Cricket's Quiet Notebook and the Blockchain Ledger: Who Will Price a Player's Labor?

Mymensingh's Circuit House ground. Seven in the morning. Dew still clings to the tips of the grass. Curator Rafiq Mia stands beside the wicket, holding a leather-bound old diary. Last night's rain, today's heat, the moisture of the soil, the height of the grass — he writes it all down by hand. Four decades of this same habit. No one keeps account of this diary. No one knows its worth. Yet hidden in these pages is data that any franchise owner should have paid lakhs of taka to acquire.

In 2026, when I was fifty-nine, I sat in seat 14C of the team bus in Thimphu, Bhutan. Captain Jamal Bhuyan, jersey number six, was calming a nervous squad. After a 2-0 win I did not only file a match report; I recorded a three-minute audio diary from the hotel lobby and posted it on Facebook. Twelve thousand people listened to it. That day I understood that when the notebook goes digital, the relationship between labor and accounting quietly changes too. Today, as cricket reaches toward blockchain, that very question has grown large — whose purpose will this technology serve? The player's, or that of the owner who merely counts tickets and sponsors?

Cricket is no longer just a game of bat and ball. It is a data economy. Every ball, every run, every delivery's speed, a spinner's revolutions, a batter's swing plane, fielders' positioning — everything is now recorded second by second. Hawk-Eye, grip sensors, helmet cameras, even chips embedded in the ball — technology has entered the body of cricket. How big is this data market? According to international industry reports, the global sports analytics market was approximately 3.8 billion US dollars in 2026, and is projected to exceed 22 billion by 2030. Cricket is a large, fast-growing part of this.

Now the real question is this — who controls this vast data? Who profits? And what do those who create the data — curators, scorers, physios, team hands, kitmen — receive? It is in seeking answers to these questions that blockchain is now entering the cricket world. What blockchain is no longer needs explanation; but what it can do in cricket is very rarely discussed.

I want to take a clear position here, and I want to convey it not by declaration but by cause and effect. The real potential of blockchain in cricket is not in selling fan tokens for stars; it lies in the work of the quiet laborer whose labor has never been written into any ledger. If data is the new oil, then it is essential to ask — who owns the well, and what does the worker get?

First, consider the question of contracts. In Bangladesh's domestic cricket, especially the Dhaka Premier Division League and the BPL, allegations have surfaced year after year over player contracts, delayed payments, match fees and bonuses. I myself have sat in many dressing rooms and heard it — a young pacer had not received three months of match fees, yet thousands of franchise jerseys were sold bearing his name. A smart contract — an automated contract written on a blockchain — could theoretically solve this problem. Once conditions are met, payment releases automatically, with no middleman broker, no 'I'll pay later.' Every clause, every installment would be publicly verifiable, yet the player's personal data would remain private.

But here is the first trap. Transparency and justice are not the same thing. A blockchain contract can indeed prove that money was released — but who decides the amount? People do. If a domestic player's value is set at one-tenth that of a BPL foreign star, then technology will make that inequality permanent and irreversible. This is blockchain's great danger — once a wrong calculation is placed on the ledger, it cannot be erased.

Second, fan engagement and tokens. European football clubs have issued fan tokens; that wave has now reached cricket. Franchises of the Indian cricket league, clubs of Australia's Big Bash, even the Caribbean Premier League — all are seeking new revenue streams. Fans can buy tokens and vote on which jersey to wear, who speaks at a meeting. The theory sounds beautiful. But I have watched this game's crowds for forty-five years. The Bangladeshi fan is not the fan who wants to buy a three-hundred-taka token to vote on club decisions. The fan in the Mirpur gallery wants Shakib Al Hasan to bowl one extra over, wants Mushfiqur Rahim to hit a six off the last ball. Their passion is genuine, but it is not a market for speculation. If fan tokens become yet another new form of speculation, it is the fan who suffers — not the club.

Third, and to me the most important area — data ownership. How many thousands of data points a match generates cannot be counted. Who buys this data? Betting companies, broadcasters, fantasy platforms, scouting agencies. In Bangladesh we have recently seen how the shadow of irregular betting and fixing can stain cricket. In the early months of 2026, several players were banned on spot-fixing allegations in the Dhaka Premier League — some of those cases remain disputed. If every ball's data is recorded on a timestamped, immutable ledger, then any abnormal pattern — a sudden no-ball in a particular over, or an artificial fall in run rate at a specific time — could be detected instantly. This could be a powerful anti-corruption tool.

But here too there is a condition we often forget. If data is corrupted before it enters the blockchain, the ledger will preserve that corruption forever, not correct it. A wrong scoring entry, a record of a wrong appeal, a biased selection decision — if these are placed on the ledger without verification, we will immortalize the error. Technology does not make information true; it makes the process of information becoming true durable.

