The On-Chain Ledger and the Training-Ground Notebook: Where Cricket's Money Gets Written Now

On 11 January, at a quarter to four in the afternoon, I was sitting on the wooden bench outside the indoor nets at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium in Mirpur. Inside, a left-handed top-order batter was finishing his last batch of sweep drills. Beside me, his agent turned a phone screen towards me. On it was a contract clause, in English: digital likeness, perpetual, worldwide, assignable. Beneath it sat a shorter paragraph I would not have seen in an agent's book three years ago — where the digital assets built from a player's name, face, shot signature and net-session footage would live, on whose server, in whose ledger.

Out of habit I checked the clock. 3:40 p.m. The phone would not stop, and neither would my hands. Visitor list, the last page of notebook two, and a new question: is the ledger where cricket's money has always been written about to change?

Cricket has been a ledger sport since birth. Scorebooks, run books, match-fee registers, central contract lists, salary-cap arithmetic — all of it is ledger work. The wage bill handwritten in English county cricket in the 1970s and the franchise auction spreadsheet of 2026 differ in technology, not in principle. Who gets how much, who is obliged to pay, when the money lands — cricket has always answered those four questions in writing.

The Indian Premier League auction is the most public version of that ledger culture. At the auction on 19 December 2026, Mitchell Starc went to Kolkata Knight Riders for 24.75 crore rupees, the highest price in IPL auction history. At the same auction, Pat Cummins went to Sunrisers Hyderabad for 20.50 crore rupees. A year earlier, in December 2026, Sam Curran's 18.50 crore rupees to Punjab Kings was the record of its moment. Those numbers become headlines. The real ledger sits in the clauses behind them — how much image rights, how much social media activation, what happens to payment if a player is injured, and what becomes of a player's digital identity when he retires.

That is where blockchain enters, and it enters modestly, far more slowly than the headlines suggest.

The first wave of blockchain in cricket is an entertainment-asset business, not a payments system. In 2026 the International Cricket Council named FanCraze as its official digital collectibles partner, and collections tied to that year's T20 World Cup and the 2026 ODI World Cup reached the market. Cricket Australia announced a partnership with the cricket NFT platform Rario in December 2026. Neither deal is enormous in financial scope. Both set a precedent. Cricket's commercial assets are no longer only stadium gates, shirt sponsors or television slots. Shots, catches, wicket celebrations — those moments are assets too, and recording who owns them needs a new kind of book.

Fan tokens and digital collectibles are not the same thing, and reporting routinely conflates them. A collectible is an asset: once bought, it is yours, and its price can rise or fall. A fan token is closer to a membership — votes, polls, perhaps access to a training session. In cricket, the future of the second is unclear. The club culture that sustains fan tokens in English football does not exist in franchise cricket. Who is an IPL supporter — the people of Kolkata, or the fans of Mitchell Starc? In franchise cricket that identity changes every year, and fan tokens rest on permanent identity.

My interest is not in collectibles. It is in smart contracts, because cricket's oldest ailment can be treated there: delayed payment. Late player salaries in the Bangladesh Premier League are not a new story; since the BPL began, the problem has returned through changes of franchise ownership, sponsor defaults and board mediation. Its root is not technological but fiduciary. If the answers to where the money sits, who controls it and who is paid first are written in advance into an immutable ledger, the excuses for delay narrow sharply.

The real cricket application of blockchain is not the NFT. It is escrow. Escrow written into a smart contract means funds sit in a central account and release automatically when conditions are met — whether a match was played, whether a fitness test was passed, whether a sponsor instalment arrived. Whether people behave honestly or not, the arithmetic is visible. Cricket administration is conservative, and that conservatism is not always a flaw, but on payment transparency it leaves little room for interpretation.

From London, the English system shows the contrast clearly. Under the England and Wales Cricket Board's central contract model, a player's core income arrives through the board rather than a franchise. Salaries in The Hundred's player draft are pre-announced in bands: a fixed amount at each tier, with no room to haggle. That model reduces the space for default or delay, and reduces flexibility with it. The franchise model offers more flexibility and more risk. Blockchain proposes a third path between them — central transparency without central control.

Here is where I want to be precise about my own bias. What the training ground says before a competition is rarely matched by honest information in the market. The training ground told me the truth three days before the transfer market did. Who is genuinely fit, who is putting in the net hours, who is rebuilding a bowling action — none of that travels on-chain. It travels in the net's canvas. Technology can record. It cannot evaluate.

I wrote that in the third notebook, the one I keep for things I could not prove yet. In it is a line: the difference between an on-chain ledger and a training-ground notebook is time. The ledger looks backwards. The notebook looks forwards.

Now the part where blockchain enthusiasts will not agree with me.

The problem blockchain does not solve is talent valuation. A contract on-chain or on paper is still a wrong valuation if the valuation is wrong. Franchise cricket still overpays for youth potential and underpays for dressing-room chemistry. Paying a proven bowler like Starc or Cummins is easy, because his record sits in a book. A 23-year-old left-arm spinner who learned the language of a dressing room in three weeks has a value written in no ledger. That value decides matches.

Second, immutability is itself a risk. A bad contract written on-chain stays visible forever, and so does the confidentiality of a good one. Medical data, injury history, mental-health notes — none of that belongs in a public book. My own professional habit draws the line here: before the recorder goes on, I ask what should stay off the record. That line cannot be written into a blockchain, because everything there is on. The conflict between technical immutability and human consent will define the real argument of the next five years.

Third, in fan tokens, ownership and loyalty are being confused. Cricket support is inherited, not purchased. You cannot buy the team your father supported; you have to choose it. A token converts that into a transaction, and transactions go where the price is higher. In franchise cricket, the risk is that fandom itself becomes a speculative asset.

So what should we watch in the next three years? Not auction prices. The path of the money.

My expectation is that between 2026 and 2028, one franchise league — perhaps South Africa, perhaps the UAE, perhaps India — will run an entire squad's payments through escrow smart contracts. Whether it succeeds will not be decided by technology but by administrative will. Blockchain's real opponent is not a crypto sceptic. It is an institution accustomed to keeping its own books private.

Sitting on that bench in Mirpur, watching a clause about digital likeness on an agent's phone, I thought about the question players still do not ask. They ask what the price is. They do not ask who will hold the footage of my shots, for how long, and who profits from it after I retire.

On the last page of notebook three I left one question. The ground always tells the truth about the arithmetic. Will the ledger learn to say it, or only record what it costs?