When the Data Falls Silent: The Courage to Say 'I Don't Know' in Football Writing

On the night of July 6, 2026, in Nizhny Novgorod, I sat in the commentary box for the quarter-final between France and Uruguay. In the 61st minute, Antoine Griezmann received the ball outside the box, looked up, and unleashed a long-range strike that left Fernando Muslera grasping at air. The score became 2-0, and the door to the semi-finals swung open for the blue shirts. But the image director chose to cut to someone who had not scored.

The camera dipped to the turf. Diego Godin — captain of a Uruguay generation that had grown up and grown old together over twelve years — sat on the ground, both hands braced on the pitch, tears running in streaks under the floodlights. In my earpiece, the crowd split into two halves: one cheering, one falling silent. I leaned into the microphone and said a line I remember more clearly than the scoreline: "Godin's tears are heavier than the ball, because they carry twelve years of waiting from a whole generation of Uruguayans."

After the match, a friend who works as a television critic texted me: "You're too sentimental, a bit cheesy." I stayed alone in the box as the lights dimmed, and what troubled me was not the criticism. What troubled me was a hard-to-name feeling: I had said something true about a human being, but I had said almost nothing about what the match actually ran on — France's pressing on the left channel, the space behind Uruguay's midfield, the conversion rate, the number of long balls broken up. I had real emotion, and I was short on real data.

That was the beginning of a worry that has followed me ever since: when is a football writer allowed to stay silent?

Context: The poet on the penalty spot

In July 2026, I was a freelance writer for a newly founded football site. I wrote a match report on Vietnam's U23 team beating South Korea's U23 side 2-1 in the AFC U23 qualifiers. The piece contained a sentence that was later cited more often than the match itself: "Cong Phuong's feet were like the brushstrokes of a wandering painter, carrying the ball past two defenders in a dance of childhood memory."

The article caused a wave. Half the readers praised it; half condemned it. The memorable part was the criticism: they said I had not analysed the tactics, had not offered a single number, had not explained why Vietnam won rather than getting lucky. A veteran editor called me "a poet on the penalty spot" — a jab both sharp and fair, so sharp that I have used it as my own name for years.

Instead of defending my position, I organised a three-hour online forum and invited both those who praised and those who criticised. And I was surprised: many fans did not remember the score, did not remember who assisted, but remembered exactly the moment Cong Phuong drew a circle around the ball before cutting left. They remembered the moment, not the result.

That forum taught me two contradictory things. First, the memory of a viewer runs on images and emotion, not on spreadsheets. Second, and this was the uncomfortable part: emotion is only trustworthy when it grows from a solid foundation of fact. If I say Cong Phuong was brilliant without being able to say why, I add nothing for the reader — I am simply selling my own feelings.

From then on, I set myself a rule: every lyrical passage must be accompanied by a verifiable detail. A line of poetry must be repaid with a fact. No exceptions.

An age where everyone has an opinion

Over the past decade, the way Vietnamese people watch and talk about football has changed beyond recognition. In the past, to offer a view on a match you had to wait for the morning paper or the evening television bulletin. Opinions passed through a filter: the editor, the sports desk, the editor-in-chief. That filter had many flaws — it was slow, conservative, and sometimes hid the truth — but it had one great virtue: it filtered out statements with no basis.

Today it is the reverse. Everyone has a phone, an account, and an opinion ready to burst out within three seconds of the final whistle. In those three seconds, no one has time to check the data. And that is precisely the problem.

I call this phenomenon the intoxication of speech: the need to have an opinion on everything, faster than the speed at which a person can understand anything. This intoxication produces three very uncomfortable consequences.

First, it turns confidence into cheap currency. The loudest, fastest, most decisive speaker is often taken to be the most knowledgeable. But in football, the most knowledgeable person is often the slowest to speak, because that person is waiting for the data to arrive.

Second, it makes "I don't know" an embarrassing confession. No one wants to stand in a crowd of argument and say: "I don't have enough information to conclude." That sounds like "I have nothing to say", and on a platform that lives on traffic, having nothing to say means disappearing.

