An empty report should not scare us; what scares us is Vietnamese football's habit of living without data

I have just received a “Stage 2 Deep Analysis Report”. Thirty pages long, professionally presented, with numbered sections from 1 to 9. But when I opened it, every column read “N/A”. “N/A – insufficient information”, “N/A – cannot assess”, “N/A – no data”. Almost every number, every judgment and every risk warning was an empty space. A report like that is usually thrown into the waste bin. But in Vietnamese football, the most frightening thing is not a wrong conclusion; it is having nothing at all to conclude. Because I have seen myself in that report. Not in its format, but in my habits. For years of watching domestic matches, I have realised that most of Vietnamese football operates like a machine without a dashboard. Talented coaches trust their eyes. Experienced players trust their instincts. Club executives trust “connections” more than fitness data, running distance or injury metrics. When nobody asks “where is the evidence?”, the answer “I saw it, I know it” becomes both a weapon and a shield. In the summer of 2026, I was called a traitor when I wrote that Neymar was right to leave Barcelona. They said I was betraying sentiment, betraying tradition. But I only did one thing: I looked at the numbers. Neymar then touched the ball in central areas half as often as Messi, shot less per match, and yet was still compared with Messi in every attacking statistic. A player placed in the wrong role in a team built around one genius was always going to leave. Vietnamese football has no Messi, but we have hundreds of contracts, hundreds of training sessions and hundreds of moments described with the phrase “that’s how it is” while nobody records, measures or stores anything for future comparison. If this were only about the pitch, the data void would already be bad. But it also spreads into transfer rooms. Every transfer window, the market is shaken by prices inflated by rumour. I remember a year when a Vietnamese club signed a foreign player for three times his market value after watching a three-minute YouTube highlight clip. Nobody asked how many kilometres he ran per game, how many times he lost the ball, or how often he was injured on artificial turf. What happened next? A three-year contract that both parties wanted to tear up in the fifth month. The story is old, yet it repeats every season. Do not rush to conclude that I despise intuition. Intuition is peak experience encoded in the subconscious. But intuition is only reliable when it is sharpened through thousands of hours of systematic observation. A coach who sees a player is tired without a machine is using good intuition. A scout who predicts a 12-year-old will grow another 25 centimetres because of family genes is making a hypothesis. And yet we often turn hypotheses into dogma without testing, without long-term tracking. The empty report is frightening because it exposes that habit. On the Kazan night in 2026, I sat in the stands watching Mbappe run like an arrow ripping through Argentina’s defence. After the match, hundreds of articles praised his speed. But few asked why France dared to let Mbappe accelerate so often. The answer lies in data: before the tournament, France’s staff built a pressure map of Argentina, identified the space behind the full-backs, and calculated the winning percentage in transition moments. Mbappe was the executor, but hundreds of numbers were the pathfinders. In Vietnam, when facing a team with a high defensive line, we usually simply hope our striker is fast. Hope is not tactics. Perhaps I am too harsh. Someone will say Vietnamese football is about emotion and fire; turning it into mathematics kills romance. I have heard that argument for thirty years. But let me be blunt: what kills romance is not data, but lagging behind. A team that steps onto the pitch without knowing how many times the opponent touches the ball in the box, without knowing how many aerial duels they lose, is like a man walking through a dark forest with only three steps of visibility from a torch of feeling. A person holding a floodlight is not hateful. The hateful person is the one who switches off the floodlight to force the whole team to walk in the dark. In 2026, I sat with a Brazilian tactical analyst during a youth-team training session. He pointed at his phone and said he needed at least two camera angles to measure running tempo, acceleration counts and receiving positions. I asked: “Just a phone?” He smiled: “What matters is not the equipment, but refusing to guess.” That day, I looked around a Vietnamese youth training ground. There was no camera, no one taking notes, only an older coach shouting: “Run! Look around you!” The boy ran, but nobody knew whether he ran in the right direction or simply ran to avoid being scolded. During the Covid season, when stadiums were empty, I sat in front of the screen watching quiet matches. Without cheering, without pressure from the stands, I realised that real football is not about noise. It lives in small spaces between the two midfield lines, in the movement of a full-back in the moment a teammate loses the ball, in a striker knowing where to stand before a cross is delivered. These things can be seen by the naked eye, but they cannot become tactics unless they are recorded, analysed and verified. An empty stadium is just a condensed version of football; football without data is a blind version of itself. So, is the empty report blameworthy? Yes, if the writer knew where the data was and refused to record it. But even more blameworthy is a system that does not produce data in the first place. Ask yourself: among the twenty V-League clubs, how many have their own video-analysis department, not someone who cuts clips but someone who reads the game? How many clubs have stored their own data for three consecutive years? How many national teams have used training-load prediction models to reduce injuries for key players? I dare say those numbers are low. Not because we lack money, but because we have not yet believed that the invisible determines the visible. I am old, but I am fast enough to understand one thing: the slow will disappear. And in the age of data, the slow are not those without pace on the pitch, but those without cognitive speed. Slow thinkers often argue that Vietnamese football is poor and cannot apply European technology. I disagree. Poverty is exactly the reason to be creative and to make every dong count. An open-source analytics programme can replace an expensive analyst. A camera and a laptop can produce basic movement data. The biggest lack is not equipment, but attitude: are we willing to admit we are walking in the dark? Today’s empty report is not the writer’s failure. It is a chance to face a truth: we often make hot judgments on the cold foundation of ignorance. A player is called “finished” after two bad games, then hailed as a “genius” after three good ones – none of this is based on standardised data. A journalist facing an empty analysis should write “there is no information” rather than invent a conclusion to fill the gap. At least the ego of media should learn from data analysts: silence without evidence is a form of integrity. Is it too late to change? If you look at the rankings, the quality of young players and the league system, pessimists will say it is too late. But I am the type who looked at Neymar’s departure in 2026 and said it is never too late to choose the right side. That year everyone thought Barcelona would collapse when Neymar left. They did not collapse immediately, but they eventually paid for clinging to an old model. Paris Saint-Germain, by contrast, accepted disruption and bought a player for a future role rather than past reputation. Vietnamese football now stands at a similar fork. One path is to keep structuring teams by “brand”; the other is to begin collecting data, clumsily, slowly, but in the right direction. I choose the latter, even if I am called a traitor again. The empty stadium during the pandemic taught me another lesson: noise is not football, reputation is not football, and a thick report is not football. Football is correct decisions repeated often enough to become instinct. To repeat correctly, you must record. To record, you need a system. To have a system, you must be willing to look at blank cells without hurriedly painting over them. I cannot guarantee that Vietnam will succeed by applying everything I have just said. But I am sure of one thing: if we keep writing analysis without data, we will become better and better at producing beautiful-looking empty reports. So next time you hold a football analysis, do not ask whether the article is good or bad. Ask where the numbers behind the words are. Ask who measured the player’s running distance, who recorded the duels, who tracked three years rather than three minutes. And when the answer is “nobody did”, do not applaud flashy commentary. Demand another report. The writer may awkwardly admit that he does not know – but that awkwardness is more valuable than a confident article built on sand. Only by staring into the void can we begin to build something real.