From the Empty Revierderby: The Sickness of Concluding from No Data

16 May 2026. Signal Iduna Park. The Ruhr derby between Borussia Dortmund and Schalke 04. The stands a brilliant yellow of empty seats, and the only sound for ninety minutes was two coaching benches shouting and the ball hitting the net. Dortmund won 4-0. The players still hurled themselves at each other, still fought for every square metre of grass as if eighty thousand people were screaming above their heads.

Three weeks earlier, I sat in Lyon and wrote a blog post insisting that football without spectators is a cheap rehearsal, that the season should be cancelled, that the essence of this sport lives in the crowd and not in the men kicking the ball. I wrote with great certainty. I even quoted a passage of philosophy about stage and audience. What I lacked was a single match to watch.

Zero input. Absolute conclusion. That is the formula eating away at my profession, and probably at the way crowds understand football.

I do not write to be loved, I write to be read. But at a certain age a person must admit a limit: wanting to be read is not enough to license writing when there is nothing yet to write about.

A PROFESSION FORCED TO CONCLUDE BEFORE THE EVENT

Modern football commentary runs like a food-processing line. You cannot call the newsroom and say there is nothing worth saying today. Nobody pays for an empty column. So when the data has not arrived, people fill the gap with something else: instinct, prejudice, memory, and above all the consensus already sitting on social media.

In France I have sat in press rooms where someone had already finished the piece "five lessons from the matchday" before half-time ended. In Vietnam, which I still follow through old friends' group chats, every defeat of a national team produces a torrent of conclusions about identity, about spirit, about stature. The same disease in two places, differing only in consequence: when the French get it wrong they lose professional credibility, when the Vietnamese get it wrong they lose a generation of belief.

What is worth saying is that I once did it the right way round, and it nearly taught me a decent lesson.

In July 2026, Neymar moved from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for a fee of 222 million euros, shattering every transfer record in football history. At the same time, in Monaco, an eighteen-year-old named Kylian Mbappé had just scored 15 Ligue 1 goals. I wrote a shocking piece: Mbappé is worth more than Neymar. Hundreds of accounts mocked me. A few weeks later, PSG completed the Mbappé deal at a total value of 180 million euros.

I retell this not to boast. I retell it to show that when I was right, I was right because I held a concrete piece of data: age, goals, the career development curve, and a pair of eyes that had actually sat and watched Mbappé play. That was a conclusion with an input. Most of what people call analysis today has no input at all.

THREE DOMAINS WHERE FOOTBALL FILLS EMPTY DATA WITH FAITH

First, possession percentage is the most blatantly deceptive metric in this sport.

I have spent much of my career saying that possession is a statistic designed for people who do not understand football. A team holding 65% of the ball may simply be passing sideways between two centre-backs, while a team holding 35% may own every real chance in the match.

The clearest evidence I have ever sat and analysed is the 2026 World Cup final at Luzhniki, on 15 July, before 78,011 spectators. France beat Croatia 4-2. The world said France were boring, France defended, France were anti-football. Croatia were praised as the prettier side. In that match, France held under 40% of the ball. Yet Didier Deschamps' team scored four goals in a World Cup final.

People look at one metric and see an entire story. That story was written by a measure that measures nothing worth measuring. It does not measure the quality of a pass, the position of a pass, or the fact that a defender was dragged out of his structure by that pass. It measures only who is holding the ball, the way you might measure who is holding the pen and conclude that person is the writer.

This is what I want the young people in this trade to write in their notebooks: when a metric cannot answer the question of which team is more likely to score, that metric is talking about itself, not about the match.

Second, expected goals and the trap of "deserving".

I am not opposed to data. I am opposed to turning data into something with religious power.

Expected goals was born as a tool for estimating chance quality, and inside an analysis room it is useful. But once it leaves the analysis room it becomes an alibi. A team that loses 0-3 while posting a higher expected-goals figure is described as deserving to win. The team that won is described as lucky.

The problem is that the model is built from historical data, and football changes faster than historical data. A header from a position the model rates at 5% may be 20% today if the man heading it is Erling Haaland. The model does not know that. The manager does.

And here I want to be blunt: a well-built model can still produce an empty conclusion if its inputs do not include the specific human beings playing that match. A decade ago I trusted data. Now I trust eyes. Not because eyes never err, but because eyes know whom they are watching.