Now let me return to my curator Rafiq Mia. I genuinely believe the most undervalued data in cricket lies in the hands of people like him. How a ball bounces on a particular wicket, at how many degrees a spinner turns it, how many hours of drying after rain make a pitch 'two-paced' — this knowledge no Hawk-Eye camera can measure. Yet this knowledge exists in no database, earns no money in any contract, holds no value in any token. If blockchain is truly to be inclusive, it must first recognize the work of that quiet laborer — the curator, the scorer, the physio, the dressing-room man who ties ice to a player's leg at two in the morning. Here lies my greatest doubt, and that is my contrarian view.

Because the reality is that technology generally does not challenge an existing distribution of power — it clothes it in new dress. The franchise that today claims a player's data as its own will tomorrow tokenize that data on a blockchain and sell it, taking the lion's share of the profit itself. The player will get a limited royalty, the fan a digital souvenir, and the technology company in the middle will take the portion that broadcasters or sponsors once took. Across four decades of covering this game I have seen repeatedly that every new technology — from video referrals to ball-tracking — first arrives in the name of 'transparency of the game,' then gradually becomes a new commercial layer.

At this point we must stay alert, learning from my second professional habit. I always keep a small recorder in my pocket, alongside my notebook. Why? Because audio provides evidence, but the notebook provides interpretation. What happened in a match, the recorder will say; but why it happened must be written by hand. Blockchain is much like such a recorder — it will say who, when, how much. But who endured how much hardship, who stood beside whom, who quietly bore pain — that interpretation can only be written by a journalist, a coach, a dressing-room guardian. Technology does not abstract us; technology does not absolve us of responsibility.

My third caution concerns mentorship. In Mymensingh I teach young writers year after year — keep a notebook, write timestamps, never print the story of someone's suffering without consent. Today this new generation is growing up inside data, blockchain and visualization. They may read data far better than I can, but if they do not know that behind a data point lies a human's diary, that data will remain a lifeless number.

Here a specific, verifiable fact is needed. The International Cricket Council sells the broadcast and data rights of its events cyclically, and in recent years the value of these rights has risen significantly — since 2026, new media-rights deals have pushed cricket's broadcast rights into the billion-dollar range. A large share of this money goes to boards and broadcasters; in the data value chain, the player's and the local worker's share is comparatively very thin. If blockchain truly makes the value chain transparent, then it raises a real question — is a player's own ball-by-ball data their own asset? Or their employer's? To this day there is no satisfactory answer anywhere, and that is the greatest gap.

On the other hand, I do not deny blockchain's practical limitations. Speed, bandwidth, energy cost, and Bangladesh's mobile-data conditions — given these, placing every ball's data on a fully public chain is not realistic today. What is realistically possible is a permissioned or hybrid system — where sensitive information stays private, but contracts and audit trails remain verifiable. Here lies a practical recommendation: the start should be made not with the hype of fan tokens, but with payment transparency in the domestic league, where the greatest harm is occurring.

Test this position of mine against a brief historical lens. Why is the back-three formation returning to football fields in the modern technology era? Because coaches fear the risk of a four-man line — one failed line and their reputation is finished. In exactly the same way, the cricket world is embracing blockchain in a safe manner — in a way that does not touch the game's power structure but reshapes it anew. Many boards and franchises are adopting technology so they look modern, without taking risks. But the display of modernity and genuine reform are two different things.

So I place my central claim here, clearly. The success of blockchain in cricket will depend on the answers to three questions — who will own the data, what share will the worker get in payment, and whether a mistake can enter the ledger without verification. If there are no answers to these three questions, then blockchain will be yet another shiny flop for cricket, yet another sponsor board.

I am now sixty-eight. I began working in an era when a match's score was printed in the next day's paper, and correcting a misprint took a week. Today the data of a single ball of a match reaches the other end of the world within seconds, and is unalterable. Standing between these two eras, I have understood one thing clearly — technology has given us information, but not wisdom. Wisdom comes from the quiet labor of the dressing room, from the curator's diary, from the physio's patience. If blockchain respects that wisdom, only then will I call it a genuine reform for cricket. And if it does not, then it will be merely a new ledger — where every number is written, but no human being exists.

For a final thought, I recall the dressing room. In 2026, when the league was suspended under lockdown, I stayed eleven days in Dhaka — who was stranded where, who needed food, who worried about family — no one was keeping that account. It was written in no ledger. Yet that was the real data of the game. I still keep that file written by hand. However far technology advances, let this habit remain analog — because some accounts cannot be put into a machine.

So the question is for you, my reader. When you sit in the stadium at the next BPL match, or watch the score on your phone — do you want to know in whose name your favorite player's ball data is written? Will you ask whether that curator, who prepared the pitch at five in the morning, has a share of his labor in the ledger? The speed of technology does not teach us to ask that question. But an honest notebook, an honest pen — that teaches. And forty years of experience in this profession has taught me exactly this: however fast the ledger, the truth is ultimately written slowly, by human hands.