The Empty Column on the Spreadsheet: Finding the Human Voice in the Sound of Football

The Empty Column on the Spreadsheet: Finding the Human Voice in the Sound of Football

People score with their feet, but I write with my scars. I first put that sentence on a scrap of paper one night in 2026, after leaving the press conference of the Becamex Binh Duong versus Hoang Anh Gia Lai match. But that is a story for later. First, I want to tell you about an afternoon last June, when I sat in front of an empty spreadsheet.

The person who sent me the file was a young colleague, born in the age of the internet, raised alongside the smartphone. He typed into the chat box: "Uncle, I've compiled everything, xG, passes, possession, heat maps, run density." I clicked it open. And I sat still for a very long time. The numbers were there, neatly arranged, complete, without a single wrong cell. But they told me nothing at all. I looked out the window, where the afternoon light fell on a school football pitch nearby. Some children were playing barefoot. None of them knew what xG was. But their laughter rang out, and within it was something no spreadsheet could ever hold.

I realized I had just touched a question far larger than a single match. It was a question about what we are counting, and what we are leaving behind.

The Context of a Man Who Has Stood Too Long on the Touchline

I began working in sports journalism in 2026, from local radio stations. Back then there were no screens, no data, only a microphone, a notebook, and a pen. I learned the trade by sitting in the stands, recording every phase with my own symbols, counting with my eyes. We called it "reading the match." No one could measure it, but everyone knew what they were seeing.

In 2026, I was assigned to cover the Olympics and major tournaments. To date, I have been through eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups, and many seasons of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. People often ask me: having traveled so much, what remains? Honestly, what remains is not the scoreline. What remains is the look in a player's eyes as he bows his head in the tunnel, the sigh of the stands when the referee blows his whistle, the strange silence of a press conference after an unexpected defeat.

Over those thirty-eight years, I have witnessed a quiet but total revolution: football became a data industry. Companies specializing in data collection sprang up like mushrooms. Clubs hired entire analysis departments. Fans open their phones and see every statistic of the match in progress. I do not deny any of it. I only ask one question: when everything can be measured, what cannot be measured becomes invisible. And in football, sometimes the invisible is everything.

A Nineteen-Year-Old Boy and the Sentence That Changed My Career

I want to retell the story of 2026, because it is one of the two backbones of this piece. I was forty-five, working as a reporter for a local sports outlet. The Becamex Binh Duong versus Hoang Anh Gia Lai match in the V.League took place at Go Dau Stadium, on an evening when the Binh Duong heat turned the stands into a furnace.

That match, seen through the eyes of data, was quite ordinary. An unremarkable game: two teams trading blows, the ball mostly in midfield, few clear chances. But around the sixty-something minute, the Binh Duong coach sent on a young player. His name was Nguyen Xuan Tung, just nineteen, wearing number 16, from an industrial district where his parents worked as laborers in export-processing zones.

He came on and played like a man with nothing to lose. Then, in the third minute of stoppage time, the ball reached his feet inside the box. He shot. The ball hit the net. Binh Duong won one-nil. Go Dau Stadium erupted. I stood there, heart pounding like a drum, and I remember that in that moment I was not thinking about tactics. I was thinking about a child who grew up among rented rooms, where his parents worked the night shift, and how this goal was like a promise to that small rented room itself.

After the match, in the press conference, he stood before the microphone, stammering, face flushed. He said a sentence I still remember word for word: "I only heard my own heart beating, and then the ball found my feet." No statistic on earth can capture that sentence.

That night I went home and wrote a fifteen-hundred-word piece. Not a single statistics column. Not a single chart. I wrote about a child, about the rented room, about the sound of a heartbeat before the ball hit the net. Two days later, I received a phone call. On the other end was the boy himself. He said: "Uncle, I read it and I saw myself in it."

From that night on, I dropped the habit of opening with the scoreline. I began every piece with an emotional detail, with a person, not with a match. That is why I say: people score with their feet, but I write with my scars.

