The Art of Saying 'I Don't Know' in Vietnamese Football

One Saturday night in Liverpool, I opened my laptop, poured a cup of tea, ready to analyse a match that a colleague in Hanoi had just sent me a link to. The screen showed a data sheet that had been completely erased. No player names, no scoreline, no data whatsoever. I sat in front of that blank space for fifteen minutes. Then I realized: this is the hardest problem a sports analyst can face. Not when there is too much data, but when there is not a single piece of data. In Vietnam, football has developed in a word-of-mouth manner, from the time when the elders kept handwritten notes all the way to the era of Excel spreadsheets. I have followed Vietnamese football since the 1990s, when matches were narrated with emotional voices on radio, and data was a distant concept. Since coach Park Hang-seo made waves at the SEA Games and AFF Cup, fans have become used to expecting victory, but local analysts still rely more on instinct than on numbers. The world has changed. A Premier League match can generate more than three million data points from GPS sensors, from the sprint speed of each player to the distance between two defenders when the opponent builds up play. But in V.League, many teams still do not have a synchronized data collection system. When there is no data, people tend to fall into the trap called game rhythm, spirit, or the Vietnamese fighting soul. I do not deny those factors, but they are like a flame: beautiful, warm, but they cannot draw a tactical map. In 2026, when Croatia beat Argentina 3-0 at the World Cup, I sat in the stands and noticed something that no statistic table could show: Luka Modric, at 32 years old, repeatedly dropped between the two centre-backs, creating a unique space in front of Nicolas Otamendi. I estimated that distance at 13.7 metres. The number has no official source, I measured it by feel, but it was enough to explain why Argentina could not press a 32-year-old. What matters is not the precise number, but the attention to a space nobody else noticed. The off-centre diamond only appears when you stop looking at the ball. But the story I want to tell today is not about Modric, nor about the World Cup. It begins with me facing a completely blank analysis sheet. At first, I felt frustrated. A veteran analyst like me, with 37 years of experience, could not possibly have nothing to say. I planned to write an analysis based on what I already knew about Vietnamese football in general. But then I stopped. Writing about things I have no evidence for is a form of fabrication, no matter how subtle. I remembered the words of an old statistics teacher: numbers do not lie, but people can use numbers to lie. I decided to try a different approach. Instead of trying to create an analysis from nothing, I would analyse the emptiness itself. Why was the data sheet empty? It could be a technical failure, a broken data source, or someone intentionally deleting information that should not be published. In any case, that emptiness reflected a systemic reality: Vietnamese football data has not been professionally managed. Look at the youth training centres in Vietnam. While academies in Japan or South Korea store detailed records of each player's physical, technical and tactical development for many years, in Vietnam that kind of tracking still depends mainly on the subjective comments of coaches. Nobody counts how many times a young player receives the ball inside the opponent's box, nobody measures the high-intensity running distance of a midfielder in friendly matches. When there is no data, player evaluation is left to the instincts of those in power. I once watched a V.League match where a team pressed very well for the first thirty minutes. But nobody measured their PPDA, nobody counted how many times they recovered the ball in the opponent's final third. After the match, the head coach simply said that his team played with a good spirit. A good spirit is a beautiful but meaningless phrase if there is no data to verify it. It is like saying the third billiard ball will go into the pocket without observing the angle and the force of the cue. The billiard ball is an analogy I often use: in a game of billiards, hitting the object ball depends on dozens of variables, but the most important is the first contact of the cue with the cue ball. If that contact is off by even one millimetre, the whole layout will collapse. Football is the same. Before analysing a counterattack, you must be sure about the starting point: where the ball was recovered, how, and which player initiated it. Without precise data on these starting points, any analysis that follows is pure imagination. In 2026, the pandemic froze English football. I lived in Liverpool, so anxious that I retreated into rewatching DVDs of the 2026-2026 season of my local team, trying to decode how Kenny Dalglish pressed. After four weeks, I had a 2,000-row spreadsheet but could not write a single word. The Merseyside derby between Everton and Liverpool without spectators taught me a lesson in humility: when you lose the noise of the crowd, you see the skeleton of the match clearly, but you also see the limits of your own vision. I deleted the entire spreadsheet and asked a smaller