Third, and this is the heaviest consequence, the intoxication of speech makes false statements too quickly forgotten. When everyone speaks, and everyone speaks in real time, no one is accountable for going back to check whether they were right. Get it wrong once, and three days later there is another match to forget it by.

What data can say, and what it cannot

Let me be clear before going further, because I do not want to be understood as someone who is against data. Quite the opposite. I am someone who spent years re-learning how to read numbers, after the shock called "the poet on the penalty spot".

Data in football — from basic metrics such as possession, shots and pass accuracy to more complex ones such as expected goals (xG), passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA), or player market values on platforms such as Transfermarkt — is an indispensable weapon. It gives me something I did not have before: the ability to distinguish between what looks right and what is actually right.

Take the simplest and most familiar example for Vietnamese readers: a team wins 1-0 but is outshot 20 to 3. Looking only at the score, we say that team "knows how to win". Looking at the data, we know that team won on a small probability, and will pay for it next match if it does not correct course. The scoreline is a photograph. Data is a film. A serious football writer must watch the film, not merely glance at the photograph.

But here I must put the question back to myself. If data is so powerful, why does it still so often fail to explain the moments people remember most?

Why can a metric like xG — calculated from thousands of past shots — not predict Zidane's volley in 2026? Why does no spreadsheet tell me why Godin wept? Why can no algorithm on earth measure the feeling of a stand when Cong Phuong cuts inside, a feeling tens of thousands remember vividly though no one recorded a number for it?

The answer lies here: data measures frequency, but it does not measure meaning. Data answers the question "what usually happens", while human beings live by the question "what matters to me". Those two questions are close but never identical. And the craft of football writing sits precisely in the gap between them.

A weak writer sits at one of the two extremes. One extreme is the purely emotional writer, eloquent with many metaphors, but with nothing for the truth to cling to — and that was once me. The other extreme is the purely statistical writer, offering three tables and two charts before concluding, but with not a single character, not a single moment that moves the reader — that is a type I have met many times, and I must admit reading them is no less tiring.

A writer of real calibre stands in the middle, and more importantly, knows where they stand in every paragraph. When to use numbers. When to let a character speak. When to stay silent, because the honest answer is "I don't know".

When the analysis file is empty

There is one professional experience I want to share, because it taught me a bigger lesson than any shock on the pitch.

Once, I received a dossier meant to support deep analysis of a match. Its structure was beautiful: nine dimensions, from tactical and technical analysis to finance, results, league landscape, rules and governance, the dressing room, risk, media narrative and the industry value chain. Each dimension had a proper table, comparison rows, credibility columns.

But when I opened it, every cell read the same: "insufficient information to assess". No team name. No player name. Not a single number. Not a single event. A dossier thousands of words long, beautiful in form, empty in content.

My first reaction was annoyance. My second was laughter. My third was a chill, because I suddenly realised: that dossier was a mirror. In my profession, how many articles are also beautiful in form and empty in content? How many pieces have I written that open with a lovely line of poetry and gradually drift toward a conclusion I myself lack the evidence to believe?

What was notable was that the dossier did one very difficult thing correctly. It made clear that the fate of each sub-dimension depended on whether the source dimension had data. When the source has no data, every downstream analysis is blocked. The author did not invent a team to fill the blank cell. The author did not say "perhaps this is a strong team" just to have something to say. The author chose to tell the truth: this cannot be analysed, because there is nothing to analyse.

And that, my friends, is one of the hardest sentences to say in our profession.

I have seen editors pressured to produce copy, and that pressure turns into something more dangerous than laziness: the pressure to fabricate. Not fabrication in the sense of inventing an event that never happened, but in a far subtler way — fabricating by stretching a thin fact into a thick conclusion. Knowing a player is injured, concluding the whole team will play badly. Knowing a coach is criticised, concluding the dressing room is broken. Those inferences sound plausible, and they are the most common form of lying in sports writing.

