The Empty Spreadsheet and the Trust Trap in Vietnamese Sports

I once sat in front of a completely empty spreadsheet. Columns, rows, headers — but not a single cell of data. For someone whose job is reading numbers, that is the most dangerous moment, because the keyboard keeps whispering that you should just fill it in. Enter a score, enter a name, enter a metric that sounds plausible. No one will check. And so a conclusion is born out of thin air.

In Vietnamese football, we are more than used to moments built on emotion. In early 2026, Vietnam's U23 team reached the final of the AFC U23 Championship in Changzhou and lost 1-2 to Uzbekistan after extra time, in a match played under snow. Later that year, the senior national team under coach Park Hang-seo won the AFF Cup. Those memories are real, and they deserve to be remembered.

But memory is not data. Memory is selective; a spreadsheet is not. And that is where the story gets interesting.

Context: a sport learning to count

Vietnamese football entered the data era about a decade later than Europe. While top European leagues had adopted expected goals (xG) and PPDA as standard language by the mid-2010s, V.League 1 still largely lived on goals, assists and cards — raw numbers that are easy to see but tell very little about how a match actually unfolds.

That gap is not only about technology. It is about culture. When detailed data is missing, people are forced to explain matches through feeling: the defence looked loose today, that midfielder is out of form. Those statements are not exactly wrong, but they cannot be verified. And what cannot be verified cannot be debated — it can only be believed or not.

That is why I start my work with the hardest-to-see metrics. PPDA — the number of passes an opponent is allowed before the ball is recovered — shows how aggressively a team presses. A team with a PPDA of 8 suffocates opponents almost the moment the ball leaves a foot. A team with a PPDA of 15 drops deep, cedes the initiative and waits for mistakes. Those two numbers describe two completely different philosophies, even when the scoreline is identical. Some matches cannot be seen with the naked eye; the spreadsheet has to tell the story.

At national-team level, the data gap is even clearer. Regional tournaments such as the AFF Cup or SEA Games often lack advanced metrics, forcing analysts to build indices from what they can observe. Having to start from scratch is not a bad thing; it simply means every conclusion must state its confidence level, sample size and assumptions. Do not argue with words; let xG speak.

Core: when the spreadsheet is evidence

I learned the value of verification at fourteen, sitting on the sideline of a youth football tournament in Seoul, recording statistics. A midfielder had a passing accuracy of 92%, but across the whole match he produced only three forward passes. That 92% looked beautiful. It made people want to praise him. But it concealed the truth that he barely pushed the ball forward, broke no lines and created no threat. High accuracy without penetration is simply safety disguised as efficiency.

That principle still holds for Vietnamese sport. A defender who completes 90% of his passes but mostly sideways does not help the team control the game. A striker who scores many goals from easy chances — that is, from high xG — is not necessarily a great finisher; the one who scores fewer but from low xG is the truly superior finisher. If we look only at goals, we misprice players. If we look at xG too, we see who creates chances and who merely benefits from the system.

This is not academic. At club level, misjudging a striker can cost billions of dong on a misfit contract. At national-team level, misreading one line can let an entire tournament slip away in frustration. I have watched an Asian club spend heavily on a striker based on his goal tally, only to realise that most of those goals came from penalties and tap-ins. Once penalties are removed from the equation, the picture flips completely.

Data does not make football less beautiful; it only makes decisions less blind. A spreadsheet does not lie; it is the reader who must learn to listen.

And that is where we reach the biggest trap.

Contrarian: empty data is more dangerous than bad data

People usually fear wrong data. But in my experience, empty data is the real enemy, because it makes no noise. A wrong number can be detected, questioned, corrected. A blank space stays silent, and that silence invites us to fill it with guesswork.

In my profession there is an unwritten rule: when there is no data, the most correct answer is insufficient information. It sounds mundane, but it is a shield. If an analysis has a full skeleton while every cell is blank, the most honest thing is not to invent a team to fill it, but to say plainly that there is nothing to say yet. An empty spreadsheet is not an invitation to be creative; it is a reminder that there is nothing to conclude.

The paradox is this: the less data there is, the more confident writers tend to become. With nothing to contradict them, guesses grow loud. A claim based on a sample of a few matches becomes truth after a few shares. A coincidental correlation between form and a small change is elevated into a cause. That is how false stories are built — not through lies, but through laziness in verification.

I do not believe in luck. I believe in blocked shots and overlooked spaces. But I also do not believe in numbers that come from nowhere. There is a gap between not having data yet and having no problem at all. That gap is where Vietnamese sports journalism most needs to stand firm.

Takeaway: signals for the next round

For me, the big question for Vietnamese sport is not when we will have full xG for V.League. The real question is: once the data exists, will we have enough discipline to read it correctly, and enough courage to say we do not know when the data is still blank?

A mature sporting nation is measured not only by medals, but by how it handles uncertainty. The spreadsheets will come, slowly but surely. What is still missing is the habit of verification — and that habit needs no technology, only honesty. When a football culture learns to say that it does not yet know, that is when it truly begins to grow.