The Empty Spreadsheet and the Invisible Witness: Cricket Data Credibility and the Limits of Blockchain

I opened the spreadsheet, and the stadium exhaled. But this time the breath carried no roar. In my workroom in Rajshahi, the table that opened before me had the same answer written into nearly every cell of its eight analytical columns: insufficient information. The machinery was working — definitions, sub-tables, risk flags, confidence tags, all in place. And yet the raw material was empty. An empty spreadsheet does not analyse anything; it analyses the absence of analysis. That is probably the biggest cricket story of the day: we live in the age of data, while the question of how trustworthy the data itself is sits outside the frame.

How much cricket analysis has changed in a decade can be said in one line. When I started the Rajshahi Lab in 2026, scraping open data from 2,800 shots to build a crude xG model was audacity. Today you can get ball-by-ball tracking from your room — release points, swing planes, a batter's footwork, a fielder's runs saved, catch-probability models. DRS, ball-tracking, Hawk-Eye: technology no longer just watches the match from outside; it has stepped inside the decisions. Whether a ball is out is now settled by software.

All this data has created a great deal of money. Betting, fantasy leagues, broadcast, sponsorship — everything rests on those numbers. I was born in England and live in Bangladesh, and I feel the gap between these two cricket economies every month: in one place ball-by-ball data is sold to farms, in the other the scoring is still done in a handwritten book. Rajshahi taught me silence; the World Cup taught me signal. But in both places one question is the same — is the number true?

That question has kept me awake for years. Cricket data has a dangerous quality: it is at once public and unproven. Everyone sees the scorecard, yet almost no one knows who wrote it, which machine measured it, which body verified it. And where data makes money, the temptation to tamper with it appears. Match-fixing, spot-fixing, illegal betting — at their centre there is nearly always a number that has been quietly changed.

This is where blockchain enters. But praising or dismissing blockchain without first clarifying what it is makes both exercises meaningless. In plain terms, a blockchain is a ledger written not in one hand but across many computers at once. Each new entry is mathematically bound to the previous one — that binding is called a hash. If someone wants to alter an old entry, every entry after it must be altered too, and the network will notice. That is why data on a blockchain is called immutable. Immutability, however, is not truth; it only guarantees that no one can quietly change something.

That distinction is enormous in cricket. Imagine that the ball-by-ball data of an international match is digitally signed at source — at the tracking machine itself — and then stored on a public ledger. If someone later claims a fielder stood elsewhere for a given ball, they must now bring proof. Who changed what, and when, all stays on record. Anti-corruption units that today work largely on human memory and suspicion could, in future, do part of that work through machines, silently.

The second area is a player's ownership of their own data. Today a player's performance data is generated, sold, and the player almost never receives a share. A smart contract — an automatic agreement with conditions built in — can change this. Whenever someone uses the player's data, a fixed share moves to the player's account, with no intermediary. If players own their data, the whole power equation of the analytics industry shifts.

The third area is collectibles and fan engagement. Around the world, sports bodies are experimenting with digital collectibles (many call them NFTs) and fan tokens. In football, Socios and Chiliz; in fantasy, Sorare — these are widely discussed examples. Cricket is not far behind; several boards have released commemorative digital items. But caution is due here: putting a trading card on a blockchain does not make it valuable. Value comes from demand and story, not from technology.

The fourth area is auction and contract transparency. The prices that surface in cricket auctions often travel as rumour and leak. With a public, time-stamped ledger, every bid, every withdrawal, every final contract becomes verifiable. A transfer rumour is just a number waiting for a witness — and blockchain claims to be that witness.

The fifth area is broadcast and media rights. Today it is nearly impossible to control who watches a match clip how many times, and where it spreads. Registered licences and micropayments on a blockchain can keep an account of every use. For smaller cricket economies this is a big opportunity, because there every rupee of accounting matters.

Now the question: is any of this actually happening, or are we dreaming on paper? Truthfully, blockchain's real application in cricket is still early. Football and basketball have seen more experiments than cricket. So anyone claiming that blockchain will solve all of cricket's problems is probably writing an advertisement, not analysis. From what I have seen, the bigger boards are interested in the technology but also afraid of losing control. This is where public and permissioned chains differ.

On a public chain anyone can participate, and all data is visible. On a permissioned chain only approved bodies take part, and data is visible only in a limited circle. For a board, the second is more comfortable — it keeps internal data under its own control. But precisely here the core promise of blockchain weakens. A ledger visible only to the powerful does not fully solve the credibility problem — it merely dresses the old book in a new cover.

On anti-corruption, one more turn. An international board's anti-corruption unit works mainly in three ways: intelligence, analysis of betting-market anomalies, and interviews with players. Blockchain can strengthen the second. If the data of a given ball is locked with a timestamp, then who knew first, who knew later, who leaked it — that timeline becomes easier to build. Proving a leak is a large part of corruption investigation; a reliable timeline there is worth gold.

