshi diaspora: from a ground in Lancashire to a television screen in Tower Hamlets, a vast audience sits outside channel subscriptions, and nobody charges them directly. Tokenisation could make exactly this audience an economic player for the first time.

And here is the COVID lesson. When stadiums emptied in 2026, it became clear the product was the screen. With fewer spectators, decisions and bias shift — referees become less home-friendly, teams play with less pressure. The fastest-growing part of cricket now is the remote fan, who is not in the stadium but watches every ball. Blockchain can, for the first time, make that fan a stakeholder and a revenue source in one click.

Ticketing is another open field. A blockchain ticket carries a unique identity — fake tickets, black-market resale, and the real ledger behind the sold-out sign, all visible in one place. The ticket queue for a Bangladesh-India series, or the scalpers circling Wembley: they are all victims of a system where ticket ownership cannot even be proven.

And the player workload ledger? Fixture congestion is the biggest cause of injury; no medical team can save a player from two games a week. If workload data sat on an immutable ledger, it would be provable which board pushed how many matches — and the player would hold a weapon against the board, not the board against the player.

There is another angle nobody wants to admit. Cricket's anti-corruption system relies largely on paper records and testimony, and breaking a case takes time. An immutable ledger — which player, which agent, which club, made contact when — could enter history in a form that cannot be erased. Not a solution, but a weapon that makes intermediaries nervous.

This is where I have to stand against myself, or this piece becomes a sermon.

I could be wrong, because the platforms selling blockchain to cricket are themselves centralised, venture-capital-funded companies. Decentralisation here is often theatre. A token is really a hidden share, and regulators will eventually wake up — then cricket's boards will either ban tokens or build a regulated version themselves. There is another risk: the very technology I think will empower the periphery could concentrate more power in the big three, because the market, the platforms and the regulation are in their hands. Crypto's bad reputation could easily reduce the whole thing to a ticketing and collectibles hobby.

One more honest point. I have watched cricket for more than a decade, built podcasts, and read matches from empty stands. That experience says cricket's fan culture is far ahead of its technology, and far behind it too. Where getting a ticket takes hours in a queue, selling a fan token through an app means dodging the real problem.

Still, my prediction: within 36 months, at least one major franchise will settle part of a player's payment in tokens, and at least one board will sell a small slice of a player's economic rights to fans. No regulator will be ready. So the question is not whether blockchain comes to cricket. The question is who holds the key to the door when it does.