Cricket's New Innings: When Blockchain Technology Steps onto the Field

At the Mirpur Sher-e-Bangla Stadium, three thousand spectators were crowding for tickets when suddenly a boy let go of his father's hand and began to cry — the tickets were sold out, their turn hadn't come. That scene from 2026 still haunts me from my Sylhet veranda. Every time I go to a stadium, I feel that cricket's biggest crisis is not bat-and-ball, it's the ticket counter.

As blockchain technology enters cricket, I wonder — perhaps this cry is the first thing technology will never hear. But is technology even trying to listen? For the past month, from my veranda in Sylhet, I have been thinking about the relationship between blockchain and cricket. Fan tokens, NFTs, smart contracts — these words are now as familiar as a T20 scorecard. But has this familiarity brought the game closer, or pushed it further away?

The Promise of Fan Tokens

In 2026, Indian Premier League side Rajasthan Royals launched fan tokens on the Socios platform. Captain Sanju Samson said at the time that fans would be able to vote on club decisions and gain access to exclusive content. The same year, the International Cricket Council (ICC) announced a partnership with FanCraze, where cricket moments could be collected as NFTs. Among those NFTs were digital versions of the greatest deliveries, centuries, and catches in history.

Reading this news, my first reaction was a kind of wonder. I have watched cricket for fifty years and filed over a thousand match reports for newspapers. Every time, beside the scoreboard, we look at numbers — crowd figures, ticket prices, broadcast rights money. Now the token price has been added to that list. The question is: what did the fan actually get?

It seems to me that the promise a fan token makes is not genuine devotion but a kind of transaction. Fans express love for a club, and the club gives them a token tied to cryptocurrency whose value fluctuates in the market. The line between love and investment becomes blurred.

Players' Futures in Smart Contracts

Another possibility of blockchain is writing player contracts as smart contracts. Suppose a cricketer automatically receives match fees upon crossing a certain run milestone, or contract terms self-adjust after an injury. In such a system, intermediaries become less necessary, and a direct relationship between club and player is established.

But here I find a danger. In five decades of journalism, I have seen that cricket's biggest accidents happen when people forget players are human, not machines. If a smart contract's code cannot properly connect a player's physical illness to the scoreboard, whose fault is it — the code's, or the player's?

The Bangladesh Context

No Bangladesh Premier League team uses blockchain yet. But after the launch of Dhaka's first crypto exchange in 2026, it is natural that the technology will circle back to our cricket. Sitting on my Sylhet veranda, I wonder — if Sylhet Strikers' match tickets were sold on the blockchain, would that boy's fate at the ticket counter have changed? The answer lies not in technology but in administration.

Ticket black-marketing is an old curse in cricket. On the blockchain, every ticket transaction is transparent because every ticket carries a unique code. Black-marketing could largely be reduced. But this requires proper implementation, proper administration, proper rules. Technology will not fold up the counter by itself.

The Contrarian Angle

Here I want to look the other way. The conventional narrative says blockchain will make cricket more democratic — fans will participate in club decisions through tokens and share ownership. But from my experience, this democracy may be hollow.

In 2026, I went to Moscow to watch the World Cup. I saw Germany's collapse and the rise of a young Mbappé. That experience taught me that big tournaments are not about big technology but big emotions. The same applies to fan tokens. If the token market falls into the hands of big investors, real power lies not with the ordinary fan but with those who can buy the most tokens. It becomes the old caste system again — just as the wealthy control the game, token owners will control it.

Cricket remains a relatively less corrupt game not because of spectator control but because of players' sense of honor. In 2026, World Series Cricket restructured the global game. Kerry Packer's circus believed money and technology would save cricket. In the end, it was the players' hunger and the spectators' love that did.

Going Deeper: Why This Technology Is Actually Arriving

Blockchain is entering cricket mainly because clubs need new revenue streams. Television rights, sponsorship, ticket sales — these are becoming increasingly uncertain. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, when stadiums were empty, clubs realized they needed alternative income. Fan tokens and NFTs are that alternative.

This arithmetic is clear to me. But cricket's arithmetic and life's arithmetic are not the same. In 2026, when I watched Liverpool win the Premier League in an empty Anfield, billions of people around the world were watching from their locked-down homes. That empty stadium taught me that cricket's true wealth is not technology but the breath of spectators.

A Signing-Off Signal

Writing all these words, I have found one question — will blockchain rediscover cricket or make it even more complicated? My old press pass still hangs on the wall of my Sylhet veranda. After every match, I remember that boy in the stadium instead of looking at the scoreboard. Amid the big blockchain transactions, let us not forget — the relationship between fan and player is not a transaction; it is a kind of trust.

Technology will come, tokens will come, NFTs will come. But the cry that nourishes the game, the gentle human touch that inspires players — those will never be written into smart contracts. In 2035, when another boy waits for a ticket, let that cry of cricket not be lost amid the noise of technology.

Blockchain may make cricket more inclusive — spectators from Sylhet, Rangpur, and Khulna may become equal stakeholders with any fan in the world. But if this inclusion ends at the doorstep of the wallet, that hope fails. The only question remains — will technology ever learn to understand human pain? There is nothing left but to wait for the answer.