The N/A Cell: When a Football Data File Is Empty, and the Temptation to Invent

There are nine rows on the screen in front of me. The first reads “Tactical and Technical Analysis”. The second reads “Club Finance and Transfer Market”. The third reads “Results and Public-Opinion Cycle”. The fourth reads “League Landscape and Team Positioning”. The fifth reads “Rules and Governance Compliance”. The sixth reads “Management and Dressing Room”. The seventh reads “Risk Profile”. The eighth reads “Media Narrative and Expectation”. The ninth reads “Football Industry Transmission”. In every cell, every row, every column, the same phrase repeats like a refrain: “N/A — insufficient information”.

A young colleague walked past my desk, glanced at the screen and asked what the article would be about. I told him: it is about nothing at all. He laughed. He thought I was joking, or tired after a night shift.

I was not joking. In thirty-nine years of writing, I have covered plenty of dull things: press-conference minutes, third-division statistics tables, the medical bulletin of a match nobody watched. But I had never sat in front of a completely empty data file. And I realised that in an era when every pass is measured, an empty cell is the hardest piece of data to read.

Today is the middle of the transfer window. That is why I am sitting here, in front of a screen with nine empty rows.

Context: a reading machine and a signal nobody noticed

A few years ago, the newsroom where I work changed its process. Every deep analysis piece had to pass through two stages. The first stage read the source article, extracting events, names, numbers and timestamps. The second stage took those fragments and built nine analytical dimensions: tactics, finance, results, league landscape, rules, dressing room, risk, media, and the transmission chain of the whole industry.

That machine only runs when the first stage returns something. If the first stage returns a blank page, the second stage can do nothing but write “insufficient information” in every cell. Nine rows, every one of them the same.

Outsiders assume this is a technical fault. It is a technical fault. But it is also a professional lesson I learned with my own skin back in 2026, when I left a print newspaper at the age of forty-six to join a digital sports platform.

The first match I was assigned was Shenzhen FC against Wuhan Zall in China League One. The stadium held four thousand two hundred and thirteen spectators. I sat in row seven, writing in an old notebook, recording every pass, every lost ball, every shout from the coach. The desk wanted a live update every three minutes. I objected. Three minutes is not enough to verify a number. But I followed the process, because the process is the process.

Thirty rounds later, I understood the difference between a fast story and a true story. A fast story goes out while the match is still being played, when nobody yet knows what actually happened. A true story arrives later, when people have already forgotten the match. Readers always remember the fast story and always skip the true one. That is the paradox of this trade, and it is the paradox of the transfer window.

The transfer window is the season in which fast stories beat true stories by the widest margin. Every day, hundreds of lines scroll across the phone screens of Vietnamese supporters: this player is moving to that club, a salary in the billions, a three-year contract, a transfer fee quoted in dollars. Ninety per cent of it is wind. Nine per cent of the remainder is wind changing direction. The final one per cent is something verifiable, and it is usually less exciting than the rest.

I am not writing this to teach anyone how to read transfer news. I am writing because that screen with nine empty rows is teaching me something new, and I want to record it before I forget.

An empty cell is data, not a space to fill with imagination

The first thing I learned from an empty file: the most dangerous moment for an analyst is not when the numbers contradict him. It is when there are no numbers at all, and he still writes a conclusion.

There is a very human temptation. When every cell is empty, people want to fill them. They look at the club’s name, recall a match from three months ago, recall an article they read, and build a story that sounds entirely plausible. That story will have tactics, numbers, judgements. It lacks one thing only: truth.

In my trade that is the gravest error, worse than being wrong. Being wrong can be corrected. Inventing a conclusion out of nothing cannot be corrected, because there is nothing underneath it to correct.

I nearly made that mistake. In 2026 I was sent to Russia for the World Cup. For the quarter-final between Belgium and Brazil in Kazan, I sat in a temporary office in front of a screen with a beautiful data table. Brazil had seventy-eight per cent possession. Brazil had more shots. Brazil had more passes. Every cell had a number; not one was empty. In my draft I wrote that Brazil would win.

Belgium won two-one.

I did not sleep that night. I reopened the footage, rewound it again and again, and found what the table had never recorded: the speed of two counter-attacks, the space Brazil’s defence left behind every time it pushed up, and the strange silence of the crowd in the final ten minutes. The table had told the truth. It simply had not told the whole truth.

My editor changed the headline into a harsh line about Brazilian arrogance. I objected, unsuccessfully. But I kept a private file on my machine: the physical data of twelve knockout matches from that tournament. When I cross-checked it, I found something that made me sit down. Possession percentage did not correlate with win rate in the knockout rounds. The deeper the tournament went, the weaker the correlation.

Since then I no longer trust statistics tables built to look good. Data is a map; the match is territory that has never been surveyed. A map tells you where you are. It does not tell you whether the ground under your feet is soft or hard.

