From Zero to Truth: Cricket's Data Economy, Blockchain and the Verification Crisis

I was sitting beside Gosch's Paddock in Melbourne, staring at three different scores for the same over on three apps. One said 47/2, another 48/2, the third 47/3. Which was true? Nobody knew. A fan standing just past the boundary rope laughed and said, "Three apps, three crickets." I did not laugh. Because I knew this small inconsistency was one of the biggest stories in cricket today — the story of data, and the story of verifying it. Cricket is no longer just ball and bat; it is a data economy, where every ball's speed, every shot's angle, every spinner's revolutions is being measured by someone. Yet almost nobody asks who verifies that data.

I have spent twenty-seven years moving in and out of dressing rooms. In 2026 I played for Udity Club in the Dhaka league as an opening batter and wicketkeeper, then turned to coaching and analytical cricket writing. In 2026 I left The Daily Star to cover the Bangladesh national team home and away. In 2026, writing for Dhaka Tribune, I was elected to the executive committee of the Bangladesh Sports Journalists Association. The change I have felt most deeply in this time is not about trophies or rankings — it is a quiet war over who owns information. And into that battlefield has now walked a word called blockchain, which some call a path to freedom and others call a new trap.

The crisis intensifies during World Cups and major tournaments, because then lakhs of people's emotions are tied to every single ball. In recent tournaments I have watched a disputed catch, a review, a no-ball become a social-media war, and the core evidence is usually a screenshot, a clip, a tweet. The actual data — the data used to make the decision — never reaches the ordinary fan. This gap is cricket's biggest structural weakness. It is precisely this gap that made me start looking at blockchain.

What blockchain actually is, in cricket's language: it is a ledger that does not live in one person's hands. What is written there cannot be erased, and each entry is chained to the previous one. To change a number, you would have to change the whole ledger, which is nearly impossible. That is why some believe that if cricket's data goes onto this ledger, scores, reviews, fitness reports, even contract money would all become verifiable. It sounds beautiful. But from thirty-seven years of journalism I know one thing: behind every beautiful promise there is always a hard question.

You cannot understand blockchain's claim without understanding how cricket's data explosion actually happened. In two decades the volume of data in cricket has grown a hundredfold. Hawk-Eye, ball-tracking, Snickometer, live-streaming platforms, fan apps — at every layer, data is generated every second. A single ODI produces lakhs of data points from ball-tracking alone. A T20 league season crosses crores. The question is where this data lives, who owns it, and who accepts it as true.

In my experience the answer is uncomfortable. Much of the data sits on the servers of a few private companies. Broadcasters, data providers, boards, even betting-related firms each build their own version. I learned more about a squad at 30,000 feet than in any press conference — but with data the opposite happens. The more data, the more versions, the less certainty. At an Asia Cup match some years ago, two platforms showed two different economy rates for a spinner, because one excluded byes and the other included them. Neither was wrong, but neither was fully true. What the fan saw was a preference, not reality.

This is where blockchain's claim becomes loud. If a given dataset goes onto an immutable ledger, with source, timestamp and hash all visible, then no one can change numbers at will. Some sports-data verification startups are working on this model — breaking match events into small records written to a chain, so that later anyone can prove what happened at a given moment. In theory it is powerful. But here is the first trap: blockchain does not prove truth, it only proves that someone wrote a particular number at a particular time. If the number was wrong from the start, blockchain immortalises the error instead of correcting it.

Now to the fan. A thing called a fan token is spreading in cricket and football alike. A club or board issues a digital token, the fan buys it, and in return gets a vote on some club decisions — jersey design, pre-season tour venues, small rewards. In Bangladesh or South Asia this idea is tempting, because fan emotion is intense while formal power is nearly zero. Tell a fan, "You can now vote on team decisions," and he will believe it.

But I have noticed something. In this token economy, what the fan is given is often symbolic power — a kind of consolation that keeps him away from real decisions. And here blockchain becomes a strange thing. On one hand it brings transparency to the fan; on the other it opens a new revenue door for the club. The question is who balances the two. In my observation, often no one. Just as cricket boards never told fans where the money went, the money flow of fan tokens is often left in fog. A digital token does not give the fan power unless the economics of that token are open before the fan.

The same goes for NFT cricket moments. Say a star player's historic innings clip is sold as a digital collectible. Someone buys it; ownership is recorded on-chain. This model can look like a lovely way to preserve memory. I have written that empty seats do not mean empty souls, they just move the noise inside — because I know how personal stadium memory is. If that memory becomes a commercial product, the question arises: who shares the profit. The player? The board? Or the platform? In many cases I have seen, the player himself does not know who owns the digital asset created from his own performance.

Now to the most sensitive side — anti-corruption. Match-fixing and betting scandals are not new to cricket. I have covered times when a suspicious over triggered all-night phone calls with no evidence in hand. Blockchain's supporters say that if all betting transactions sat on an open ledger, abnormal patterns would surface and corruption would become hard. The theory is reasonable. But in practice the world's big betting economy runs almost entirely through illegal or semi-regulated channels. A transaction that never surfaces cannot be written to a blockchain. So the part that is most dangerous stays beyond blockchain's reach. It is the same old problem — you can build a ledger, but if the criminal refuses to write in it, the ledger has no power.

