Who Keeps the Book? The Data Void Eroding Vietnamese Sport

The folder was placed in front of me on an August morning, at the training ground of an old club in Da Nang. The man who handed it over was a coach who had been part of this city's football for more than twenty years. He opened it, turned to the 2026 season, and pushed across the table a sheet with exactly twenty-two rows — the number of rounds that year.

The first column listed player names. The second, minutes played. The third, goals. The fourth, cards. That was all. Four columns, and the white space behind them.

No passes. No duels won. No distance covered. No presses. Nothing that could tell you a midfielder had run eleven kilometres in a match, or that a centre-back had won seven of ten aerial duels against a foreign striker.

I photocopied that folder. I have kept it ever since, not because it is valuable, but because it is empty.

A few weeks ago, an in-depth analysis on a martial arts subject was sent to me. It came back as a single line: no title, no source, no facts, no names. All that remained was one classification label, written as a single word. Nobody had done anything wrong. There was simply nothing to analyse.

Two blank spaces, almost a decade apart, saying the same thing.

Vietnam has plenty to be proud of in sport. We have packed grandstands. We have the night of 15 December 2026 at My Dinh, when the final whistle blew and a generation of players — Quang Hai, Hung Dung, Tien Linh — and an entire country wept together. We have fighters who walk onto the mat at continental tournaments with medals around their necks.

What we do not have is a full book.

Vietnamese sport's data currently lives in three places: coaches' notebooks, the team's group chat, and the memory of the people who watched. All three share one property — they vanish when the person holding them leaves.

The professional national league publishes basic statistics: goals, cards, minutes. The divisions below barely do. Women's football has very little. Futsal has almost nothing. And in martial arts, where I spend most of my watching time, the picture is emptier still.

I have covered professional sport for more than forty years, more than twenty-five of them tied to Da Nang football. Long enough to realise that most of what we call the history of our sport is actually oral history. It passes from person to person, and it changes a little each time.

Let me tell three stories. All three begin with a blank space.

In 2026, when the city's club I had followed for twenty-five years sank to the bottom of the table with twelve points from twenty-two rounds, I did not write a critical piece. I made phone calls, rented a coffee shop by the Han River, and invited three groups to sit down: former players, the supporters' association, and the club's leadership. The conversation lasted nearly five hours.

What made that conversation possible, as I remember it, was that nobody had the numbers to throw in anyone's face. No analysis sheet proved that the first key player had declined, that the second was running slower than the previous season. Because there was no evidence, people were forced to listen to each other. The three key players stayed. The following season, the club survived.

When Hoa Xuan stadium dissolved into tears, I understood that a brand is not a logo but trust. But in our country that trust often has to be built on an empty data foundation. I tell this story not to praise ignorance. I tell it because it shows the blank space has two faces: it can be a condition for dialogue, and it can be a condition for rumour. When there are no numbers, people believe in stories. And stories always have an author.

The frightening thing about a sport without data is not that it cannot measure players. It is that it teaches an entire system the habit of judging by feel, and then calls that feel experience.

The second story involves a scout. He called me at eleven at night about a Vietnamese-heritage player in Europe. He said the kid could play. I asked for numbers. He went quiet for a few seconds and said: there are only forty minutes of phone footage, cut from three matches, two of which were old tapes someone had reuploaded.

We watched those forty minutes four times. No pass completion. No possession lost. Nothing to compare him against a player in the same position in the domestic league.

The question I asked then — is forty minutes of video enough to price a human being? — still has no answer. But I know this: in sports that have data, people still watch video. The difference is that they watch video to verify an existing file, while we watch video to rebuild a file that never existed. These are two very different jobs, and the second costs many times more people.

Sitting in the stands in Moscow in the summer of 2026, at the semi-final between France and Belgium, I learned to listen with my eyes and look with my ears. France won 1-0 that night, the only goal a Samuel Umtiti header in the fifty-first minute. But what I remember most was not on the pitch.

Beside me was a group of Iranian supporters whose team was not at the tournament. They wore Russian shirts and cheered for anyone who played beautifully. One of them, about forty, opened a small notebook and started writing. I looked over, curious. He was counting, by hand, how many times a Belgian midfielder dropped to receive the ball on the left flank. No stadium app was giving him that number.