The blind spot of collective memory

At this point I want to turn in another direction, one I consider more important. We often discuss fabricated data. But there is something far subtler, and it does not come from the writer — it comes from our collective memory.

The collective memory of football fans is systematically distorted. We remember heavy wins and forget narrow ones. We remember goalscorers and forget those who made the runs. We remember a beautiful passage and forget the entire game state that built it. This is natural, not sinful. But a football writer has a special duty: to stand within that collective memory and say that memory may not be right.

Let me take an example everyone has encountered. Cup upsets — a weak team eliminating a strong one — are usually called "miracles". But when I rewatch the footage of such matches, most contain nothing miraculous. They are the inevitable result of two very concrete things: a strong team rotating its squad because of a congested calendar, playing with the mindset that it does not need to win; and a weak team accepting a high press, accepting risk, and being lucky enough to convert one or two chances.

When we call that a miracle, we both erase the credit of the weak team — who calculated and endured — and hand the strong team an excuse to avoid looking at its own mistakes. The word "miracle" sounds poetic, but it is a truth bent out of shape.

This is where I contradict myself, and I want to be honest about it. I am someone who believes football lives on humanity before it lives on goals. I am someone who wrote that Godin's tears are heavier than the ball. But if I let that humanity overpower the truth, I turn humanity into a sweet lie. And a sweet lie is still a lie.

A weak team beating a strong one is a beautiful story. But a beautiful story holds only when it stands on the truth that the strong team underestimated the opponent, and the weak team dared. Remove that truth, and the story collapses.

The trap of a writer who wants to lift the weak

There is one trap that I — and I believe many football writers in Vietnam — fall into more often than we admit. It is the trap of kindness.

My starting point in this profession was a desire to lift those who are forgotten: substitutes, a goalkeeper who sat on the bench all season, fans in the last row, reporters in the provinces nobody reads. I believe in that, and I still believe. But that belief has a flip side I have had to face: when you want too much to lift someone, you very easily turn them into a saint.

And a saint is not a human being. A saint has no mistakes, no limits, no pettiness, no fear. When I paint a substitute as a hero unjustly abandoned, I strip him of the most precious thing: the right to be an ordinary person, the right to play badly, the right to be wrong.

I remember a female colleague of mine — who later co-hosted a long-form series with me — being mocked harshly simply because she was not deeply versed in tactics. She had a perspective I lacked: she listened to fans. She spent time sitting with people who had suffered loss through football, people who had been bereaved, people who had missed their own weddings for a match. Together we created a segment called "The Pitch and Its Sorrows", with guests drawn from those very fans.

But in that segment, we had to set a strict principle: never turn those fans into victims recounting their suffering. They are not victims. They are people who made choices. If we remove their choices, we turn them into decoration for our own emotions. That would be a betrayal of what I pursue.

When the pitch no longer roars

When the pandemic came, stadiums closed. Football in Vietnam and around the world played into silence. I remember posting a series I called "Diary of an Empty Pitch" — one entry a day, each a small story.

At first I did it only to keep myself from falling silent. But then I noticed something strange: that was the period in which I wrote most truthfully in years. Because when the roar disappears, you have nothing to lean on but what you can verify. No stand to deceive me. No atmosphere to amplify my words. I was left only with what was real.

There is a line of mine I still quote when recalling that period: "In the diary of an empty pitch, every match without spectators is a poem not yet set to music." But I must honestly add one more clause. Every such unset poem is beautiful only when it stands on what actually happened. I once wrote a passage about a closed-door match and nearly gave it an outsized meaning. I stopped. I asked myself: what evidence do I have to say that match mattered? The answer was none. I deleted the passage.

The counter-intuitive angle: knowledge lies in knowing when to stop

Now is the moment to reach what this whole piece is trying to say.

There is a widespread belief in football media, and perhaps in society at large: that a knowledgeable person is one who has an opinion on everything. That silence is a sign of ignorance. That if you do not speak, someone else will speak for you, and you will lose your place.

I think the opposite is true.

