Blockchain's Tide in Cricket: Fan Tokens, NFTs and the Hidden Math of Franchise Valuation

It was half past eleven at night in Dhaka. My laptop screen glowed in a small flat, and I was watching a T20 franchise league auction. A young cricketer's price suddenly landed at six times his base price. A franchise official stood up, slapped the table, then laughed into his phone. I paused the screen and sat still. The question was simple: where is this money actually coming from? The answer was not written on the player's jersey. It was on the franchise's sponsor list — a crypto exchange, an NFT marketplace, a fan-token platform. That night an old assumption of mine broke. Cricket's money is no longer running only on tickets, broadcast rights and board grants. A new layer has been placed on top, and the language of that layer is blockchain. Since then I have done one job: I trace every new stream of money in cricket — where it comes from, whose pocket it enters, and who ends up carrying the risk. This piece is one such accounting. I have watched three big waves of money enter cricket. The first was broadcast rights. Through the nineties and the 2000s, television turned cricket into a product and board revenues jumped. The second was the T20 franchise league. The Indian Premier League (IPL) began in 2026, followed by Australia's Big Bash, the Caribbean Premier League, our own Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), and more recently the UAE's ILT20 and South Africa's SA20. A franchise is not a cricket club, it is a cricket company — with shares, a valuation, an owner. The third wave began around 2026-2026, and its name is crypto. In football this wave arrived earlier. When I built a spreadsheet in Dhaka about Neymar's €222 million move to PSG in 2026, I noticed how PSG spread the fee across five years and inflated its commercial revenue. — Root: the 2026 crypto fever. The same technique, a few years later, entered cricket in new packaging — as fan tokens, NFTs and crypto sponsorships. In football, platforms called Socios and Chiliz created fan tokens for clubs like Barcelona, PSG and Juventus. Fans bought tokens and could vote on minor club decisions. In cricket this model arrived later, and through a different door — the NFT door. The two most visible examples of blockchain in cricket are FanCraze and Rario. FanCraze partnered with the International Cricket Council (ICC) to launch an NFT collection called Crictos, and in 2026 it reportedly raised a Series A of roughly $100 million, according to company announcements. Rario signed a deal with Cricket Australia and built digital collectibles around cricketers. Both platforms wanted to turn cricket moments — a six, a catch, a match-winning innings — into tradeable products. In 2026, as a Daily Star reporter, I interviewed Soumya Sarkar. That was my first verifiable byline. Back then cricket news meant scores, stats and quotations. Today, in the same profession, cricket news means amortisation, token supply and regulatory risk. The day Soumya was making his debut, nobody could have imagined that a digital token calculation would one day sit beside his name. Blockchain money entered cricket mainly through three separate doors, and understanding them separately makes the whole picture clear. One door is sponsorship. A crypto exchange or NFT platform logo appears on a franchise's jersey, helmet, even stadium boards. This money flows directly into franchise revenue, and that revenue is what a franchise uses to buy players at auction. So crypto company money, in a roundabout way, becomes a player's salary. This is not new — cigarettes, alcohol and betting companies have entered sport this way for decades. What is new is the scale and speed. When a crypto exchange signs a large deal in a single season, that money arrives as sudden extra income. And people rarely spend sudden money carefully; they spend it on enthusiasm. Another door is the NFT. A moment becomes a digital product — a cover drive, a match-winning six, a memorable catch. A fan buys it, and ownership is written on a blockchain. The income here goes mainly to the platform and the licensing board or league. The player himself usually does not get a direct share, even though his performance is the raw material. NFT prices are set by a simple rule — how many want to buy. How many want to buy is set by how famous the moment is. So here a qualitative emotion is priced on a quantitative demand curve. The third door is the fan token. A fan buys a token, and that token gives him the right to vote on minor club decisions — the anthem, the jersey design. It sounds democratic, but economically it is a speculative asset whose price depends on fan interest. A token has a fixed supply, and the platform releases it gradually. Keeping supply low makes the price look high, and a high price attracts new fans to buy more. This loop runs as long as new buyers keep arriving. Together, the money from these three doors produces a curious effect on a franchise's balance sheet. Sponsorship adds revenue directly. NFT and token income adds revenue plus a new story — that this franchise is not only a cricket team but also a digital platform. And it is this story that inflates the franchise's paper valuation. That valuation is the real game. When an investor puts money into a franchise, he does not look only at the team's performance; he looks at its growth story — digital fans, token economics, global reach. A hot crypto market makes that story easiest to inflate. So for a franchise owner, blockchain is not just a source of income but a tool to raise valuation. And this valuation pressure lands directly on the auction table. When a franchise believes it is worth more, it does not want to fall behind in the race to buy players. The result — a young cricketer's price rises far above his market value. That six-times price that night was therefore not mere madness. It was the final step of a blockchain-driven valuation. A football parallel is needed here. European football has a rule called Financial Fair Play (FFP), which ties a club's spending to its income. Cricket franchise leagues have a salary cap instead — you cannot buy players beyond a certain limit. One easy way to break that cap is to raise revenue. And the fastest way to raise revenue artificially is a blockchain announcement — a token sale, an NFT drop, a sponsorship deal. In other words, blockchain works as a financial loophole, exactly as inflated commercial revenue once did in football. I built a franchise-valuation model from my auction notebooks. The inputs were three — sponsorship income, the declared valuation of the digital platform, and total spending on players at auction. The model showed that where the share of digital income rises, auction spending also rises, but its relationship with player performance grows weaker. In short: