A Sheet Full of N/A: Football Writing and the Temptation of Empty Analysis

There is always a sheet of A4 in my bag, printed on both sides: nine sections, forty-two small cells. I printed it on a July afternoon, before Incheon United hosted a visiting side, and I printed it out of curiosity. What does a professional analytical framework look like when there is not a single line of data to feed it?

Forty-two cells. Thirty-nine of them read N/A. The remaining three read "insufficient information to assess".

The match finished 0-0. Rain arrived in the 20th minute, grew heavier, and by the 70th the stand behind the goal had begun to empty. I stayed behind after the press conference, looked at the sheet curling at the corner from the damp, and understood that the thing in my hands was the most honest document in the room. It did not lie. It simply said there was nothing to say.

My trade now stands on a chain of three layers. The first is the coder, usually seated in the highest row or in a windowless room, keying a code for every pass, every duel, every touch. The second is the provider, collecting those keystrokes, cross-checking them against the camera system around the pitch, and pushing the file to a server. The third is me, opening that file in the press box with twenty minutes to turn eight hundred event rows into something that means something.

When all three layers run cleanly, I have almost everything: touch maps, pressure counts, distance covered minute by minute, and PPDA — passes allowed per defensive action, where a lower figure signals more aggressive pressing. I have xG too, an estimate of chance quality built on the probability that a given shot becomes a goal.

But the chain breaks in many places. In K League 2, some grounds have one camera and one coder. At youth level, often nobody codes at all. At the U19 matches I used to follow in Vietnam, the only record that existed was my notebook and a phone filming from the touchline. And when the chain breaks, the framework is still there — nine sections, forty-two cells — only empty.

The 2026 season adds another kind of pressure. Every article must bring back something new, what the algorithm calls information gain. A reader opens three pieces about the same match and must find three different things. That pressure is not wrong. It simply pushes the writer toward a very specific temptation: filling in the blanks.

My A4 is blank for a simple reason. It was built to analyse an article, and there was no article. No club, no player, no scoreline, no source. Nine sections, from tactics to club finance, from results to dressing-room crisis, all returned a single line.

What is worth noting is that the sheet was still correct. It described the state of the material accurately, not the match. A blank table does not report on a match; it reports on the pipeline — on the point where the signal died before it reached the writer.

I remember a U19 final on a provincial ground: three stands, a corrugated roof, no tracking system at all. I sat in the second row and wrote every phase into my notebook. In the first half the hosts sat deep; their two central midfielders barely crossed the halfway line. In the second half they pushed the press higher and won 2-1.

With data, I would have written about PPDA dropping after the interval. Without data, I wrote about something else: the head coach calling both midfielders to the touchline in the 44th minute, speaking very fast, tapping each of them on the shoulder. One of them nodded three times, and in the second half he ran forward far more — not faster, but forward.

That detail cannot be measured by any index. It does not need to be. It is data of a different kind: the data of someone sitting close enough to hear.

In 2026 I was twenty-three, freshly out of a second-division playing career, and I talked my way into a junior reporter's job following Incheon United. Against FC Seoul I sat in the corner of the ground logging bookings. Number 17, Kim Do-hyuk, twenty-one years old, came on in the 75th minute, scored the 2-1 winner in the 89th, tore off his shirt, took the yellow card, and was reprimanded by the coaching staff in front of the whole squad.

The data file that night, had it existed, would have read: fifteen touches, one shot, one goal, one yellow card. I did not write the piece from that file. I followed him back to the dormitory, met his mother at a small eatery near the ferry terminal, and heard her describe four years of hourly-rate pitches, three sessions a week, the rent paid out of what she earned selling goods in the morning.

A goal can be recorded in fifteen touches; the reason that goal exists sits in a kitchen. From then on I wrote from people first and numbers second. And I learned to count a team's rhythm from the sighs in the dressing room.

The summer of 2026 taught me the same lesson more heavily. The stadiums were empty, and the sound of boots was uncomfortably clear. I sat in a cold stand watching a veteran midfielder — Lee Myung-joo — play in fragments. The data file would say his pass completion had fallen, his turnovers had risen, his distance covered had dropped. All of it true and all of it useless.

After the match I stayed in the dressing room and saw him sitting with his head down. The piece that followed was called "When the Applause Disappears". The club appointed a psychologist to the squad. There was not a single metric in that article, and it is the only piece I wrote that year for which I did not have to re-check a data source.

Refereeing is where the data story exposes itself most clearly. From the 2026 World Cup, VAR entered the major competitions with a promise to reduce controversy. I stood in Rostov Arena that summer, after South Korea beat Germany 2-0 through Kim Young-gwon and Son Heung-min, and listened to the men around me arguing about a first-half handball. The winners still went out. The arguing on the pitch fell; the arguing in the review room rose.

The reason is simple. VAR is the most data-rich procedure in football — dozens of cameras, offside lines, slow frames down to hundredths of a second — yet the public usually receives the conclusion, not the material. Viewers see the referee run to the monitor, see him gesture, see a decision announced. The rest of the columns are blacked out.

Then there is the grey zone of the law. Offside is judged on the part of the body that can score, and at high frame rates that body part moves several centimetres between two frames. Handball is split between an "unnatural" and a "natural" arm position — two phrases whose interpretation shifts a little every season.

A decision without evidence is still a decision, but it loses the ability to be checked. The controversy does not vanish; it moves off the grass and into a room with no spectators, where the people deciding see more than we do and tell us less.

Deeper down, the data gap produces something else. Scouting networks in developing countries often have no tracking systems, no youth databases, no fully digitised fixture lists. What replaces them are forty-second videos cut by agents and sent over messaging apps.

A seventeen-year-old in a provincial town can be seen by a scout abroad through those forty seconds alone. The opportunity is entirely real. The price of being seen through an edited clip is that he is judged by exactly that clip, while his family stakes everything they own on it.

Where there is no data, people do not stop analysing; they analyse with material that distorts more easily. Faced with a story like that, my trade has to choose between writing the dream and writing the invoice. I usually write both, which is why those pieces run longer than a page allows.

Transfer news is the most common form of data gap. A single transfer passes through four source layers: the agent, the selling club, the buying club, and a third-party broker nobody will admit to. Each layer has its own reason to speak early or late. With one layer I write a sentence. With three independent layers I write a paragraph. With all four I write a piece. That boundary is not an abstract ethical rule; it is craft, and it is decided by how many blank cells remain on the sheet.

The natural response to a blank table is to fill it in. I think that is precisely the mistake.

Football media rewards novelty. Every day, every match, the writer must find an angle nobody has taken. But a football match does not generate a fresh insight every twenty-four hours. When that pressure meets a data gap, what gets produced is usually an adjective: the defence lacks concentration, the mood has dropped, the tactics are chaotic. Those sentences sound like analysis and survive no check at all.

The A4 with thirty-nine N/A cells was the most honest document in the press box that day, because it was the only thing that did not invent. In this trade, silence at the right moment is a professional skill, not a concession.

There is one more paradox. More data does not reduce argument; it relocates it. VAR puts the evidence into the review room and takes it out of the crowd's sight. The stats sheet puts measurement into the article and takes the story out. The dressing room is never silent; we are simply not still enough to listen.

This regular season I am tracking one small signal: more second-tier and youth competitions are publishing open data packs, however raw. If that continues, the first thing to change will be who gets seen, not how I write.

And if one day all forty-two cells are filled, what will I write? Probably still the story of a mother near the ferry terminal. The crowd disperses, but the roar stays behind in the eyes of every player.