The Night in Kazan, When the German Machine Broke Down

The second backbone of this piece is a June night, the twenty-seventh, 2026, in the city of Kazan, Russia. I was forty-six, sent abroad for the first time as a field reporter for a local television channel. That night, in the stands, I witnessed the German national team, the reigning World Cup champions, lose nil-two to South Korea and be eliminated in the group stage.

I sat there, and what stunned me was not the score. What stunned me was how that machine broke. Germany controlled seventy-four percent of possession. They completed hundreds more passes than their opponent. On the spreadsheet, they won every metric. But on the grass, they stood still. I saw it with my own eyes: their strides seemed to owe time an explanation, while the Korean players ran as if repaying a debt of honor.

The Germans had lost before the match began, because they had forgotten fear. They entered the game as a machine, not as people. When the machine met a team playing with fear and pride, the machine broke. The German machine broke down, and I saw a generation cry without a sound.

When the referee blew the final whistle, I turned to look at the German bench. The seats were empty. That is the image I wrote into my piece "The Rusting Machine" - blaming no one, only describing a dynasty stepping off the ladder of history. The Koreans burst into tears on the pitch. The Germans walked quietly into the tunnel. The ball rolled on the grass, but really it rolled through the fate of people.

When Everything Can Be Measured

I tell these two stories because they point in the same direction. In Binh Duong, I met a nineteen-year-old boy whose achievement was not in the numbers on the board. In Kazan, I witnessed a team that won every number but lost a match. Both tell me this: modern football is trading something precious for accuracy.

It is the most beautiful and painful paradox of this sport. We have more data than any generation before us, but we are not sure we understand football any better. Because understanding a match, to me, is not knowing which team passed more. Understanding a match is knowing why a twenty-five-year-old plays like an old man, and a thirty-five-year-old plays like a child set free.

At fifty-four, I understand that the stadium floodlights illuminate an entire life. They light not only the ball, but the burning lungs, the family waiting back home, the mortgage, the contract about to expire. No camera, no software captures those things. But they are present in every stride.

Finding the Human Voice in the Sound of Football

I have a sentence I often use when talking to journalism students, especially those who grew up with technology: find the human voice in the sound of football. It sounds poetic, but for me it is a very concrete method of working. When you arrive at the stadium, the sound of the ball hits your ears first. The ball striking the crossbar. Boots grinding the grass. The stands shattering like glass. But beneath those chaotic sounds, there is always a human voice. The writer must find that human voice.

For me, that human voice is usually not in a beautiful scoring play. It is in the quiet moments the highlights never show. It is the weary wave of a hand as a player signals his teammate to stop running because he is spent. It is the shout of a father in the stands when his son comes on. It is the nervousness of an entire neighborhood where a player grew up, gathered around a screen that night.

Throughout my career, I have learned that a sports journalist has three choices when standing before a match. One is to count. Two is to describe. Three is to empathize. Counting anyone can do, and machines do it better. Describing requires skill, but it still belongs to technique. Empathy is where football touches literature. And empathy is the only thing a machine, however powerful, however many billion calculations per second it can process, cannot do in our place.

The Machine and the Scar

I will be honest about something controversial. I do not believe football can be written in pure data. I know this runs against the trend. I know there are data analysis departments that help clubs sign the right players, save millions of dollars, discover a lower-league player the naked eye overlooks. I am not blind, I see it. But I still hold a stubborn belief: data can explain why a team wins, but not why a person plays.

Because between winning and playing there is a gap only someone who has stood in the stands for years can perceive. You can win a match through luck, through a referee, through wind, through an opponent's mistake. But to play football - in the fullest sense of the word - is to send part of yourself into the match and never get it back. That leaves a scar. And a scar cannot be digitized.

When I say "I write with my scars," I do not mean only my own scars. I mean the scars of an entire footballing nation. Vietnamese football grew up through joy, but also through loss. We have had nights of held breath, times we entered history and then left it through a moment no one wants to recall. Those moments leave scars. And those scars are memory. And memory, to me, is worth more than data.

Do Not Personify Numbers

There is a style of writing that has become common and that I deeply dislike: personifying numbers. "That number is not just a number." "This number speaks." I have read hundreds of pieces like that. And I ask myself: since when did meaning need that form? Since when did counting become proof of feeling?