question: how did the home advantage disappear? The new article was only 500 words long, but it pulled me out of paralysis. The emptiness of data is not a disaster. It is an opportunity to practice honesty. In a culture where admitting that you do not know is considered a weakness, Vietnamese sports analysts are often pressured to give opinions without evidence. On football forums, people argue about which coach is better, which player deserves to start, but very rarely does anyone say: I do not have enough information to judge. Rushed judgement creates what I call 'beautiful numbers' — statistics packaged as effort indicators that are actually just selective arrangements. Distance covered and number of sprints are easy indicators to make pretty. A player who runs twelve kilometres in a match can be praised as a warrior, but if ten of those twelve kilometres are pointless running that creates no opportunities, the number is only a beautiful number. Data succeeds when it reflects the reality on the pitch, not when it creates a compelling narrative. Useless running also produces beautiful numbers, and that is why I am always sceptical of any statistic that appears on a TV screen. Conversely, when the data sheet is blank, we are forced to return to the most basic questions. Where did this match take place? What was the starting lineup? What was the score? If we cannot answer these questions with certainty, then all analysis is meaningless. I once taught a group of sports journalism students in Vietnam a simple exercise: watch a match with the volume off, without pre-match information, and write down only what the naked eye observes. The results were fascinating. My students began to notice details they usually missed: a full-back slowing down a few beats before moving forward, a midfielder always drifting to the left, a centre-back who habitually plays long balls after every duels with the goalkeeper. Those details are not in the statistic table, but they form the real tactical map. From that observation, you can develop a hypothesis, then use data to verify it. That is the process I have applied for decades, from the days as a snooker commentator for VTC to writing tactical blogs for English readers. I do not watch football for entertainment. I watch to decode. But decoding does not mean providing an answer to every riddle. Sometimes, the best answer is: we do not have enough data to solve this problem. Take the example of evaluating a young Vietnamese player. Nobody can claim that a striker will become a star just by watching him for ten youth league matches. To reach a solid conclusion, you need at least one full season with data on technique, physicality, tactics and also behavioural conduct. Without data, all praise is just an investment in emotion, and emotion is not a reliable analyst. Geniuses always leave behind a space that few people can measure. But if we do not know where that space is, we will never recognize the genius. One of the common mistakes of sports media is rushing to conclusions after the match has ended. Phrases like 'I saw this coming' appear everywhere, making readers believe the analyst has a prophetic ability. But the truth is, football is a game with high probability variance, and the outcome of one match is affected by hundreds of factors that no model can fully cover. I can spot a good tactical structure, but I cannot be certain that structure will bring victory. I can only say that the team has a higher probability of winning if they maintain that structure throughout the match. There have been times when I predicted a team would win because they had a far superior midfield, only for them to lose because of two stupid red cards. An analyst can evaluate tactics, but cannot evaluate the impulsive minutes of a player. At that point, tactical data is broken by unplanned behavioural data. I have learned that scepticism with verification is a necessary virtue. Not blind scepticism, but systematic scepticism: test every hypothesis with numbers, observation, head-to-head history, then reach a conclusion. Going back to my blank data sheet. I remembered a lesson from 2026, when I worked at The Independent. An old editor once told me that in journalism, the hardest task is not writing a long article, but writing a short article where every word has meaning. Similarly, the hardest task in analysis is not finding an answer, but identifying the right question. When I have no data, the right question is not 'who will win?', but 'why do I have no data?' This question led me to an investigation into Vietnam's football information infrastructure. There is no central archive for V.League matches that is publicly available like Premier League Data. Some teams have their own analysis systems, but the information is completely compartmentalized. Journalists who want to write about tactics have to count every move themselves, a manual job that takes hours. I have done that many times, sticking forty-seven diagrams on my bedroom wall after Manchester City beat Liverpool 5-0, counting the frequency of every player's touches in the final thirty metres. In 2026, that made me famous with an article about Pep Guardiola's off-centre diamond. But if the data had been public, I would not have had to count