Smart contracts carry another big promise. When conditions are met, money is released automatically — player salaries, prize money, sponsorship instalments. In cricket, where financial disputes between boards and players often stall midway, this is tempting. In both my home and adopted countries I have seen small-league players wait months for pay. To them a smart contract sounds like liberation. But this liberation has a condition — who writes the contract terms, and whose approval runs it. If the board itself controls the ledger, blockchain is only a wrapper, with the old power structure inside.

In South Asia the discussion is more complex. Here cricket is not just a game; it is a junction of national emotion, economy and politics. The Bangladesh Cricket Board, the BCCI, the PCB — each holds vast data and vast money. If this data truly went onto an open ledger, fans would for the first time see where money went, who made which decision, and why a player was dropped. That is a revolution for the fan, but discomfort for the board. My suspicion is that this is exactly why boards are so slow to embrace blockchain. Every dynasty begins as a quiet ritual nobody outside the room respects yet — and transparency is the same: at first nobody wants it, later it becomes the norm.

One thing must be made clear. Blockchain is not magic; it is a framework. And a framework is never stronger than human will. I have walked into dressing rooms for years and learned that when a team wins a trophy, the real story begins after the cameras leave. Then no one looks at the scorecard; then people remember who said what. The data economy is the same. A score may be written on a chain, but the words inside the dressing room — who is tired, who is injured, who is mentally broken — never go onto any ledger. Clubs never fully disclose the true nature of a player's injury, because it hurts his market value. Blockchain cannot break that secrecy, because the problem is not technology, it is power.

Now my biggest doubt, and the core argument of this piece. I have worked with information for twenty-seven years, and my biggest lesson is that no system can deliver more truth than is fed into it. If a cricket board deliberately supplies false information, blockchain will immortalise that falsehood. Then the fan will believe a lie with even more confidence, because he thinks, "It is on the blockchain, so it must be true." To me this is dangerous, because it strengthens the lie. When technology arrives disguised as verification, the need for real verification only grows.

I once nearly fell into this trap. At a tournament I got a statistic and was about to build a piece on it. A colleague asked, have you verified the source? I checked, and the number was wrong. The error was in a ledger, written confidently, yet wrong. Since that day I ask two questions behind every number — who measured it, and why did this number reach me. In the blockchain era these two questions matter more. Technology eases the path of information, but it does not change the purpose of information. If someone releases data for public relations, blockchain will not make it neutral.

Still, I do not dismiss blockchain entirely. The opposite. I have seen one thing that is genuinely promising — the data of a player's career. How many matches, how many balls, how many injuries, how many coaching reports — if these sit in a secure, transferable, verifiable record, then clubs or selectors can no longer make claims at will. This is power for the player, especially for those who play small leagues and want to move to big teams. In my experience information is often used against the player, not for him.

Another possibility is fan participation. If a board truly wants to include fans in decisions, blockchain is a tool for it. But the will to give fans power must come from the board itself; technology cannot create that will. I have written that empty seats do not mean empty souls — likewise, a digital token does not mean digital power. Power comes from the decision room, not from the ledger page.

There is a bigger context behind this whole discussion that I deliberately avoided at the start. It is the emptiness of information. As a journalist I have often faced situations where I had no credible information yet a piece was demanded. Then the biggest temptation is to fill the gap — with guesses, possibilities, estimates. I have resisted that temptation, because I know a blank space can be honestly left blank, but a wrong fact can never be honestly wrong — it leads others astray too. In the blockchain era this lesson is more valuable, because there false information does not merely spread, it becomes permanent.

So my advice is clear. Before bringing blockchain into cricket, boards must answer three questions. First, which data will be open and which closed. Second, who writes the data, and who answers when an error is caught. Third, what will be the ownership of players and fans. Without these three answers, blockchain will remain just another marketing word. I often think cricket's biggest crisis is not in any disputed umpiring decision — the crisis is that no one wants accountability. Technology cannot change that will.

Now I return to that evening beside Gosch's Paddock, before three apps and three scores. The fan laughed, because to him the inconsistency was funny. To me it was a signal — cricket's data economy has not yet found its own truth. Blockchain can be a tool in that search, but it is not truth itself. Truth comes from verification, transparency, and the courage to take responsibility. None of the three can be given by technology; they are human decisions.

My thirty-seven years of experience tell me cricket's future will be decided not on the big screen but in the small ledger. A ledger that records who said it, when, and why. Blockchain can make that ledger durable, but the first entry must be written by a human. And that first entry is the hardest, because there technology does not help; conscience does. Cricket's next great battle will be fought not on the field but in the information room. And in that battle the winner will be the one who is not afraid to ask questions. When fans watch the score in the next tournament, let them keep one question ready — who verified this number? If no answer comes, then blockchain or no blockchain, cricket's truth is still pending.