The numbers I still use, and where they fall silent

That does not mean I threw data away. The opposite. I use it more, but more carefully. I want to explain to Vietnamese readers a few metrics you will meet more and more often, and, more importantly, where they tell you nothing.

Expected goals, usually written xG, is the probability that a shot becomes a goal, calculated from position, angle, shot type, the number of players blocking the path, and a few other variables. Expected goals against, xGA, is the xG a team concedes. It sounds scientific. But xG does not know who took the shot. A penalty struck by a striker in form and the same penalty struck by a nervous defender are given the same probability by the machine. In football, the shooter is half the shot.

PPDA, the number of passes a team allows its opponent before making a defensive action, measures pressing intensity. Lower PPDA means fiercer pressing. But PPDA cannot distinguish organised pressing from eleven men chasing the ball. A stupidly pressing team can still have a beautiful PPDA. And a team that deliberately drops deep, concedes territory and counter-attacks will have a terrible PPDA, even while executing its coach’s plan perfectly.

In China League One in 2026, I saw a team with the lowest PPDA in the division and the second-worst goals-conceded record. The table said they pressed ferociously. The footage showed chaotic pressing: three men charging, seven standing still, and a gap in midfield as wide as a road.

That is why I spend an average of five hours a day on footage. I take handwritten notes, cross-check every phase, and only when a number appears in at least three separate sources does it go into the piece. Three sources, not one. A number standing alone is not data; it is an opinion written in digits.

In Vietnam, the football data infrastructure remains thin compared with the big leagues. V.League 1 has fourteen clubs, but very few have a full-time data analyst. Most of the numbers supporters see come from external providers, or from the broadcaster itself, where passes are counted by eye while the commentator talks. That does not mean Vietnamese numbers are wrong. It means Vietnamese numbers often have nobody accountable for them. A number with nobody accountable cannot be verified, and a number that cannot be verified should be read as an empty cell.

The match no dataset predicted: notes from Vietnam

I follow Vietnamese football from a distance, through a screen, and I know that is a limitation. But there is one tournament I watched closely enough to speak about: the 2026 AFC U23 Championship in Changzhou, China.

If you had handed me the dataset for Vietnam’s U23 team before that tournament, I would have predicted nothing. The table would have described the average height of the defence, the number of senior caps, the minutes played in the domestic league. It would have drawn an underdog. Technically, it would have been right.

Then Vietnam reached the final. They lost one-two to Uzbekistan after extra time. Thousands of Vietnamese flew in mid-winter. On the screen I saw snow falling. Data does not predict snow. Data does not predict singing either.

The 2026 World Cup taught me that data can predict the future, but it cannot predict the heart. Vietnamese football is one of the places that proves it most clearly, every time an underestimated team runs further than the spreadsheet allows.

That does not mean I ignore numbers. It means I put them in their proper place: one layer of information, not the whole house. When Nguyen Quang Hai joined Pau FC in Ligue 2 in 2026, his V.League 1 numbers looked excellent. But the numbers could not measure adaptation time, or living alone in a small French town, or the feeling of having to prove you belong at twenty-five. When Nguyen Cong Phuong joined Mito Hollyhock in Japan in 2026, the same. Those moves did not fail for lack of talent. They were hard because of things that have no column in a spreadsheet.

In Shenzhen I learned that a screen cannot replace the stands. The city I live in manufactures most of the world’s screens. I watch them roll off the line every day, flat, bright, flawless panes of glass. And I know that a match watched on a screen, however beautiful the screen, is missing three things: the smell of grass, the breathing of the person beside you, and the moment the whole stand rises at once.

Money: where numbers are written to persuade, not to count

Now to money. This is where, during the transfer window, data is distorted most, and where Vietnamese readers need the firmest filter.

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play, FFP, and the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules, PSR, are two spending-control systems. They work on an accounting principle called transfer amortisation. When a club buys a player for fifty million on a five-year contract, the outlay is not booked in one year. It is spread evenly: ten million a year, for five years.

This means the “transfer fee” reported in the press is almost never the figure that actually affects a club’s financial health. Two clubs buying the same player for the same fifty million will feel completely different consequences if one signs a three-year deal and the other a six-year deal. Three years means carrying nearly seventeen million a year. Six years means carrying just over eight. One contract, two accounting fates.

Then there is the sell-on clause. When a club sells a young player, it usually retains the right to a percentage of the next sale. If that player becomes a star, the clause can be worth more than the original fee. This is why youth academies in Vietnam should read every clause before signing, and why contracts that look small can pay off enormously later.

Then there is the final contract year. When a player enters the last year of his deal, the negotiating position flips. The club must sell or lose him for nothing. The player knows it. The agent knows it better than anyone. During the transfer window, most of the “big clubs are watching” stories that appear at precisely this moment are not coincidental. They are part of a negotiation, released to create pressure, and calculated months in advance.

