The Empty Spreadsheet and the Discipline of Football Reporting

In August 2026, on the concrete stand of a fifth-tier stadium in south-west Germany, I opened my notebook and counted the columns again. Forty-seven of them. Twenty-three players, one page each, forty-seven cells per page waiting to be filled: twenty-metre sprint time, receptions between the lines, the rate of progressive passes into the final third. The China U-20 selection played eight matches in the Oberliga that summer under Sun Jihai and won two. Across those eight matches I did not miss a single measurable phase of play, because I believed that once the final whistle goes, the only thing left is what you wrote down.

Then came another evening, much later. A report landed on my desk. It had all nine sections. A title, a skeleton, a tactical analysis section, a financial analysis section, a results section, a risk section, a media narrative section. Inside every section, each line said the same thing: insufficient information to assess. Not one player's name. Not one competition. Not one number.

The first thing I did was not write. It was to establish what had broken, where, and when.

Football learned the language of data long ago, but learning a language and understanding it are two different things. An ordinary supporter today can talk about xG, about PPDA, about pass completion in the final third without opening a single glossary page. Those terms have leaked out of the analysis room and into the pub, into the comment section under every article, into the half-midnight arguments after a goalless draw. That popularisation is real progress. But it carries a side effect few people discuss: once the vocabulary of evidence becomes common, people start using it to decorate claims that have no evidence behind them at all.

The football information market runs on a twenty-four-hour cycle. When the transfer window opens, a hunting season begins, and in that season speed is paid better than accuracy. An agent has an obvious incentive to leak an unverified detail: it moves a price, it creates pressure, it forces a club to respond before it has had time to calculate. I have followed enough windows to see a repeating pattern. The rumours that travel fastest are usually the ones with the murkiest origin, and the ones with the clearest origin usually arrive late, when the deal is already done. That is why I tell the young reporters in the newsroom that this trade does not reward the fastest. It rewards the one still standing after the fever has passed.

From twenty-eight years of watching matches, I have drawn a conclusion that sounds obvious and is very hard to hold: an honest report always has three anchors. The first is the raw measurement, together with how it was taken and when. The second is the identity of the source, enough for the reader to judge credibility rather than trust the writer's reputation. The third, and the most frequently abandoned, is a willingness to write the words I do not know.

Those three anchors are the entire content of that nine-section report, with one difference: it kept the third anchor perfectly and lost the other two completely. It had no measurement and no source, but it did not invent. In an industry where fabrication runs so smoothly that nobody notices, a document that dares to stay blank is an artefact worth studying.

The value of a report lies not in how many sections it contains, but in how many lines it dares to leave empty, and why.

I learned this from a young player. Across those eight Oberliga matches I kept noticing a midfielder born in 2026, Yan Dinghao. He was not the most conspicuous man in training and he had no speed that made a crowd gasp. But my notebook had a column for ball-handling time, measured from the instant the ball touched his foot to the instant it left, in situations under pressure. After six weeks that figure had dropped by 0.4 seconds. A number so small that set beside a scoreline it is almost meaningless. Yet 0.4 seconds under a tight marker is the difference between a blocked pass and a pass through the lines. My series on that metric was later cross-checked by academies against their own internal reports, and that was the first time I understood that the worth of a measurement is not in its size but in whether it was recorded at the right moment, in the right way.

In the summer of 2026, in Russia, I carried the same habit. In the France against Argentina match on 30 June 2026 in the round of sixteen, I logged seventeen sprints from Kylian Mbappé and noticed a detail no scoreline ever reflects: the gap between two consecutive sprints was always under 22 seconds. His recovery capacity between explosive efforts sat at a level I had never recorded at any tournament before. The piece on that speed structure got thirty reads on its first day. Three days later, when Mbappé scored twice in France's 4-3 win over Argentina, it was shared more than five hundred times.

I do not tell that story to advertise my own eye. I tell it to describe a delay. The measurement came before the event, but the market only recognised its value after the event. Inside that delay, a writer has to endure something deeply uncomfortable: knowing you are right and finding that nobody cares.

That is why I keep asking questions about scouting reports stuffed with conclusions. A report saying a player has the potential to become a cornerstone, that he reads the game well, that he must improve defensively, is a report that cannot be tested. There is no measurement to argue with, no timestamp to check, no way to know how many matches the author watched or under what conditions. It is true at the level of an impression, and it is presented at the level of a professional finding.