more money, less accounting. There is a clear warning here, and I do not want to hide it. Many inputs of this model are estimates. A franchise's true digital income is not always public. Token prices are volatile, and that volatility makes the model's output volatile too. So I always show a range, not a single number. If someone says a given franchise's blockchain income is exactly this much, he is probably passing off an estimate as fact. In November 2026, the FTX collapse came. That collapse was not merely the fall of one exchange. It cast a shadow over every sports sponsorship deal. Franchises and leagues that had built their budgets on crypto company money suddenly found their numbers did not add up. Through the crypto winter of 2026-2026, NFT trading volumes collapsed, and cricket's NFT platforms too began cutting costs to survive. A jersey that carried a crypto logo one year carried a different logo the next. Sponsor changes are routine, but here the message was big: blockchain money was enthusiasm money, not permanent capital. When enthusiasm falls, the money falls too. Football had learned this lesson earlier. When football clubs were earning overnight income by selling fan tokens, some were already asking: if a token's price depends on fan affection, how can that be permanent income? In cricket we asked the same question later, and smaller leagues paid the price for the delay. Big leagues survived because they had broadcast rights and audiences. Smaller leagues that had relied on new crypto money suddenly saw their budgets shrink. And this is exactly where the view from the Dhaka desk offers a different picture. Bangladesh Bank has repeatedly warned about crypto transactions, and crypto is not legal tender in Bangladesh. Yet Bangladeshis are among the world's most passionate cricket audiences. BPL, IPL, World Cup — millions here watch the streaming and the debate. So the very fans around whom blockchain companies want to build their biggest story are largely in a country where they legally cannot buy that product. This is an uncomfortable reality. If cricket's core market is South Asia, and much of crypto is banned or uncertain there, what leg is the blockchain-cricket story standing on? From years of watching matches, I can say this market runs on emotion, not accounting. And blockchain wanted to turn that very emotion into a product. But emotion has a problem — it raises prices fast and drops them faster. Another side of blockchain-cricket is its rumour engine. A token launch, an NFT drop, a crypto sponsorship — these are announced through press releases and social media, and spread across time-zone gaps. From Dhaka I have watched a European morning announcement become my night's news, and that same night fans decide whether to buy. This time-zone game is the real engine of crypto-cricket. The news moves so fast that nobody has time to verify. I learned that a deal is never one story; it is leaks, clauses, and people pretending they know nothing. Blockchain-cricket is the same. What an official statement calls fan empowerment is, in a draft document, a token supply table and a vesting schedule. The official story of blockchain-cricket is simple and beautiful. The claim is that blockchain gives fans ownership, gives players a fair share, and spreads cricket's money out of a few hands into ordinary people's hands. I traced crypto sponsorship money from the Dhaka desk and arrived somewhere else. Of the money that entered cricket, where did the largest share go? To platform founders, to early token investors, and to the franchise owners who used the blockchain story to inflate their company valuation, then raised debt or investment against that valuation. What did players get? Very little. NFT income goes mainly to licensors and platforms. If a token price rises, the gain is the investor's, not the fan's. And what the fan got was not ownership but a suggestion — the right to vote on minor decisions, with almost no real power. This model had a weakness from the start. Cricket's core fans are in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Much of crypto in these countries is uncertain or restricted. So the fan meant to be made an owner has no legal route to buy that ownership in his own country. The result — blockchain-cricket is really not for those fans, but a story for foreign investors and platforms. Two independent pieces of evidence can test my claim. One, most cricket NFT platform trading has been concentrated in international markets, not with local fans. Two, through the crypto winter these platforms had to cut costs to survive, yet player salaries and boards' core revenues did not fall much. In other words, the risk went to fans and platforms, while the benefit went elsewhere. Another point many skip is fan-token voting rights. When a club gives fans a vote on the anthem, that is not democracy but a branding exercise. Real power — buying players, hiring coaches, ticket prices — carries no fan vote. Where there is no power to decide, the claim of ownership is a story, not an asset. There was a chance to learn from football's experience. After football's fan-token boom, many clubs' token prices fell substantially after the initial surge, and that price movement showed little relationship with club performance. This is my second independent piece of evidence: a token's price is a function of market mood, not fan affection. My claim here is clear and falsifiable. The real beneficiaries of blockchain in cricket are platforms and franchise owners, not fans or players. To disprove it, one would have to show that a large share of cricket NFT and token income went directly to players or local fans, and that this income stayed stable through the crypto winter. So far, the evidence I have seen says the opposite. What comes next? I see two things. One, regulation is coming — many countries are bringing tokens and NFTs under securities rules, which means future fan tokens will need licences and legal risk accounting, not just marketing. Two, consolidation — small NFT platforms will not survive, and big leagues and boards will build their own digital assets, in a regulated mould. And one possibility I have watched from the start — tokenised player contracts. The idea is simple: sell part of a player's future earnings to fans as tokens. It sounds revolutionary, but the risk is enormous. If the player is injured or loses form, the token price can fall to zero and the fan's money vanishes. To invest in such a market from a place like Dhaka means buying a volatile asset with no regulatory protection. The question remains: in the next crypto fever, will cricket's boards look at the accounting first, or will they again sell the story first? And if that story returns, from the Dhaka desk I will again trace it step by step — where the money comes from, and who ends up carrying the risk.