The line between a good writer and a weak writer is not drawn by how many things they know, but by how accurately they admit what they do not know.

Imagine two writers facing the same empty dossier. The first remembers he needs a piece, so he fills the dossier with speculation: this team is weak, that team is strong, this player has fallen out with the coach, and so on. His article reads smoothly, and most of its content is fabrication. The second reads the dossier, recognises there is no data, and writes a short report stating that there is not yet enough basis to assess. The second writer's report is dry, shared by no one, commented on by no one. The second writer loses traffic. But the second writer keeps the truth.

In the short term, the first wins. In the long term, the second is the one still trusted ten years later.

And here I must question myself again, because I am a person who lives on emotion. Is the stance of "no conclusion without sufficient data" something too cold, too technocratic, too far from the poetry I claim? I used to fear so. I feared that if I were strict with data, I would lose my voice, lose what makes me different.

But I have come to realise this: discipline with data does not destroy poetry. It makes poetry trustworthy. A good metaphor has value only when it accurately describes a fact. If I compare a player's movement to a brushstroke, then the first thing I must do is be certain that player actually made that movement, in that match, at that minute. When the foundation is firm, the poem stands forever. When the foundation wobbles, the poem collapses along with the truth.

There is another temptation I want to name, because it is the most dangerous kind for a writer of good will. It is the temptation to stand outside the game as an indifferent bystander. The outsider says: "I only analyse data, I take no side, I am not responsible for the reader's emotions." It sounds objective, even noble. But in truth it is an evasion. I do not believe in emotionless neutrality. I have chosen to be a participant. I write from inside the wound, from inside the stand, from inside a dressing room I have never entered but try to understand.

But being a participant does not mean being allowed to fabricate. On the contrary, precisely because I am inside, I must be stricter with myself.

Criticism, not cowardly evasion

In six years of work, I have had to learn a distinction I often confused before: the distinction between destructive criticism and constructive criticism.

When I write about a coach, there are two ways to say he is wrong. The first: "He is conservative, finished." This sounds strong, spreads easily, and has nothing to verify. The second: "He has kept the same formation while the midfield has lost its best off-ball runner; that is why chances created have fallen over the last three matches." This is drier, but it is only correct if I have actually watched those three matches and actually counted.

The first is destructive. It helps no one understand anything more. It merely gives the reader three seconds of satisfaction. The second is constructive. It gives the reader a tool to observe the next match for themselves.

I used to think softness was evasion. I used to think that to be constructive one had to be gentle. But I have come to understand: gentleness is not construction, and harshness is not destruction. The line lies in whether the article hands the reader a tool. If it does, however severe it is, it remains constructive. If it does not, however gentle, it is merely an evasion dressed in courtesy.

And this is why I chose this profession after all these years, in an age when anyone can speak. Not to speak first. But to speak correctly.

Heartbeat and numbers

In one interview I said a line many people later repeated: "Football is not read through the scoreline, but through the heartbeat of hearts in the stand." I still stand by that, but I want to add a clause I learned later.

The heartbeat of hearts in the stand can also be deceived. When tens of thousands cheer together, it is very hard for one person among them to say: "Wait — we are cheering for something that never happened." But that is precisely the writer's job. The writer must be the only person in the stand who dares to keep a cold space in the chest, enough to recall exactly what just happened, while tens of thousands of others are shouting for a collective feeling that may be wrong.

This does not contradict poetry. On the contrary, it is the condition for poetry to endure. If I write about a moment I am not sure happened, then my poem is not poetry. It is a dream, and everyone knows a dream is not real.

My colleagues — those who have followed me over the years — understand this. We have a joke among us: "Poetry may fly, but the kite string must be tied to a real tree." Our real tree is what the camera recorded, what the scoreboard displayed, what the players said in the press room, what the head-to-head record preserved.

VuaBong, VangBong and the infrastructure of truth

In recent years, I have begun to notice a trend in how the football industry is reorganising itself, and I think it is directly relevant to the story I am telling.

