Pitch Under the Shadow of the Chain: Fan Tokens, NFTs and the Invisible Labour of Cricket

The smell of rain still lives inside my nose. On the evening of 8 December 2026, sitting at the Sylhet International Cricket Stadium, I watched a ball-boy trace raindrops on the tarpaulin with his finger, as if drawing a map with no address. The groundstaff pulled at ropes; some stood by the pitch with lowered heads. The scoreboard had frozen at Sylhet 142/7, Khulna Titans had not yet batted. That day I did not file a score update; I wrote about that ball-boy. The post travelled, and a producer in Dhaka wrote: you write the pitch, not the score.

Eight years later, on a rain-soaked evening in 2026, almost the same scene returned. Rain in Sylhet again, the tarpaulin again, the waiting again. But this time a phone in my pocket buzzed. A notification surfaced: your fan token is up twelve per cent. The same waiting, but a different economy. Where waiting was once a mere erosion of time, it is now a market. And the language of that market is blockchain.

From my twenty-eight years of watching cricket, one thing I can say: this game has always been bound to its audience by a kind of contract. Buying a ticket and walking in means a promise, a transaction of love. Blockchain wants to rewrite that transaction. The question is: for whom?

Context: the chain arrives in cricket

Blockchain entered cricket through three doors. The first is the fan token. Socios.com and its parent platform Chiliz, which built the fan-token world in football, extended a hand toward cricket leagues and clubs. The idea is simple: a club or league issues a limited number of digital tokens, fans buy them, and in return they get some voting rights and perks, such as taking part in a poll to pick the XI or access to special meetings.

The second door is the NFT, the non-fungible token. In India the most active names have been Rario and FanCraze. Rario has worked with Indian cricketers' digital cards and video clips; FanCraze has entered the same collectibles market. Cricket Australia has also released digital collectibles of its historic moments. The third door is blockchain ticketing, where each ticket is a unique digital object that cannot be forged and whose resale can be controlled.

Behind these three doors sits a common promise: to remove the middlemen between cricket and its fans. The club will reach the fan directly, tickets will escape the black market, and a player's money will reach his own hands. The promise is beautiful. But like that tarpaulin in Sylhet, which stops the rain but will not let the pooled water escape, this promise also holds something back.

Core analysis: an arithmetic that does not add up

Blockchain's biggest claim is ownership. The fan is no longer a mere spectator; he is a stakeholder. But to understand what that stake really means in cricket, we must go a little deeper. When a fan buys a fan token, what is he actually buying? He is buying a digital object whose value is set by the play of demand and supply, much like a stock. But a cricket club's or league's success is set on the pitch, in runs and wickets. There is a gap between these two economies, and that gap is the real story.

The real truth is that a fan token does not change the game of cricket; it changes the financial speculation that surrounds cricket. A club may issue a fan token, raise money, but where does that money go? If it goes to players' salaries, academies, women's cricket, local ground maintenance, then a moral foundation is created. But often the proceeds of a token sale are used to repay old debt, or simply to brighten the owners' balance sheet. Then the token becomes a financial instrument with no link to the people who live with the game.

In my notebook I have written a line I return to again and again: a fan's love for the game is not liquid, and the market that seeks to liquefy it will never understand its value. Blockchain experts say tokenisation means liquidity, turning a fan's love into something buyable and sellable. But the love of cricket can never be divided into whole numbers. What you feel for that rain-soaked ball-boy in Sylhet cannot be measured in a token.

There is another thing worth noticing here. Blockchain's advocates say the system is decentralised. No central bank, no middleman. But in cricket the system actually becomes more centralised. The right to issue tokens sits with the club's owner, and the fan holds zero power over the token's price. Decentralised technology, centralised power: the meeting of these two is the true character of blockchain cricket.

Look at the players. If a payment system is built on smart contracts, there is a theoretically good side. Image rights, match fees, bonuses, all could flow automatically to a player's account once defined conditions are met. This could reduce delays, reduce the room for corruption. But in reality cricket's financial structure is not that clean. Women players in small leagues, first-class domestic players, net bowlers, physios, scorers, these people's contracts are often verbal and vague. Blockchain does not erase that vagueness; it increases the power of those who have blockchain and pushes those who do not further to the margins.

In 2026 I worked on a transfer-window documentary for Aston Villa, embedded remotely from Dhaka. I was able to confirm Philippe Coutinho's loan from Barcelona, number 23, after earning his agent's trust. That experience taught me how much human labour lies behind a transfer, people whose names no one knows. Blockchain does not recognise that invisible labour, because that labour is not digital. No one can tokenise the touch of a physio's hand.

Yet one side of blockchain genuinely interests me, and that is ticketing. Getting a ticket to a big match in Bangladesh is a kind of war. Standing at the gates of a stadium in Sylhet or Dhaka, I have seen how the ordinary spectator loses to the black-market tout. If blockchain ticketing truly works, if each ticket becomes a unique object that cannot be duplicated and whose resale price the club itself controls, then it could be a fair change. Here technology can stand beside the spectator, against the tout.

But there are conditions. First, the ticketing system must work on ordinary phones, not only expensive smartphones. Second, the language must be local, Bengali or whatever the region's language is. Third, there must be an alternative path for those who are not digitally literate. Otherwise blockchain ticketing will itself create a new middleman, a digital tout, less visible than the old one but equally powerful.

