Football Doesn't Fit in the N/A Cell: Notes from an Empty Analytics Sheet

Lyon, 2 a.m. I am sitting in front of a forty-page analytics report sent over by the data department of a Ligue 1 club. The match ended six hours ago. The scoreline is there. The match report is there. The list of substitutes is there. But nearly half the cells in the spreadsheet carry the same line: "N/A — insufficient information." I read each empty cell again. One lacks the distance covered by the player who came on in the 78th minute. One lacks pressing counts after the home side went behind. One simply cannot be measured — how do you measure the look in a centre-back's eyes when he realises he has stepped half a metre out of position? People call me a writer on the touchline grass. All I do is record the breath of the ball before it rolls. That night, the breath was in the empty cells. Football analytics has travelled a very long road over two decades. From counting goals and possession share, European data departments now track hundreds of metrics per match: xG (expected goals), PPDA (passes allowed per defensive action), progressive passes, expected threat, even player-valuation models. In France, where I work, every Ligue 1 club has at least one analytics unit; some employ ten people. But faith in the numbers is wobbling precisely where the numbers are produced. Ligue 1 once signed a domestic broadcast deal with Mediapro worth more than one billion euros per season, then watched it collapse at the end of 2026 when the investor could not pay. Four years later, the league had to sell most of its rights to DAZN for less than half the old figure. Analytics departments were cut back. The reports grew thicker, but so did the number of empty cells. The more data, the less certainty. A club can measure every stride but cannot measure why the stands are emptying. It knows exactly how many kilometres a player ran, but not why he stood still for three seconds after the final whistle. I once believed metrics would save us from sentiment. In 2026, while working as a statistics editor for a football site in Lyon, I wrote an analysis of Nabil Fekir's return from injury. I was supposed to produce an xG chart. Instead I wrote about his eyes when the captain's armband was handed back to him. My editor brushed it aside and told me it was "too literary". A week later, a television editor read the piece and invited me to try live commentary. I learned something then: numbers persuade readers, but detail keeps them. In the summer of 2026, in Sochi, I sat in the stands for the Croatia–Russia quarter-final. Luka Modrić ran 12.8 kilometres, dribbled past three players and scored from outside the box. The post-match data sheet recorded all of it. But when I skipped the press conference and followed him into the tunnel, I saw him weeping alone — even though his team had won. No metric in that sheet explains those tears. The Moscow hotel room had no window, yet every night I saw the World Cup shining through the slit of my pen. Then came 2026, when the pandemic pushed stadiums into emptiness. I spent four months in Lyon recording wind and echo inside Groupama Stadium during closed training sessions, where only seven cameras and two cleaners were present. The data said matches went on normally: 90 minutes, 22 players, the full pass count. But my ears heard something else — something I later called "ghost football". I wrote the script for a short film called Football in Silence. The production company turned it down, saying there was no market. I made it anyway, with two friends. Around the same period, I began noticing another pattern: big clubs receive more favourable referee decisions than small clubs. Many call that a conspiracy theory. I don't. Crowd and media pressure are real, and they act on the person holding the whistle in ways a statistics table cannot record. VAR was introduced to correct errors, but it only corrects what the cameras catch. The rest stays in the empty cell. The transfer market is where the empty cells are most numerous. Every window, thousands of rumours are pushed out, and most of them have no clear origin. What is worth tracking sits in quieter places: release-clause structures, wage bills, payment schedules, the moves of agents. A deal announced at 50 million euros may actually cost only 30 million in cash, with the rest contingent on performance. Data sheets rarely spell that out. Our blind spot is treating the absence of data as the absence of truth. An "N/A" cell is read as a void, when it is usually a signal: something happened there that the measurement system has not yet touched. An analytics department willing to leave a cell blank is an honest one. An analytics department that fills every cell with assumptions is the dangerous one, because it turns guesswork into evidence and then makes buying decisions on top of it. I learned to listen to the pitch with my heart, because reason has already said too many dull things. A touch of the ball is an unfinished poem. The ball rolls away, but the writer stays. Next time you open an analytics sheet and see it full of N/A, don't close the file. Read a little more slowly. That empty cell is where the match is still being played, where a player is still breathing, where memory has not yet frozen into a number. The roar rises inside my head. The stadium is empty, but memory has never been without people.