By contrast, a report stating that across six observed matches between August and October 2026 this player received the ball between the lines 11.3 times per ninety minutes, with a progressive pass rate into the final third of 34 percent, is a report that can be contradicted. Someone else can measure again and tell me I am wrong. That very vulnerability to contradiction is what builds credibility, not smoothness.

One detail in that nine-section report made me stop longer than anything else. It noted that time sensitivity had not been assessed. To a working journalist, that line is a clear trace: the processing stopped before the timeliness step, which means the original article was not empty of content. Even the worst football article usually leaves behind at least a headline and one name. Losing both the title and the source points to a metadata-level failure rather than a body-level one. That is a technical conclusion, but it is also a professional lesson: when an information chain breaks, people tend to fill the gap with memory. And the memory of someone who reads a great deal of football news is an extremely dangerous data source, because it is always available and always seems reliable.

I have watched that happen to myself. There were times, looking at a spreadsheet with three missing cells, when I told myself I knew what those three cells would say, because I had watched the player. Sometimes I was right. But this trade cannot be built on being right in ways nobody can verify, because the reader has no way to separate the times I was right because I am good from the times I was right because I was lucky.

The Oberliga map is still lying there. It is just that few people have the patience to dig.

And here is where I want to go against the crowd. People often say the problem with sports journalism is a shortage of data. I think the problem is a surplus of conclusions. Over two decades the volume of publicly available football data has grown exponentially, yet the share of conclusions that can be traced back to a specific measurement has barely moved. We have more numbers and less evidence, in the precise sense: plenty of figures, and an ever harder trail from a claim back to the measurement that produced it.

Part of the cause is structural. A confident claim gets shared. A hedged claim gets scrolled past. A piece saying a player may improve if used in the right position in the right environment will never generate a headline, while a piece saying he will become a star will. Agents understand this better than anyone and exploit it professionally. The noise they generate is not aimed at persuading experts. It is aimed at establishing a reference price in the public mind, and that reference price can then be used as the opening position in a real negotiation.

The rest of the cause sits with the reader, and this is harder to say. A report that leaves three quarters of its content blank looks like a failure. A report with all nine sections filled, each one delivering a decisive conclusion, looks like an achievement. Nobody praises a writer for not writing. And so the pressure always leans towards filling.

Six months frozen is not an empty space; it is where value settles.

I learned this while tracking young players who vanish from matchday squads. A long-term injury, a demotion to the reserves, a season without a single minute on the pitch. To the market that is a void, a depreciating asset. But if you watch long enough you see another process at work inside the void: the player relearns things a congested fixture list never permits, and when he returns some technical details have shifted in a better direction. Yan Dinghao's 0.4 seconds after six weeks is one instance of that process, and it only became visible because somebody stayed behind to measure during a period nobody else bothered to measure.

The value of a map lies in the lines left blank, not the lines that were drawn.

There is one area where I find this impatience most dangerous: how we handle decisions at the margin. An offside line redrawn to a thickness of less than a millimetre, a goal erased after four minutes of review, a match carved into dozens of fragments of checking. The technology here is more precise than ever, and precisely because of that it produces an illusion: that everything can be settled to the very end. What gets lost is something very hard to measure: the attacking instinct of a forward who moves half a step early, and the acceptance that football contains a margin of error that cannot be eliminated.

The same habit shows up in scouting reports. When you have forty-seven metrics, the pressure is to use all forty-seven. But a metric that cannot separate two players is adding noise, not light. The good analyst is the one who dares to discard thirty-seven and speak only about the ten that genuinely create a difference, with a reason for why those ten were chosen.

Modern football does not lack spectators. It lacks people who read footprints on melted snow.

So when a report lands on my desk with nine full sections and not a single fact inside, I do not treat it as a failure to be hidden. I treat it as a diagnosis. It tells me where the data supply chain broke, and it reminds me that the most important step in this trade happens before writing: establishing what you have and what you do not.

What I want a reader to carry away from this is not a belief in numbers. It is a habit of asking. When you read a claim about a young player, look for three things: what was measured, across how many matches, and when. If those three are missing, you are reading a story told in the accent of data rather than a conclusion drawn from data.

And if one day you hold a nine-section report in which every line states that there is not enough information to conclude, read it to the end. It may be the most honest report you read all year.