I sort transfer news into three tiers. Tier one: the club makes an official announcement, with a date, a figure, a signature. Tier two: two or more independent sources report it, with the agent’s name and a specific contract length. Tier three: a single source, unnamed, undated, without figures, only “reportedly”. Ninety per cent of social-media transfer content sits in tier three. And tier three, by definition, is an empty cell written in words.

Transfers are the art of waiting; I specialise in recording the weary minutes. People imagine my job is reporting grand deals. It is not. My job is to sit, to call, to wait again, and to record that today nothing happened. Three weeks before a big transfer is announced, there is usually nothing to announce. That is when the trade demands patience rather than imagination.

The silences no table records

There is another kind of information I began collecting in 2026, and I believe it matters as much as xG or PPDA.

That year, at forty-nine, I was one of three reporters allowed into Guangzhou Evergrande’s closed training bubble during the pandemic. The Tianhe Stadium holds fifty-eight thousand. That day it held nobody. I could hear a ball strike the grass from two hundred metres away, clearly enough to count the rhythm.

Centre-back Zhang Linpeng practised free kicks. He struck forty-seven of them in thirty-eight-degree heat. Nobody cheered. Nobody objected. Only the ball and the breathing.

The coaching staff wanted me to write about fighting spirit. I refused. I wrote about loneliness. We argued for two days. In the end the editor sided with me, because I had concrete data on the players’ mental health during quarantine, supplied by the medical team itself, and that data said nothing about fighting spirit. It spoke about sleep, resting heart rate, and how many times the players called home.

That piece became one of the rare documents of sport in a pandemic. Not because it was good. Because it was true, and because it recorded something nobody later wanted to remember.

At Euro 2026, I followed Denmark for twenty days after the collapse of Christian Eriksen in the forty-third minute against Finland. The media called it a miracle story. I interviewed the team doctor four times and wrote up the six-minute resuscitation protocol like a tense score: which device, who called whom, how many seconds. The piece was called dry. But the Danish Prime Minister quoted it in parliament. A match was not saved by a miracle. It was saved by a protocol, and a protocol always has numbers behind it.

I keep the beat for seasons already past, even when nobody is listening. There are matches where I am the only person still taking notes. There are empty summers, no World Cup, no Euros, no crowds, only ghosts on the grass and a notebook. I write for those seasons, because if nobody writes, they vanish from the memory of a whole generation.

The contrarian angle: this industry rewards confidence, not truth

Here I want to be blunt, even knowing it will irritate a few colleagues.

That file of nine empty rows is the most honest answer an analytical system can give when it has no data. And it is the answer this industry pays least for.

An article that says “I do not know” will not be shared. An article that says “this club will certainly be relegated” will be shared thousands of times, even if the club survives. The reward mechanism of modern sports media pushes careful writers to the margins and pulls confident ones to the centre. Confidence is not the same as accuracy. It only means loud and clear.

I see this most clearly in an unexpected place: the position of the winger.

Over the past twenty years, world football has homogenised wingers. A left-footed winger plays on the right, a right-footed one on the left, so he can cut inside and shoot. Data tables love this type of player, because he scores more. Academies train according to the tables. As a result, the traditional winger — the man whose one job is to go down the line and cross — is being erased. Not because he is worse. Because he does not produce the numbers the tables know how to count.

Yet a stalemated match, with the central corridor locked down, is often unlocked by exactly one cross from wide. The table has no column for that moment. It has only “successful passes”, and a cross headed clear by a defender counts as a failure, even though it just won a corner and fifteen seconds of tension.

I have a similar worry about esports, which I follow as an outsider. A professional esports career is shorter than a footballer’s. Yet its youth-development and post-retirement support systems are close to non-existent. A thirty-five-year-old footballer can become a coach, a commentator, an academy director. A twenty-five-year-old retired esports player usually has one option: streaming. And streaming depends on algorithms, on view counts, on things that shift faster than a team’s form.

In every industry, what is measured gets paid, and what gets paid gets done more. The frightening part is this: who keeps what cannot be measured?

What I take from an empty data file

I close the file with nine rows. Outside the window, Shenzhen is lighting up, the big advertising screens switching on all at once, and I think about the distance between a city that manufactures screens and a real patch of grass.

I will file this piece. In it I will not say which team will be champions, which player will move where, which coach will be sacked. I will say that there is a data file with nothing in it, and that daring to leave it empty is the most professionally correct act available to us in this transfer window.

To Vietnamese readers, who open their phones every morning and are hit by hundreds of transfer lines, I want to say one small thing. When you read a report with no named source, no date, no figure, look at it the way I looked at that screen with nine rows this morning. It is an empty cell. Do not place your hopes in it.

And if next season your club signs nobody, do not rush to believe it is a disaster. Sometimes a club signs nobody because it checked three sources and none of them said there was anyone to sign. Silence, in my trade, is often the most honest information a club can send out.

I never run faster than the match; I only keep the beat until the final minute. Today, that beat is an empty data file. Tomorrow there may be a number. My job is to wait, to record, and to invent nothing at all.