Handling the Void: When Football Learns to Say 'Insufficient Information'

One autumn morning in Shenzhen, I opened a file already named: Deep Analysis — Football. A blank page. No title. No source. Not a single player's name. No club. No figure. Only a nine-dimension skeleton built neatly, and inside every cell a repeated line: insufficient information, cannot assess. I sat still for a long time. Outside the window the city kept moving. In my earphones I played an old recording: the sound of a crowd before kickoff, that thirty-second stretch before anyone shouts, before anyone claps, only plastic seats knocking together and someone coughing. It is the thing I record before I record a match. Noise, anyone can capture. Silence is harder. And that empty file, strangely, was teaching me exactly that. When the lights go out, the match has only just begun. I have covered football for twenty-four years. I taught myself to build a nine-dimension analytical framework: tactics and technique, club finance and the transfer market, results and the opinion cycle, league landscape and team positioning, rules and governance, management and the dressing room, risk profile, media narrative and expectation, and finally the transmission of an entire football industry. Those nine dimensions are a beautiful thing. They make a writer feel he can grasp a match, a season, a club, even a national game, simply by asking the right question into the right cell. But there is a kind of cell the framework never prepared me for. The cell with nothing to fill it. I used to think the greatest skill of an analyst was the ability to find answers. I was wrong. The greater and far harder skill is the ability to tell an answer apart from a fabrication dressed in technical language. That empty file did exactly that. It did not invent. It did not paper over. It stated plainly: all nine dimensions are non-computable. It even called itself a diagnostic checkpoint rather than an analytical result. And it named its own greatest risk: the risk of fabricated analysis. I read that line and felt cold, because in my trade that risk is not an exception. It is a habit. Look at how we talk about football every day. A striker goes three games without scoring and instantly a figure appears about goalless minutes. A team loses twice and instantly a curve appears about pressure on the chair. A transfer rumour surfaces and instantly a table appears analysing contract structure, fee, age, resale margin. We produce such tables so fast that nobody stops to ask a simple question: where is the source. I do not write about goals. I write about the silence before the roar. That silence, in analysis, is precisely the stretch before data is thick enough to say anything. There a writer must choose between two roads: say we do not yet know, or build an answer that sounds certain. The second road is always better rewarded. It makes the front page. It gets shared. It makes the writer look like an expert. The first road makes him look like someone who knows nothing. I have stood on both sides of that divide. In 2026 I wrote about the Shanghai derby. I analysed how André Villas-Boas deployed Hulk as a false nine, counting Hulk's seven successful dribbles and Wu Lei's five shots. The piece went up, and a group of male fans reacted: what does a woman know about tactics. I did not argue. I opened a small group watching session in a tiny café and sat listening to the very men who had just attacked me explain how they read a match. What I learned that night was not in the numbers. I realised all of us, writers and readers, cling to numbers not because they are true, but because they give us the feeling of holding something in a game that is chaos. A number is a blanket. It is warm. And sometimes it covers the truth that we understand nothing at all. Since then I changed my method. I still use numbers, but I do not let numbers lead. I read expected goals as a hint, not a verdict. I look at PPDA, the passes a team allows an opponent per defensive action, and understand that a low figure does not automatically mean good pressing; it can mean the team is pinned back, or playing on a small pitch, or simply tired. A number without context is like a sentence cut out of a speaker's mouth. The other half of the story lives elsewhere. Between two passes there is a world the camera does not capture. That world is where the nine-dimension framework, short on material, must fall silent. And I believe that silence is a professional skill, not a failure. Take the example where I work most: the transfer market. A transfer rumour passes through four layers before reaching a reader. The first layer is the agent, who has an obvious motive for the rumour to exist. The second is a journalist needing a source. The third is an aggregator who reposts without checking. The fourth is the fan, who reads and believes at once. At the first layer we usually have no source. At the fourth we have belief. Between the two lies a gap my trade loves to fill with a confident tone. Some concepts should make us more cautious. A loan with an obligation to buy is one. For accounting, a transfer fee is spread across the contract length, what people call transfer amortisation. Which means a small club can buy a player today by promising to pay over three years, when it does not yet know where it will be in three years. When I write about such deals, I always ask myself: who actually carries the risk. And the honest answer, in most cases, is that there is not enough information to know. Then there is illegal approach, tapping-up, or third-party ownership, TPO, which FIFA has banned. These stories rarely come with enough public evidence. We usually have half a truth and half a guess, and we tell them as if both halves were certain. Such a piece can be gripping, but it is not analysis. It is a novel wearing a data jersey. The second example is the manager's chair. Whenever a team loses we draw a pressure index. I used to do it too. I counted matches, points, goals conceded, then added and subtracted to produce a figure that sounded scientific about the sack probability. But I have never sat in that club's board meeting. I do not know how long the contract runs, what the severance clause says, whether the dressing room is tense or warm, what pressure comes from sponsors, what keeps the president awake. I only know