The Empty Cells of the Data Sheet: The Football That Cannot Be Measured

In the summer of 2026, in Saint Petersburg, I sat in the stands of the Krestovsky Stadium next to a Belgian data analyst. Before kick-off, he opened his laptop, pointed at a dense sheet of numbers, and said with certainty: “Eden Hazard will create at least five chances from the right flank.” Ninety minutes later, the France–Belgium semi-final ended 1-0 in France's favour. The only goal came from a centre-back, Samuel Umtiti, with a header from a corner. Hazard left the pitch in silence, without a single assist, without a single meaningful shot on target. The laptop was still glowing, but the sheet on the screen had become a blank page. That night, instead of taking tactical notes, I wrote three thousand words about the loneliness of Eden Hazard on the right flank, cut off by France's three layers of defence. That piece travelled faster than any data report. And it taught me something I have not stopped repeating after all these years of writing: there is a part of football that always returns an empty result. At sixty, looking back, I see how much the craft of writing about football has changed. When I graduated from the Journalism Academy in 2026 and began contributing to Báo Bóng đá, people analysed a match with their eyes and their memory. Today, every big club has its own data-analysis department, measuring xG (expected goals), PPDA (passes allowed per defensive action), possession, and hundreds of other metrics. A midfielder can be judged only by his key passes; a defender is scored by his successful tackles. Data has become a new language, and anyone who cannot speak it is considered outdated. I am not against that language. But I notice that any data system will always have empty cells. There are matches where, after the analysts finish entering their figures, the report returns the words “insufficient information”. Not because the match had nothing to say, but because the most telling thing sat in no column of the spreadsheet. I call it the unmeasurable part of football — the territory before which every algorithm must bow and write two words in the empty cell: “undetermined”. I learned this on an afternoon in 2026, while filming a short documentary about Hà Nội FC. In the match against Becamex Bình Dương, the goalkeeper Nguyễn Văn Công saved a penalty with a strange reflex: he dived to his right while his eyes stayed fixed to his left. The penalty taker, like every taker, read the goalkeeper's gaze. He struck to the left. Văn Công was already there. When I rewatched the footage, I realised that no metric captured that moment. Saves made: one. Penalty-save rate in that match: one hundred per cent. But what made the difference — the misdirecting gaze, the gamble of a man who dares to trust his instinct over his opponent's data — lay outside every chart. A sports radio station invited me on air, and I said a line that many still repeat: a goalkeeper is the poet of the penalty area, writing with his body instead of words. The match ended 2-1, and Văn Công was voted man of the match. Nobody voted for him because of xG or pass counts. They voted for him because of a moment that cannot be digitised. Three years later, at another tournament, I touched the same lesson again. In 2026, while making a short documentary about substitutes at the Euros, I met the Swiss striker Breel Embolo right after his team's round-of-16 match against France. He came off the bench and scored the equaliser in the ninetieth minute, taking the game into extra time and then to penalties. Switzerland won 5-4. It was one of the biggest shocks in the tournament's history. I asked Embolo what it felt like to score. He was silent for a moment, then said: “I can't remember what it felt like to touch the ball. I only remember breathing like a hunted animal for twelve minutes.” Twelve minutes. The post-match statistics recorded that Embolo came on in the 74th minute and scored in the 90th. But for him, it was twelve minutes of being hunted. The number sixteen lives in the spreadsheet; the number twelve lives in the chest. I took his words as the title of the film: “Twelve Minutes of a Hunter”. In 2026, when the pandemic suspended the domestic league, I spent nine months rewatching all fourteen National Cup finals from 2026 to 2026. I was not looking for beautiful goals. I was looking for something else. And I found a strange pattern: in matches where a goal was scored in stoppage time, Vietnamese players celebrated with exactly the same three movements, repeated across more than two decades. What those three movements are, I will save for the five-part film I made afterwards, “The Body Language of Late Goals”. What I want to say here is this: no column in a data sheet exists for “how a nation