In my pitch-side notebook there is a remark about blockchain that a steward once made to me. He said the real accounts of a match are settled under the tarpaulin, where we all wait, and no one counts money. That line stayed with me. Because blockchain's real test will come in that moment of waiting, when play is stopped, when nothing is happening. Will the technology stay with the spectator then, or only search for his wallet?

In 2026 I covered Spain 2-1 England at the Euros, where seventeen-year-old Lamine Yamal provided four assists. Then Spain 5-3 France at the Paris Olympics, Sergio Camello scoring twice in extra time. In that period I felt that the future of cricket and football lies in youth, but who controls the economy of youth is another question. If an NFT is sold in Lamine Yamal's name, how much of that money reaches him? How much goes to the platform? How much to the investor who bought a token in his name but has never watched him play?

There is another layer here that I consider important, and that is cricket's moral economy. The 2026 Club World Cup reform, Chelsea 3-0 PSG, felt commercial to me. My mood dropped then, and I returned to Sylhet to write the 2026 USA-Canada-Mexico World Cup documentary, a twelve-part series. Blockchain is a new chapter of that same commercialisation, only this time the currency is different.

Even as audiences grow, cricket's real wealth is its tradition, its locality, its unfinished stories. Blockchain wants to sell that tradition in pieces. But the moment that touches your heart is whole; it cannot be divided. In the cricket that is converted into blockchain, the game remains, but the poetry of waiting does not.

I have spoken to many people on this subject, especially agents and kit managers, because my way of writing is to look for the people behind the player. One kit manager told me a digital token means nothing to him, because his work starts at six in the morning, measuring grass height, checking pad straps. That work does not go on the blockchain. Yet cricket's greatest asset is this kind of invisible care.

So is blockchain entirely bad for cricket? My answer is no, but it is good only when it is made for the fan rather than imposed on the fan. If a fan token truly lets the audience vote on the XI, truly keeps ticket prices in check, truly secures a player's unpaid wages, then it is a tool, not a toy. The difference is not small.

I think cricket boards must avoid two mistakes on blockchain. The first is total denial, the claim that the technology is outside our culture. The second is blind allegiance, where a board issues a token seeing only the sponsorship money. The middle path is difficult but possible: before issuing a token, the interests of players, workers and spectators must be protected in writing.

In the Bangladeshi context, one point deserves separate mention. Our cricket's reality is limited infrastructure, uncertain contracts, and a vast gap between ticket demand and supply. In this situation, if blockchain can reduce corruption, if it can help a local woman cricketer's salary arrive on time, then it is not mere technology, it is justice. But if it only creates a new rumour market for foreign investors, then it is another loss for our cricket.

In 2026, during Covid, I wrote a documentary about empty stadiums. Watching a match before 80,000 empty seats at Dortmund's Signal Iduna Park, I felt nothing but exhaustion. Then I understood that an empty stadium is a character with its own breath. Blockchain cannot measure that breath. A token can say how many spectators were there, but it cannot say what was happening in their chests.

This is why I am sceptical of blockchain's claim that technology will improve cricket's experience. Experience is a mental event, not a technical one. The wait in the rain, the water pooled under the tarpaulin, a ball-boy's finger, all of it together makes cricket, and none of it can be stored on a chain. Only its image, its code, its record can be stored.

Still I want to be hopeful about blockchain, because I do not want cricket's administration to fall behind in the name of technology. I want smart contracts to change the story of a player's unpaid wages. I want blockchain ticketing to end the reign of the tout to whom an ordinary spectator like me has lost again and again. I want the fan's vote to truly matter, not only the owner's balance sheet.

Contrarian angle: the illusion of ownership and centralised power

Now I look for that corner I always ask about in meetings: where is the corner? The corner of the blockchain cricket story is that its biggest promise, ownership, is actually its biggest deception. The fan is told, you are now a stakeholder. But a stake means a share in decisions, a share in profit, a share in liability. A token gives you a vote, but not power over decisions. Profit perhaps some, liability none. This is not a stake, it is the pretence of participation.

Another contrarian truth is that blockchain is purportedly decentralised, but in cricket's reality its outcome is centralised. Those who issue tokens make the rules. Those who buy tokens follow them. Technology can be neutral, but its use is never neutral. As long as cricket's financial power rests in a few hands, blockchain will not spread that power; it will give it a new form.

My other suspicion concerns fan-token valuation. If a club's token price is unrelated to the club's on-field success, then it is a speculative asset, a gambling table where real cricket is an excuse. I do not want to moralise about gambling, but I want to say that cricket's love and financial rumour are two different things, and to mix them is to cheat the spectator.

The last suspicion is about NFTs. If a video clip of a historic moment, which lives freely in my memory, is locked in someone's digital wallet, does my memory shrink? I think yes. Because cricket's moments belong to everyone, not to a single buyer. A Kohli shot, a Mahmudullah innings, these are collective assets, and selling a collective asset into private ownership is a cultural loss.

Takeaway: the test of technology in the moment of waiting

Cricket's future will not be decided on the pitch, but beside it, under the tarpaulin, where the spectator waits. Blockchain's real test will be there: in the moment play stops, when nothing is happening, will the technology stay with the spectator, or search for his wallet? Sitting in the rain in Sylhet, I wonder whether in 2040 a ball-boy will still run a finger across the tarpaulin, or buy a digital token and wait. I do not know the answer. But I know that the cricket which forgets its invisible labour and the poetry of waiting will lose its own soul.