Don't Read "N/A" as "No Problem": The Empty-Data Disease of Vietnamese Football

I opened the transfer dossier of a V.League club to check it. The spreadsheet was beautiful. Every column was there: transfer fee, contract length, wages, release clause, agent fee. But every single cell, from top to bottom, read "N/A". A table that was perfect in form and empty in content.

What made me stop was not the empty table. It was the faces of the people sitting next to me in that meeting. No one found anything odd about it. One of them even said: "No figure means no problem, relax." I looked at him, then looked back at the table, and realised an entire football culture was misreading one of the most important symbols in the world of data: "N/A" — no information.

In thirty-three years of watching this industry, from my first broadcast days to now, I learned one thing: when the numbers speak, I listen; when the crowd shouts, I count again from scratch. But this time what I had to count was zero — and zero was being inflated into a shield of safety.

Vietnamese football analysis has a deep-rooted habit: we believe what is presented, and we rarely check whether anything was actually presented at all. A report with all its columns and rows, stamped and taken to a press conference — and we automatically treat it as proof of transparency. But transparency of form never equals transparency of content.

In data science there is a mistake more serious than fabricating figures: presenting an empty dataset and letting the reader assume that "no problem was found". An empty spreadsheet, a report with no data, a file missing its key information — none of them says everything is fine. They say only one thing: nobody has investigated yet. And in Vietnamese football, we make this mistake every day.

In the transfer window it shows up as clubs that refuse to disclose fees and are then praised as "discreet and professional". At federation level it is a financial report that shows only total income and no detail, then gets read as "financially healthy". In medical matters it is a player declared "no problem at all" while no test results are produced to verify it. The surface is always clean. The inside is always empty.

The core point is this: empty data is not evidence of innocence — it is merely the absence of evidence, and in football those two things lead to opposite decisions. When a club publishes a transfer summary in which the "additional fees" column reads "N/A", that does not mean there are no additional fees. It means the club has chosen not to disclose them. A small difference on paper, an enormous one at the negotiating table.

I have made exactly the mistake I am describing. In 2026, when I reconstructed Paulinho's 19-goal record in the Chinese Super League, I found something I believed at the time was cast-iron proof: 12 of those 19 goals came against bottom-table teams. I published the conclusion and was attacked ferociously by the online community. But what I learned afterwards was not that I had been right — though two years later, when Paulinho moved to Spain and scored only 3 goals, the numbers took my side. The real lesson was this: if I had not had those 12 figures, I would have had nothing at all. An analysis with no data behind it is not a safe analysis. It is an analysis that has not been done.

I also remember the 2026 World Cup. While the world praised Luka Modric as the conductor who carried Croatia to the final, I sat down and counted again. His misplaced-pass rate in the attacking third was 38% — the highest among the tournament's top ten midfielders. He spent most of his time dropping deep to receive the ball from centre-backs. Croatia reached the final, but Modric produced no decisive contribution in extra time. I am not saying Modric played badly. I am saying the "conductor" story was written with emotion, while the "38% misplacement" story was written with data. Only one of those two stories can be verified.

The lesson from both cases applies directly to Vietnamese football today. Every time a club boasts it has "sorted out" a complicated transfer without giving a single figure for the fee, the wages, or the release clause, we are looking at an "N/A" cell disguised as a tick mark. Every time the federation announces that V.League has "met its licensing criteria" without publishing the scoring criteria, we are reading silence as approval.

This is the truly frightening part. An empty dataset, once it reaches an unsophisticated reader, gets compressed into a positive conclusion. That is how a data error becomes a wrong decision — an investment, a contract, a national-team call-up. A data gap is always filled by assumption, and in football assumption is always sweeter than the truth. That is why "N/A" is the most dangerous symbol in any report: it invites the reader to write in the missing parts themselves.

There is a paradox I have observed across several recent transfer windows. The more money flows into Vietnamese football, the fewer numbers get published. That sounds absurd, but it is perfectly logical: as the value of a contract rises, so does the incentive to hide its structure. A transfer worth a few billion dong does not need to be hidden. A transfer worth tens of billions means every "N/A" cell has a price. The gap is no longer administrative laziness — it becomes a negotiating instrument.

I have watched football since the days the pitch still smelled of earth, not of money. Back then, a coach saying "this kid is fine" was enough, because the whole village knew each other. But we have entered the transfer era, where every player is an asset and every contract is a financial transaction. In that world, personal trust is no longer data. And in that world, an empty table is no longer a guarantee — it is an information debt left unpaid.

What we need is a credibility filter. Not a filter to catch liars, but a filter to detect people who say nothing. Three simple questions. First: where does this figure come from, and is it verifiable? Second: if that figure is missing, what else do we actually know? Third: who is rich enough not to need to disclose it? Any data report that cannot answer all three questions should not be read as a conclusion — it should be read as a question.

And this is where I want to pause to address a very common belief in Vietnam. Many people assume that when an organisation refuses to disclose information, it is because they want to keep a secret — a sign of cunning. I do not believe that naive reading. Silence in football is rarely strategy; it is usually emptiness that has not yet been covered up. We have grown so used to respecting things that say nothing that we forget there is a huge distance between "having nothing to say" and "not wanting to say anything".

There is a counter-argument I must raise myself, because an analysis that does not expose its own weak points is just propaganda typed out with ten fingers. The counter-argument is this: cold data does not tell the whole story. An empty table sometimes genuinely reflects a healthy reality — some small V.League clubs disclose no detail because they have nothing worth disclosing, and forcing them to expose every minor expense may be an unfair imposition on collectives living on limited resources.

I accept that. Data only tells part of the story, and there are honest gaps, not guilty ones. But distinguish two things: a gap that is admitted — "we do not have this data" — and a gap disguised as a conclusion — "everything is fine". What I criticise is not the lack of data. What I criticise is reading the lack of data as a positive result and then acting on it.

A second point, to be fair: there are times when an analyst's own home-made model is as empty as the data it criticises. I have built player-valuation models on the basis of just a few matches, then presented them as if they had been validated across multiple seasons. That too is a disguised "N/A". If I demand transparency from others, I must run my own model over at least two past seasons before publishing — and disclose every time it was wrong. A critic who does not verify himself is just someone who shouts louder.

What I want to leave behind is not an accusation. It is a very concrete proposal: treat every "N/A" cell in Vietnamese football as a red flag, not a green tick. In the coming transfer window, when a table full of columns and empty of content is placed in front of you, count again from scratch. The crowd has the right to be deluded, but you have the right to wake up.

And I will say it in advance: keep reading an empty report as safety, and sooner or later it will collapse. A sports bubble does not burst with a bang; it deflates with a sigh.