I abandoned my own tactical notes and talked to him for most of the second half. Apps only tell me which team has more of the ball, he said. What I want to know is who is making their team have the ball. I brought that line home and use it as a reminder every time I read a match statistics sheet.

Possession is the most deceptive statistic in this sport. A team that grinds out sixty per cent of the ball with sideways passes between two centre-backs is not controlling the match — they are controlling the ball, and the ball does not score. Yet it is the first statistic any young sports market puts on television, because it is easy to calculate, easy to understand, easy to sell.

The statistics that actually matter — the line-breaking pass, the phase that breaks a defensive block, the gap run into — are barely recorded by anyone. At many of our stadiums they exist only in the eyes of someone in the stands, who has nothing to write them in but a notebook.

Transfers are where the blank space shows most clearly. Transfers are not numbers. They are separations written into contracts. But in a market with no metrics, a player's price is set by three other things: relationships, recommendations, and rumour. A buyer does not know whether he is buying a midfielder with sixty per cent possession or a midfielder with ten forward passes a match, because neither number exists.

In youth football the blank repeats in a circle. A fifteen-year-old moves from one province to another and his file restarts from zero. Nobody carries the data with him. By the time he reaches the first team, nobody knows how many matches he played in which position, what he injured, how many penalties he has missed.

Women's football is the clearest example. The national women's team has achievements on the continental and world stage, with players who have committed more than a decade, yet the data on them is unbelievably thin. To find out how many goals a striker has scored for the national team, a reporter often has to add it up by hand, match by match, and sometimes it still does not reconcile.

In martial arts the blank is more dangerous, because it is attached to the human body. A fighter can be recorded as five wins, no losses in one province, and no wins at all in another, because no body exists to keep a single record. When two sheets of paper never meet, a person's fighting history becomes storytelling. And with it come the things nobody counts: the number of rapid weight cuts, the number of weigh-ins done while dehydrated, the number of fights taken too soon after a head injury. No book means no warning. And no warning means injury only appears once it is already inside the fighter.

In the pandemic season, the stadium was silent, but I have never heard the hearts of supporters so clearly. The league was suspended, players trained on dusty pitches, no crowd, no chants. One goalkeeper in that squad, Van Cuong, fell into depression without anyone on the coaching staff knowing, because which department was recording mental-health metrics?

I recorded supporters' messages of encouragement, edited them into a tape, and sent it to the team to play during training. Later he told me that tape helped him through the hardest period. I am not telling this to boast. I am telling it because it shows a kind of data can be created from nothing, if someone is willing to do it. One recorder and three days of collecting, and the club suddenly had a metric that appears in no spreadsheet.

In recent years, a few things are changing. Bigger clubs are hiring analysts. Vests with GPS units are appearing at training. A few supporters' groups build their own databases for the clubs they love, typing in every minute by hand. But most of it stops at one club, one group, one season.

And this is where I want to say what I believe, even if it irritates some people in the trade.

For years the familiar line has been that Vietnamese sport lacks data. Look a little closer and we do not lack it. We are drowning in it. Every training session produces data. Every game on a public pitch, every provincial youth tournament, every selection trial for fighters produces data. What we lack is a keeper.

Data is not lost because it is deleted. It is lost because nobody is assigned to hold it. A coach leaves and takes the notebook. An assistant changes clubs and takes the folder on his laptop. A volunteer supporters' group runs out of fire after two seasons. After each of those departures, a piece of the sport's memory evaporates, and nobody notices because nobody cross-checks.

But there is another side to this, subtler and less discussed. The first metric we chose to put on television was the worst one. The result is that a whole generation of viewers learned to read a match through a meaningless number, and then, realising it was meaningless, turned to distrust every other number. That is the price of getting the order wrong: we started with what was easy to measure instead of what needed measuring, and now we pay for it with general scepticism.

There are matches that last ninety minutes but stories that linger for decades. I have seen that at Hoa Xuan, in Moscow, on empty training grounds during the pandemic. And every time, what lingers was never in the statistics sheet, because nobody ever wrote it down.

So the question I leave behind is not how much technology we need, but something simpler: who will keep the book, for how long, and when that person leaves, into whose hands does it pass? A sport cannot live forever on the memory of people who still remember. It needs a place to look things up — and a place to safely forget.