More and more football data platforms are emerging, and they serve not only fans. They serve the writers themselves, the analysts, the journalists, and organisations that need to make evidence-based decisions — clubs in their scouting work, sponsors choosing whom to partner with, federations assessing performance.

A good data system — for example an index measuring squad depth to judge whether a club has enough players to compete on three fronts — does not replace the writer. It gives the writer leverage. It makes the sentence "I do not have enough data to conclude" verifiable, because it allows the writer to point precisely to where the data is missing.

I imagine the future of football writing in Vietnam will have three layers. The first is the news layer — fast, short, serving immediate demand. The second is the analysis layer — slower, deeper, grounded in sourced data. The third is the memory layer — where human stories are preserved and become the community's heritage.

These three layers do not replace one another. A layer without the other two will warp. News without analysis becomes rumour. Analysis without memory becomes a spreadsheet. Memory without news becomes unfounded nostalgia.

And in all three layers, one thing must always be present: an infrastructure of truth. A place where every piece of information can be traced to its source, every number carries its unit, every claim carries a responsibility.

The price of telling the truth on a platform that lives on traffic

I must speak about the price, because if I speak only of what is right and ignore the cost, I am deceiving young readers considering this profession.

The first cost is loneliness. When you are the only person in a group chat who does not offer an opinion right after the whistle, you look like someone without a view. When you say "let me check the data first", you are seen as slow. Truth is an uncomfortable friend, and truth often costs you easy agreement.

The second cost is traffic. A piece saying "not enough basis to assess" will not spread. A piece saying "here are three tactical reasons this team lost, with three specific metrics" can spread, but will spread more slowly than a piece saying "anyone can see this is wrong". In an environment that lives on views, the honest writer is always at a disadvantage.

The third cost, and I think the heaviest, is self-doubt. I have a perfectionist, self-questioning streak. I rewrite a paragraph ten times, change word by word, until I no longer know whether it is still right or has warped. At times I am paralysed by uncertainty over whether my data is sufficient. I have had to learn to set a timer, to write the first draft in one sitting so the emotion stays intact, and only then to edit with reason. I have had to learn to accept that a perfect article is one that never gets published.

And this is what I want to say to myself more than to anyone else: perfectionist self-questioning is not a virtue. It is a fear dressed as a virtue. It makes a writer afraid of being wrong, and a writer afraid of being wrong never says anything useful.

How a good platform saves a writer

I hold a slightly naive belief, but I keep it. The belief is this: a good writer needs a good platform, and a good platform also needs a good writer.

A good platform is one that lets a writer say "I don't know" without being punished. It lets a writer publish a short, dry, unglamorous report without being seen as wasting space. It puts truth above traffic.

I once witnessed an irony. A publication trialled a data section, hired someone very rigorous, verified every figure, each piece taking three days. Readership was far lower than emotional pieces. The publication closed the section after two months. The person who ran it lost her job. And three years later I met her again on a deep-analysis programme, where precisely the verification habit she learned during those two closed months had made her irreplaceable.

Truth has a strange property. It does not win immediately. It wins late. But when it wins, it wins permanently.

A poetry fundraiser night and a lesson about trust

I must tell one more story, because it is an important piece of this picture.

There was a night when I and a group organised a poetry reading to raise funds for teaching children in difficult regions. That night, I stood before a small auditorium and read poetry about football. Not everyone in the audience watched football. But by the end, the amount raised far exceeded what I had dared to imagine.

What I learned was not about the money. What I learned was this: donating is giving trust, not giving money. People give you money not because you speak well, but because they believe you will use it rightly. And that trust cannot be bought with traffic. It can only be built with truth.

That line applies to football writing almost unchanged. Readers give you their time, and they do so because they believe you will speak correctly. Every time you fabricate a detail, every time you exaggerate a story, you are spending that trust. And trust is easy to spend, hard to build.

Over six years, I have spent a portion of that trust. I once described Cong Phuong with an overblown metaphor, and I know the line was not factually wrong, but it promised more than the facts could repay. Later, I learned to police myself: if I write a line that makes a promise, I must be sure the piece contains a place that answers it.