the table. And from the table I build a story. The truth is that most sack decisions are not decided by the table. They are decided by conversations we never get to hear. An honest framework must say so: data on pressure on the chair cannot be computed from outside the boardroom. The third example is financial fair play. UEFA's FFP and the Premier League's PSR are serious rule sets, and we should cover them seriously. But there is a strong temptation: to use rules as rhetorical weapons. Whenever a club spends big, someone instantly drafts a sanction scenario. Whenever a club spends little, someone instantly says it is in trouble. Both directions can be right, and both can be wrong, and the honest thing to say is: we have no financial statement, no ruling, nothing but speculation. Modelling sanction scenarios is real work. But it needs a real triggering event. Without an event, every scenario is wordplay. Here I want to return to that empty file, because it taught me three things I believe matter to anyone writing about football. The first: source transparency is not an administrative procedure, it is an ethical stance. When an analysis states clearly where its data comes from, and states clearly that it has none, it respects the reader. Every football piece should do this. The second: a framework's value lies not in filling every cell, but in showing which cells are empty and why. The nine-dimension framework I use today is not a conclusion machine. It is a compass showing where I stand and what I lack. The third: in football, as in film, people remember the silent scene most. I worked as a documentary screenwriter before writing football, and I learned that a good film is not the film that says the most. It is the film that knows when to stop the camera and be quiet. But here I must be honest with myself. There is a sweet trap in this way of writing, and I know it because I have fallen into it. The trap of turning silence into something beautiful, of turning not knowing into a virtue, of turning every gap into a poem. A writer can get so drunk on the beauty of the gap that he forgets the reader needs something to hold. Honest humility and manufactured vagueness are separated by a very thin line. I have seen many football pieces fall into that trap. They open with a lovely image, pass through a few memories, plant a few philosophical lines, then close with a rhetorical question. Reading it, one feels comforted, but learns nothing. That is not honesty about data. That is laziness dressed up. Conversely there is another trap, and it is more dangerous: the trap of turning not knowing into indifference. If I say there is not enough information about everything, I will never have to be responsible for anything. I will become a writer hiding in the gap. But analysis is not hiding. Analysis is stepping out, pointing at something, and saying: this is where I stand, this is what I dare to believe. So where is the line. In my experience after more than twenty years, it lies in a single question: am I talking about what I know, or what I want. If it is what I know, I write. If it is what I want, I stop, note it down, and wait for more data. If a month passes and no data comes, I still write, but I write about the gap itself, plainly, without cosmetic sheen. That is why that empty file, instead of blocking me, became one of the most valuable lessons I received this year. It did not give me an answer. It gave me a way of treating the absence of an answer. A player can change his shirt number, but he cannot change the memory he carries on his back. A football culture is the same. We can change the metrics system, change the data provider, change an entire generation of writers. But we cannot change how audiences believe what is told to them in a confident tone. Once that trust is abused a few times, it does not return easily. That is why I think the discipline of telling the truth about data is not a matter for writers alone. It is a matter for a whole ecosystem. At the end I want to bring Vietnamese football into this story, because I always see football through the lens of an expatriate. Where I work, there is an entire data industry with hundreds of metrics and thousands of analysts. But what I realised, after years standing between two football cultures, is that the biggest difference is not the number of figures. It is how we treat what is unknown. A mature football culture is not the one with the most answers. It is the one where everyone is used to the idea that a correct answer can be: we do not know yet. And that is not as remote from Vietnamese football as many assume. I have watched matches in Saigon, in Hanoi, in cafés where people argue so hard it looks like a fight. But there is one moment I remember: at half-time in a big match, the whole café fell silent. No one analysed. No one predicted. Everyone just drank water and waited. That silence was not emptiness. It was respect. A whole café of people knew something was happening on the pitch that no one had understood yet, and they chose to wait. If we could bring that silence into our writing, I think we would write better. Victory is what gets printed in the papers. Collapse is what gets carved into the heart. But between victory and collapse lies a region far larger: the region of things we never knew, never told, never counted. That is the region I want to spend the rest of my life walking through. Not to fill it with words, but to stand in it honestly. I closed that empty file and did not delete it. I named it Silent Note Number One. I know that in the coming months I will open it again, not to fill it in, but to remind myself that some analysis sheets do not need to be completed. They need to be kept empty. And a good writer is one who knows when he truly cannot say more, and knows when that is right, and not an escape. The pitch will keep rolling the ball. Data will keep being pumped into every pass, every shot, every duel. Hundreds of new analyses will be born every day, each more confident than the last. And amid that current, I tell myself: if one day I open a file and it is empty, I will not be afraid. I will sit down, play the recording of the crowd before kickoff, and ask the only question worth asking: what made this page empty. Because in football, the best question does not always have an answer. But it always has a place to stand.