manually. Vietnam has many talented players, but that talent is being eroded by the lack of a synchronized data system. Foreign coaches coming to V.League are often shocked to discover they do not have access to the data they were used to in Europe. They have to rely on their eyes, on coaches' notes, and on subjective feedback. That is not wrong, but it significantly reduces the effectiveness of their coaching. The March deadlock freed me from my dependence on the audience, and I hope it also frees those working in Vietnamese football from their dependence on sentiment. Look at other top Southeast Asian football nations. They do not only have beautiful stadiums, they have well-invested academies where each player is tracked from the age of ten with periodic physical tests. They fill the data gap early, when players are still very young. Vietnam is falling behind in this race, not because of a lack of talent, but because of a lack of connection between those who hold the data and those who need it. The match ends at the eleventh angle, and in Vietnam, that angle is rarely recorded. Once, I was invited to a youth football training centre in the south. I asked the head coach if he could show me the data on the number of minutes played by his students over the last six months. He looked at me with surprise and said they did not store such things. They had a notebook recording match results and comments from each coach. When I asked about tracking a player's progress over time, he shook his head. I cannot blame him, because he works in a system that has never asked for data. That leads to a broader question: does Vietnamese football actually want to develop in a data-professional direction? If there is no clear answer, any reform is just a coat of paint. Data is not the only salvation, it is just a tool. But a football nation that does not use modern tools will struggle to compete in a region where opponents are all running with data engines. Thai clubs sent people to Europe to study tactical analysis many years ago. Malaysia is also beginning to invest in sports science. Vietnam is still stuck at signing famous foreign coaches. I do not want to paint too pessimistic a picture. There are positive signals. A few V.League teams have started using GPS in training, but only stop at measuring running distance, without deep analysis. Some young sports journalists are building their own data tables by rewatching video footage. They deserve encouragement. But for sustainable development, a national sports data strategy is needed, and that requires determination from the top leadership. I often tell my students: age only counts down, tactics count forever. Data is forever. Before having data, have honesty. I do not want to read analyses that praise a player just because he scored two goals in one match. I want to understand why he got those two chances, how he moved, how his team-mates created the space. If there is no data, I am willing to write an article of only one hundred words saying I cannot assess that match. One hundred honest words are more valuable than one thousand words of fake certainty. In billiards, if you are not sure about the force, you shoot lighter to make sure you control the cue ball. Football needs the same approach. That night, after sitting in front of the blank data sheet for fifteen minutes, I closed my laptop and went to sleep. The next morning, I emailed my colleague in Hanoi to ask why the file was empty. It turned out his system failed during the data transfer. He sent the full file three hours later. But in the moment before receiving the real data, I had learned an important lesson: the willingness to accept a blank space is the first step to filling it with something meaningful, not with fabricated numbers. Vietnam's empty data zone is an opportunity to build from scratch. Do not rush to judgement when you do not have enough information. Be patient. Watch the match with unbiased eyes. Count what you can count, measure what you can measure, and accept that there are things you cannot count at all. It is that acceptance that creates a trustworthy analyst. The off-centre diamond only appears when you stop looking at the ball. It also appears when you stop looking at hollow numbers and start looking for the structure beneath. And the underlying structure of Vietnamese football, though still faint, is waiting for those who know how to listen to data to discover it. In the end, I want to leave a question for the readers: are we watching football with the eyes of an analyst, or with the heart of a fan? Both are necessary, but they serve different purposes. The heart helps us love the match, the eyes help us understand it. When the heart and eye contradict each other, trust what you observe, not what you feel. Football does not lie. Only analysts lie when they lack data but still try to create a story. I chose to stay silent rather than lie, and I believe it was the right choice. If the blank data sheet is a mirror, then it reflects a football nation searching for its voice, searching for a method, a common language to describe what happens on the pitch. Emptiness is not an end, it is an invitation to begin. Let us begin by admitting that we do not know. And from there, we can learn everything.