To me, a beautiful number never replaces a beautiful story. Seventy-four percent possession does not tell me the German team was afraid. It only tells me they held the ball a lot. That they were afraid - I saw that in their eyes, in their shoulders, in the way they dared not take risks when trailing.

I do not oppose data. I oppose using data as a crutch to avoid writing from experience, to avoid going to the stadium, to avoid listening, to avoid being hurt. Because if a journalist refuses to be hurt when writing about football, what he types is only data, not literature.

And I will say this honestly: between a perfect analysis of thirty-two metrics and a passage describing a player's eyes as he emerges from the tunnel after a defeat, I believe the passage about the eyes is closer to the truth.

Football as a Scar Map of a Nation

I have thought a great deal about why we Vietnamese love football enough to cry over it. A country that went through war, through hunger, through decades of rebuilding from ashes. A people who learned that joy never comes easily. And then football arrived, carrying something we needed like air: the feeling of being thrilled, of hoping, of holding our breath together.

That is why Vietnamese football, to me, is never only football. It is a scar map of a nation. Every victory carves the shape of a smile. Every defeat carves the shape of tears. Both belong to us, on the same map. I believe a nation needs its scars retold, not through tactics, but through memory and loss. That is how we keep our history.

When I sit down to write about a national team match, I do not think about the standings. I think of a man in the Mekong Delta placing a radio beside his dinner tray. I think of a mother in the Central region screaming when her son, who does not know what football is, sees her happy and laughs too. I think of a poor student lying beside his desk, listening to the broadcast on a broken machine, dreaming that one day he too will stand in a foreign stadium as I once did.

Football is most alive in its voices. Not in the spreadsheet. And my job, every day, is to find the human voice in the sound of football.

What Data Cannot See

I want to try a comparison, to make clear what I am saying. Imagine two people watching the same match, in the same stand. One is a data analyst. One is the father of a player on the pitch.

The analyst sees a system in operation. He sees the formation, the spaces, the conversion efficiency. He can state with mathematical precision why the team is losing.

The father sees his son. He sees footsteps heavier than usual, a slightly tilted gait, the way his son bites his lip when the ball comes. He cannot say which number is wrong, but he knows something in his son's heart is off.

Both are right. But if I had to choose to truly understand that match, I would choose the father. Because football is a sport of people, played by people, for people. A spectator with no data but a heart tied to the match can still sense what a calm spreadsheet never touches.

That is why, in my writing, I try to avoid numbers. Not because I fear them. But because I believe they do not belong where I am writing.

The Empty Stadium

I have a strange obsession with empty stadiums. In my career, I have stood many times in a stand with not a soul in it. Once it was after a big match, when the crowd had gone home and I stayed to catch the feeling. Once it was in the empty stand of a local ground, one morning, when the team had only a few players warming up in silence.

An empty stadium. In the morning wind, I still hear applause echoing somewhere. It is not a hallucination. It is my own memory, reverberating in the empty stand. The cheers of a match many years ago carved into the brick, the concrete, the air, refusing to fade.

When everything can be measured, everything can be stored as numbers. But an empty stadium has no data. It has only memory. And I believe that memory is what keeps football alive forever. An empty stadium, yet applause still lingers somewhere in memory. I write to record that applause.

The Flip Side of the Digital Revolution

I know I belong to a generation that is stepping back, and I do not delude myself. My generation will leave the newsroom, and the generation of young people like the colleague who sent me the spreadsheet will take the seats. That is the natural order. I do not complain about it. But I want to leave behind one note.

The digital revolution in football - and in sports journalism - has done much good. It breaks down prejudices. It shows that a small player can still win if he plays smartly. It uncovers hidden gems. It makes football more transparent, brings fans closer to the game.

But it has also taken something away. When everything is counted, young writers tend to become compilers of data rather than storytellers. They type neat, correct analyses, but cold ones. And I, as someone who came before, cannot blame them. The system rewards them for accuracy. But I still believe accuracy is not the summit of writing about football.

