Vietnamese football and the empty fields: When data says 'I don't know'

Hanoi, a rainy Friday afternoon. I received a report from the analytics department – nine pages of white paper with only one repeated word: N/A. No numbers, no tactical annotations, no coded passes. The young assistant looked at me and asked, 'Anh, how do we read this?' I did not answer, because I could hear a strange sound: it was football breathing its sigh when all the noise in the stands has faded. 'When the pitch is silent, you hear the sigh of the game' – my own words had never felt truer. The context is not just a bad report. It is the whole world of Vietnamese football analytics living in a paradox. We have some of the most passionate supporters in Southeast Asia, but our data system remains like a blank sheet of paper in the wind. When I follow the national team, I see that the head coach may know much about the opponent's strengths and weaknesses, yet he does not even have a simple software to measure his own team's pressing. While the world has moved to xG and PPDA, we still rely on… intuition. Not that intuition is wrong. In earlier years, when I sat in the stands of Mỹ Đình watching the national team in the AFF Cup, everything was narrated through shouts, through the colors, through stories circulating online. The 2026 final was a masterpiece of resilience, but if we sit back and analyze every metric, we must admit that Malaysia kept the ball better. But football is not a chart. As I often whisper to myself: 'Football is not read by the score, but by the beating of hearts in the stands.' However, when we step into bigger tournaments, when opponents change their stripes from Malaysia to Japan, Korea or Uzbekistan, the beating hearts alone cannot create tactics. I remember that nine-page N/A report – it is like a confession of the domestic analytics industry. Nine issues raised at a professional workshop: tactics, finance, performance, recruitment, dressing-room stories, risk, media, and the impact on the football ecosystem. All blank. I cannot decide whether the team played well or poorly, because we do not even have a single shot measured by expected goals. Perhaps that is a test of humility. A blank page does not lie. It forces us to face the core question: how exactly are we trying to imitate modern football? Look at South Korea, where academies produce thousands of players a year with physical records recorded to the millimetre. In Vietnam, we have gifted talents such as Công Phượng or Quang Hải, but no system truly knows how to measure and nurture that natural gift. When I wrote about U23 Vietnam beating U23 Korea back in 2026, an editor called me 'a poet on the penalty spot.' At that time I did not want to answer; because my poetry contained some truth, but my team did not contain a database. There is a blind spot fans tend to ignore: the so-called upsets in major cups are rarely miracles. They are just a chain of tiny decisions. But without data we cannot read that chain. A traditional winger is being erased by modern football – that is a statement I once read, but I cannot prove it with Vietnamese players' data because no one measured the width of a sprint to the byline. Football fails not because we lack moments, but because we lack maps. During one August tour with the U23 team, we played a friendly. It was fast and uncontrollable. We pressed immediately after losing the ball, but nobody on the coaching staff noticed that the midfield had left a vast area in front of the box. When a foreign reporter asked about PPDA, I hesitated and admitted that we did not record that metric. He said nothing, but his eyes spoke volumes – they saw a football country left behind. Yet I have enough experience to understand that the mistake is not simply the lack of numbers. The mistake is when we put all our hope into numbers and become disappointed when they don't come. In that emptiness, I find a strange comfort. There is a kind of knowledge that cannot be written into spreadsheets: the memory of the days when stadiums were closed because of pandemic, when each match without spectators became an unperformed song. We witnessed things no number can explain: a decisive match in complete silence, only the sound of boots and rolling ball. This taught me that even when computers fail to provide data, the heart can still record the pulse of a match. I sat with veteran former stars, people who have never heard of xG, to watch a national team match. They noticed instantly any tactical change; they could predict the scorer, not by algorithm but by what people call 'tactical vision.' That vision comes from hundreds of matches, from tears and blood. If we respect what the eyes see, why should we despise what numbers have not yet told? After all, the biggest lesson from that N/A report is not the sadness of a helpless analyst. It lies in honesty. When we don't have enough data, we should not invent slick claims. We should say, 'I don't know.' But at the same time, we cannot use the absence of data as an excuse to quit. Vietnamese football needs people who dare to look at blank pages and ask big questions: without xG, are we blind? Without PPDA, are we deaf? Or are we still able to hear the rolling ball through our own hearts? Over the last five years, I have witnessed many arguments online – about tactics, philosophies, whether to play possession or counter-attacks. Yet in the end, all of them come down to one thing: respect for the truth on the pitch. If we do not have a system to spy on ourselves, we will forever be poets singing over the ashes of defeat. I want to see a Vietnam that is not only about legendary AFF Cup nights, but also about small data centers in every youth academy. We do not need to wait until rich football bosses invest millions of dollars; just let sports lecturers start recording the runs of their students in a simple notebook. Start with the smallest thing: record a single shot on target, a decisive pass. And then, when data has thickened, let it join the heart to tell its story. Today, when I look back at the nine-page report, I no longer find it useless. It feels like an invitation: fill those empty cells with true stories, with the persistence of collecting each touch of the ball. Football does not wait for the lazy. It waits for those who can listen to both the sigh and the roar. We do not need to become tech fanatics, but we must know that technology will help us see more clearly what the heart has already felt. And if one day, when Mỹ Đình Stadium resounds with the songs of fifty thousand hearts, I hope that behind the stands there are screens delivering a new kind of speech. Not to replace love, but to make that love more understood. Standing outside the hotel in the hot late afternoon, I suddenly realize the answer to the young assistant's question: 'How do we read this?' – 'We don't just read it with our eyes; we also read it through the matches that were never written down.'