The crowd believes in the numbers sheet. I believe in the pain on the pitch.

Third, the transfer market, where reports with no source get printed as news.

Here I must talk about something my own trade helps create: deals built entirely from fiction.

Transfers run on a simple cycle. There is a player performing well. There is an agent wanting to raise a contract's value. There is a journalist needing copy. These three meet in one short line of news, and three days later that line becomes "negotiations are progressing well". A week later it becomes "the two sides have agreed personal terms". A week after that it becomes a television debate about whether that player suits the tactical system.

That third-floor debate is an analytical report generated from an input of zero. Nobody goes back to check whether the original line had a source, because if everybody has already repeated it, it must be true.

What I always tell colleagues in France: the transfers of modern football are largely not mathematics, they are psychology applied to a very thin layer of data.

The Saudi Pro League is the clearest example. From January 2026, when Cristiano Ronaldo joined Al-Nassr on a deal international media valued at close to 200 million euros per year including commercial rights, a whole current of stars flowed there. No audience is ever born from a payroll. What that league bought was not the development of Arab football but tourism ambassadors with a talent for playing, placed on covers and airline advertisements. A football nation needs a youth system, a league system, a coaching system. None of those are purchased with a transfer fee.

The country I was born in understands this better than anyone. In our national leagues, every time money arrives to bring a former foreign international in to set the stadium alight, people promise a turning point for the game. Three years later they have a photograph, a terminated contract, and a queue of young players still without a proper training pitch.

Fourth, the mythologising of miracles, or how a structural conclusion gets read as a fairy tale.

This is the part where I allow myself the least tenderness, because it is the standing law of football.

Euro 2026, Greece won. The media called it a miracle of myth. I sat and rewatched the three knockout matches: 1-0 against France, 1-0 against the Czech Republic, 1-0 against Portugal in the final. Three matches, three goals scored, not one conceded. That is not a miracle. That is a defensive organisation drilled to an extreme, plus a tournament format that rewards teams who play with few variables. Otto Rehhagel was not praying. He was calculating.

Leicester City in 2026-16, at odds of 5000 to 1, finished on 81 points and lost only three matches all season. That fairy tale has a forgotten half: that season Chelsea finished 10th, Liverpool 8th, Manchester United 5th, Manchester City 4th. A power vacuum opened at the top of the table and exactly one team was disciplined enough to step into it. Leicester were great, but that greatness is measured by the quality of the vacuum they met, not by heaven-sent will.

People call me a contrarian. I call them the crowd.

WHERE I MIGHT BE WRONG

If I stopped here, I would have become exactly what I criticise: a man producing conclusions from a thin input.

I might be wrong on three points.

First, the anti-data posture very easily turns into laziness dressed up in vocabulary. Saying I trust my eyes sounds heroic until someone asks what those eyes saw in the 78th minute of a match I only watched in highlights. Data sees what the human eye cannot: workload, number of accelerations, recovery curves, re-injury probability. A club that ignores those numbers is a club gambling with the health of its most expensive assets.

Second, the contrarian brand is a cage. After a few years, dissent becomes a reflex, and a reflex is not thought. When the whole world speaks in unison, my ears start ringing with the echo of error. But sometimes the whole world speaks in unison because it is right.

Third and heaviest, my own 2026 lesson. I publicly retracted my position on my blog after the Ruhr derby, and part of my readership left me for it. I accept that. Because the only thing worse than a man who is always contrarian is a man who is always contrarian even when he has seen the data.

A stadium with no spectators is just a car park painted the colour of grass. I wrote that line. I believed it. Then I sat and watched a derby in that car park and saw players still playing as though there were a war in the stands. A fine sentence can still be an empty conclusion.

A THOUGHT TO CARRY FORWARD

Not long ago I received a forty-page post-match analytical report. Every metric was present. Every model had run. But when I reached the tactical conclusion, I found the author describing a match I had watched live, and describing its tempo completely wrongly. The report looked full. In substance it was talking about a different match.

Here is a verifiable prediction for the next five years: a European club will publish a post-match analytical report consisting of a single line — insufficient data to conclude. And that report will be the most honest document of its season.

As for me, I will grade myself by the number of readers who change their minds, not by the number of shares.

If tonight you read a nine-dimension analysis of a match in which all nine dimensions say "insufficient information", would you dare publish it under your own name?