The summit of writing about football is making the reader feel they were there. In the stand that night. At the moment the ball crossed the line. At the heartbeat of a nineteen-year-old boy in the number 16 shirt.

The Blind Spot of Collective Memory

I come to the hardest part of this piece, the part I always hesitate to write, because it demands self-reflection.

There is a blind spot in our collective memory, we who work in sports journalism. It is the tendency to sanctify the past. As a journalist ages, he easily comes to believe that the football of old was more beautiful, that people of old were more genuine, that memories of old were more sacred. I am prone to this disease too. By nature I am a man who lives with memory, so I must be all the more careful.

I realize I might be looking at the German team of 2026 through the eyes of a man who loves sad stories, not through the eyes of an objective observer. I might be inflating the meaning of a defeat, turning it into a philosophical lesson, when in reality the German team that year simply played poorly. That is a trap, and I want to tell myself that I see it.

The truth is every generation has its own scars. Young people today may have memories of a defeat as painful to them as my old failures were to me. Pain is not the monopoly of age. A young player collapsing after missing a penalty in the eighty-eighth minute hurts no less than an older player recalling a past failure. Both leave scars.

So when I speak of memory, I must be careful not to make my memory the standard for everyone. Memory is mine. But football does not belong to one person. It belongs to all who ever held their breath for it.

Metaphor Must Be Anchored to Detail

And I also want to speak of another trap, the trap of writers like me who write in a literary style. When you love metaphor, you easily let metaphor blanket the event. You call a defeat "the collapse of a dynasty," and you forget that behind the phrase are concrete people who are truly sad.

So I set myself a rule: every metaphor must be anchored to a visible detail. When I speak of the German "rusting machine," I must anchor it to the empty bench under the Kazan stand that night. When I say "the stadium floodlights illuminate an entire life," I must anchor it to the concrete image of that match night, when the lights came on and I saw on the faces around me wrinkles and crow's feet never seen in daylight.

Metaphor is to make the truth clearer, not to hide it. If a metaphor cannot be anchored to a detail, it is merely empty rhetoric, and I do not want to write that kind of prose. Football does not need me to invent extra poetry. It already has enough. My job is to see that poetry, and to describe it correctly.

Do Not Generalize a Team's Psychology from a Single Moment

One more thing I remind myself when writing. I am a person who tends to seek common patterns. By nature I lean toward seeing hidden laws behind individual events. But I must be careful, because there is a great temptation: to see a hug on the pitch and then conclude about the psychology of an entire team, or an entire generation.

I have written sentences like: "The German players had lost faith." But did I truly know that? I only saw a few bowed figures. Perhaps other players were thinking something entirely different. Perhaps their faith was not lost at all, only their bodies were spent. I have no right to speak for the inner lives of people I never spoke to.

The lesson here is humility. A good journalist is not one who dares to judge, but one who knows the limits of his understanding. I have learned to say "I see this," not "they feel that." Because between what I see and what they feel there is a gap that cannot be erased. And acknowledging that gap is precisely respect.

That is also why I try not to judge players in my writing. I only recount what I see, in qualified words, and let the reader feel for themselves.

Data as a Foreign Voice

I once had a small argument with a young colleague in a content meeting. I said I did not want to include statistics in my analyses. He asked why. I answered in a way I later found somewhat extreme: because data kills literature. He was silent a moment, then said something that made me reconsider. He said: "Uncle, data only kills literature when we let it be the master. If we treat it as a foreign voice, we can learn from it."

I think he was partly right. I may not use data as a pillar, but I can let it appear as a supporting character. For instance, I can mention that Germany had seventy-four percent possession to highlight the contrast with their defeat - but I do not build the whole piece around that number. The number is only a foreign voice in the choir, not the lead voice.

That is a reconciliation I think both my generation and the young generation can find. No need to pick a side. Only need to know where you are, and what is in charge in each line.

The Germans, the Koreans, and the Fear of Being Forgotten

Back to Kazan, I want to tell one more small thing from that night that I have never told.