But blockchain can also freeze an investigation. If an entry is locked and it is wrong, the error is locked too. Suppose the tracking machine had a processing fault, or a match official entered wrong data, and it went onto the chain. The error can be corrected, but the correction is also recorded — who fixed it, when, and why. That is good for transparency, but at a critical moment it can slow decisions.

The question of cost and speed also matters. Writing ball-by-ball data to a blockchain triggers a fight between speed and expense. Some blockchains are so slow that they are unusable in a live match. So the practical answer is often two-layered — raw data goes into a fast internal system, while its 'fingerprint' (hash) is written to the blockchain at intervals. This cuts cost while keeping much of the transparency. It is the most promising path right now.

On player-data ownership I am a little emotional, I admit. My first big piece was a 2026 data diary where I placed an xG table beside notes on a teenage forward's body feints. It reached 18,000 readers. Now I think — who built that data, who measured it, who was paid for it? The answer is almost no one, no one. The industry increasingly profits from the numbers of a player's body and talent, while the person on the field gets little back. A smart contract could reduce part of that imbalance, if the boards agree.

On fan tokens my caution is greater. In my experience any new financial product in sport moves through three phases — a wave of enthusiasm, a correction, then real accounting. Fan tokens are like that. Many will pour money in the name of the technology, then find that beyond voting and perks it gives little. I am not in favour of gambling, and I do not want token speculation to be part of this discussion.

By now one point should be clear: blockchain is a powerful layer, but it is not the root solution. The real solution begins at the source — where data is created, verified, and signed. This is what my empty spreadsheet taught me. Every cell of it came back saying 'insufficient information', because before entering the analytical machine the data had never been verified, and in fact did not exist. Blockchain could not have filled that empty spreadsheet; it could only have recorded that it was empty, and when.

Now consider the reverse. The empty stadiums made every data point echo — I first understood this in 2026, watching matches in crowdless grounds, where every pass and every run seemed somehow louder. That was when I understood that when the environment changes, the meaning of the same number changes. In the same way, when the technology changes, the meaning of the number changes too. A number stored on a chain and a number in a handwritten book look the same, but they do not weigh the same. Who wrote it, who verified it — that is the real difference.

And here is my main disagreement. The analytics industry today presents blockchain as a truth-technology. But blockchain does not create truth; it stores truth. If the input is wrong, the output will be wrong — computer science's oldest rule holds on a blockchain too. No analysis comes out of zero information, just as no goal comes out of zero talent. My empty spreadsheet is the living proof.

My disagreement sharpens when I see some selling blockchain as the total solution to corruption. The reality is that blockchain is a ledger, not a witness. A ledger proves what was written; a witness proves what actually happened. Fighting corruption needs both. With only a ledger, someone can enter false data at the source, and it will sit locked like truth forever. So source verification, human witnesses, journalistic investigation — these cannot be replaced by technology, only supported by it.

A comparison can be drawn here, but carefully. The same over-enthusiasm I see in blockchain talk is the over-enthusiasm with which the sporting world prices a young player far ahead of his proven performance. The technology is promising, but its price now exceeds its proof. Time will pass, a correction will come, and then only those applications that solve real problems will survive — the rest will fade like rumour.

One question therefore remains: whose ledger is this? If it is only for boards and broadcasters, what does the ordinary viewer get? A reader in Rajshahi who wants to see a match score should be able to get a verifiable score anyway — whether or not it is on a blockchain. If technology does not ease that ordinary verification, then whose interest is it really protecting?

I look again at the spreadsheet. It is still empty, but the emptiness is now information. It tells me where a pipeline broke — at the input. Often the most honest thing an analyst can do is say: there is nothing here for me to analyse. No technology chain can buy that honesty, because it is a human decision. And the future of cricket data stands on exactly that honesty, not on blockchain.

Blockchain's greatest contribution may be the timeline. Who received which data when, who leaked it, who corrected it — if a journalist has such a precise timeline, the nature of investigation changes. Today, verifying a leaked auction price, I often grope in the dark; tomorrow I may see its birth time and the history of its changes at a glance. A transfer rumour will then no longer be just a number, but a time-stamped claim — verifiable, refutable.

Still, I keep my optimism measured. In the history of sport, every promise of technology has ultimately reached human hands — sometimes slowly, sometimes unevenly. In a country where ball-by-ball data is sold to farms and a country where scoring is still in a book, the same technology will not arrive at the same time. That inequality is itself a big piece of information — and blockchain will never erase it, because the inequality is not of technology but of power.

My way of working here is simple. I do not build tables; I verify tables. I watch a match, then check the numbers; I see the numbers, then return to the field. Between these two steps there is a gap, and that gap is where my real writing lives. If blockchain can narrow that gap — only narrow it, never erase it — then it is welcome. And if it is only another wave of enthusiasm, time will recognise it too, just as the cricket economy recognises every exaggerated rumour.

So next time someone says blockchain will make cricket data unassailable, I will ask two questions: who is verifying the input, and who gets to read the ledger? If the answers to those two are unclear, then however modern the technology's name, to me it is the old handwritten book in a new form. And my empty spreadsheet has taught me this much — truth cannot merely be stored, it has to be earned. From every ball, every number, every witness.