World Cup 2026 and loyalty

Here I want to return to World Cup 2026 — a tournament tied to me by a memory I can state honestly.

World Cup 2026 gave me no trophy, and also no complete theory of elite football. It gave me a lesson about loyalty. After the France-Uruguay match, when Godin wept, I understood that what has kept me following football for twenty-five years is not beautiful tactical models, but human beings who choose to stay with something longer than themselves.

But that lesson holds only when I accept that France won because France played better that day, because France controlled the game, because Uruguay lost its capacity to create. Godin's loyalty was real. And France's victory was also real. A writer of real calibre must hold both truths at once, without trading one for the other.

I have a line I wrote for myself and still repeat: "World Cup 2026 did not give me a trophy, but it gave me a poem about loyalty." I keep that line, because it is true to me. But I also remind myself: that poem deserves keeping only if I am honest about the match that produced it.

About those left behind by the camera

Throughout my career, I have always chosen to tell the stories of those with no place in the evening sports bulletin.

I tell of the substitute who sat out the whole season, who still warmed up seriously until the 90th minute each match though he knew he would not come on, because he believed doing so was a way to respect the team. I tell of the fan in the last row — the one the camera never reaches — who skipped a shift of extra work to be there. I tell of the goalkeeper who was a backup for twelve years, whose entire career is remembered through a single match.

But when I tell of them, I must keep a discipline. I must not turn them into saints. That substitute is not a saint. He may have envied his teammates. He may have wanted to leave many times. He may have been wrong in the few rare matches he entered. Those things make him real. And only when real is he worth telling.

The story of the forgotten carries a trap: it easily becomes a tale of grievance. And grievance is a form of lying, because it turns people from subjects into objects. I do not write about the forgotten so that they weep. I write about them as people who chose, who accepted, and who stayed.

That is how I repay the pitch that raised me.

What I want to say to young writers

If tomorrow a twenty-two-year-old, freshly graduated, having just opened an account to write about football, asks me for one piece of advice, I will say this.

You will be praised when you speak decisively. You will be noticed when you speak forcefully. You will be shared when you take a clear side. Those rewards are real, and you will be tempted.

But remember this: every time you conclude without data, you spend a little of the reader's trust. You may not spend it all in a day, perhaps not in a year. But you spend it. And when trust runs out, you have a big account, many followers, and no one who believes you.

Learn to say "I don't know" when you truly do not know. Learn to say "I need to check the data" when you need to check the data. Learn to write a short piece in which you state precisely what you know, the limits of what you know, and the source of what you know.

And learn to feel that this is not a failure. It is an act of courage.

Ending: a prayer without a bell

I do not want to end this piece with a summary, because a summary is the thing I find too easy.

I want to leave behind an open thought, one I have not finished working out.

In a football world increasingly pressed to be fast, to have opinions, to take sides, I ask myself: are we losing the ability to sit still? Will the next generation of football writers still know the feeling of reading an empty dossier and choosing not to fill it? Will "insufficient information to assess" still be a sentence that can be spoken without being dismissed as useless?

I do not know the answer. And this time, I do not pretend to know.

But one thing I know for certain. When the pitch no longer roars, we can finally hear football sigh. And that sigh — even though it generates no traffic, no argument, no fame — remains the only thing I can honestly offer my readers.

Football is not read through the scoreline, but through the heartbeat of hearts in the stand. But the heartbeat is only trustworthy when we take the trouble to listen to the monitor before listening to the heart. That is my job. That is our job. And that is why, even after twenty-five years, every morning I still sit down, reread the data, and ask myself one question before writing: what do I actually know today?

That question has no bell. It does not ring when I reach a milestone. It rings only when I am about to lie. And each time it does, I remember an evening in Nizhny Novgorod, a centre-back weeping under the floodlights, and a friend texting me: "You're too sentimental."

He was half right. The other half, I am trying to write correctly, every day, with a poem tied to a real tree.