After the match, when the stands were almost empty, I wandered into a corridor beneath the stand. There I met a Korean fan, a middle-aged man in a red shirt, sitting on the stone floor, eyes still red. Beside him was a German man, in the Germany shirt, standing still as a statue. The two said nothing to each other. But as I passed, the German reached out and patted the Korean lightly on the shoulder. Just one pat. Then both rose and walked off in different directions.

That is the moment I cannot forget. One team lost, one team won, two fans from opposite halves of the globe, and one pat on the shoulder. No statistic can record that pat. But it is one of the most beautiful images I have ever witnessed in my career.

Football can make a nation on the verge of being forgotten become remembered. The Koreans that night fought for something very simple: do not let us be seen as unimportant. And they won, not only the match, but a war over collective memory. Without their goals, perhaps we would have forgotten a Korean night that made a miracle. And that miracle also began with a fear: the fear of being forgotten.

Fear as Part of the Game

I believe football, in the end, is a dialogue between hope and fear. You hope to win, and you fear to lose. You hope to be remembered, and you fear to be forgotten. That balance, in big matches, is extremely fragile.

A player steps onto the pitch with the numbers on the spreadsheet in his head - his salary, his transfer fee, his market value - and he carries an unnamed burden. That burden is the result of people being turned into commodities. A young player valued at hundreds of millions of euros before playing fifty top-level matches is no longer football, it is naked gambling. And once football becomes gambling, fear is no longer the fear of losing. Fear becomes the fear of losing value.

I think that is one of the subtle tragedies of modern football. It makes the joy of playing dimmed by the worry of being valued. When I watch an eighteen-year-old play in a small Vietnamese league, I see in him a naivety I fear will vanish when he steps into the wider world. And I hope that later, whether he succeeds or fails, someone will always remember that he once played with the sound of his heartbeat.

Club IPOs, or Turning Emotion into Money

I had occasion to talk with a few people in the sports business industry, and I heard about the trend of clubs becoming publicly traded companies. That trend made me frown.

I do not oppose football needing money. I understand a club must survive, must grow, needs revenue, investment, strategy. But when a club goes on the stock exchange, it carries a paradox. It turns the emotion of fans into an asset. And assets must generate returns. But emotion does not generate returns by the quarter or the year. The emotion of fans cannot read financial statements.

What is worrying is when the pressure of financial reporting weighs on sporting decisions. A coach may want to build a team long-term, but the board may want results this very quarter to reassure shareholders. A young player may need another season to mature, but the balance sheet may demand selling him at once to balance cash flow. Then football is driven by numbers that understand nothing about a round ball. And I feel for the fans - people who still believe the club is theirs, while in truth it belongs to a spreadsheet.

The Transfer Market and the Young-Player Price Bubble

Another topic I want to raise with caution: the bubble in young-player prices. I read numbers I cannot believe. A club pays one hundred million euros for a player who has not played fifty matches at the highest level. That is no longer investment. That is naked gambling, dressed in the shirt of a development strategy. And when the bubble bursts, those who suffer the consequences are not the people who signed those deals. Those who suffer are the young players, burdened with a price tag too large for shoulders too young to carry it.

I will be honest: I am not a financial expert. I am only a journalist observing. But I ask a question: when a young player is valued at a fortune, who is protecting his youth? When he misses the decisive penalty, what does the club owner think? And when he collapses on the pitch, who still remembers that he is only twenty?

And What the Germans Forgot

Back to Germany. When I think about their failure in Kazan, I do not think about the tactical system. I think about how they had forgotten fear. A team that was once an invincible machine entered the match with a false pride. They no longer feared their opponent. They no longer feared defeat. And when fear vanished, part of their strength vanished with it.

That is the paradox of every dynasty, in football as in life. The ruler is often defeated by his own complacency. He wins too much and forgets the fragility of victory. He loses respect for the times. And when the opponent, a small but hungry team, charges at him like a beast cornered, the machine breaks.

To me, this is the greatest lesson of Kazan, and perhaps of every great defeat. Not defeat through weakness. Defeat through forgetting. Forgetting that football, though stuffed with data and money, is still a game of people, and at its deepest bottom, there is always a fear that must be respected.

Why I Still Write

There are days I ask myself why I still write. At fifty-four, I could retire. I could sit at home, drink tea, watch football, and not worry about deadlines. But I do not stop. Because if I stop, who will record the moments data cannot see?

I write for those who never make it into the stands. I write for those who work the night shift and only learn the score from their child's text message. I write for those who have to listen to the broadcast through earphones during a break between shifts. I write for those who once had a moment in their lives like the boy Nguyen Xuan Tung that night - a moment when the heartbeat was louder than every number in the world.

And I write for myself, to remember that I lived through those football nights. That I once stood in the Kazan stand when the Germans fell, once sat in the Binh Duong press room hearing a boy speak of his heartbeat, once listened to applause still echoing in an empty stadium.

Those moments cannot be converted into data. And that is precisely why they are precious.

The Gap as a Reminder

I want to return to the opening image of this piece - the empty spreadsheet on that June afternoon in Binh Duong. After sitting still for a long time, I realized the sheet was not empty at all. It was full of something the number column cannot display: absence. The absence of what cannot be measured. The absence of heartbeats, of the pat on the shoulder in the Kazan stand, of the silent nod between two teammates when the score was settled, of the trembling breath of a boy after a stoppage-time goal.

Those gaps are where football truly lives. And I believe the writer's job, in any era, is to stand at the edge of those gaps and tell the world what they hold.

The Moment and the Life

At fifty-four, I understand that the stadium floodlights illuminate an entire life. When the lights come on, they do not only light the grass. They light what people bring into the match, and what they take away from it. They light the loneliness of a player at the peak of his career yet empty inside. They light the fear of a player who has lost form but dares not say so. They light the brief happiness of a man who waited his whole life for a single moment of brilliance.

The ball rolls on the grass, but really it rolls through the fate of people. That is what I learned after thirty-eight years on the touchline, listening to the sound of the ball and trying to find the human voice within it.

And I believe that in a world increasingly digitized, in a sport increasingly measured, preserving that human voice is an act not only professional but humane. Because football, in the end, is one of the last places where people are still allowed to live innocently and genuinely, like a child playing on a school pitch, barefoot, not knowing what xG is, only knowing the ball is at his feet and the whole world is sitting out there waiting.

A Note for Those Who Will Write Next

To the young people holding the pen, writing about football in the age of data. I do not advise you to abandon statistics. Use it, understand it, respect it as a foreign voice. But please do not let it master your pen. Because when data is the master, you will write about football without truly seeing football.

Please go to the stadium. Please stand in the stand when the match is over and the crowd has gone home. Please listen. Please let the match touch you, hurt you, gladden you, make you remember. Then write. Not to prove you are good, but to record a moment that was real. Because among the millions of matches played each week, what remains is not the numbers. What remains is the moments that touched the human heart.

And if one day you ask yourself where you stand in this sports journalism world, let me leave you a small question. A question that, I think, every generation of writers must answer in its own way: are you counting football, or are you finding the human voice in the sound of football?

About the Empty Spreadsheet and the Names

I will close this piece with a few concrete names, because I believe every abstract reflection must be anchored to real people.

Nguyen Xuan Tung, number 16, a young player of Becamex Binh Duong, who in 2026 scored in the third minute of stoppage time in the match against Hoang Anh Gia Lai, and afterward said a sentence that changed my writing career. He may never become a big star. Football does not promise anyone that. But his moment has stayed forever, and it matters more than any number.

Son Heung-min, with his Korean teammates, who on the twenty-seventh of June, 2026, made a miracle in Kazan, not through data but through a hunger nothing can measure.

And the nameless people on the school pitch on that June afternoon in Binh Duong, the barefoot children I saw through the window. In my eyes, they are the most important people in this piece. Because they remind me where football begins, and why it can never be fully understood by a spreadsheet.

People score with their feet, but I write with my scars. And in that empty spreadsheet that afternoon, I found something I will carry for the rest of my life: sometimes the absence of data tells us more than all the data combined.

The ball rolls on the grass. But really it rolls through the fate of people. And at fifty-four, I understand that the most beautiful part of this sport lies in no data cell at all.