Blank Scouting Files: Vietnamese Football's Habit of Deciding on Empty Fields

At 2:40 in the morning the file was still glowing on the screen. Twelve pages. The first page listed a player's name, date of birth, height, weight, parent club. The second page held a portrait photo and a league logo. From page three onward, the cells began to empty out.

The pressing-metric column was blank. The injury-history column was blank. The sprint-speed column was blank. The live-viewing assessment column was blank, though a small line beneath it read: reviewed via highlight video. At the end there was a conclusion section, and the conclusion was not blank. It stated: sufficient quality, recommend signing.

That report still went into a meeting. And in that meeting, a decision was still made.

I am not telling this story to catch out an individual. The man who sent me the file works seriously, squeezed by deadlines, by budgets, and by something harder to name: the habit of deciding in silence. A file with a name, a photo, a logo, a printer's mark — it looks enough like a file. Nobody checks the rest.

Across nearly four decades following teams, I have learned that Vietnamese football's biggest error in the transfer market is not a shortage of data. It is deciding as though the data were already there.

A league that buys on highlight reels

Every transfer window, dozens of foreign-player slots pass through Tan Son Nhat and Noi Bai airports. Most of these players come from Brazil, from Nigeria, or from leagues inside the region. Most are introduced through two channels: a three-minute highlight reel, and an agent who speaks Vietnamese better than the player does.

In Europe a large club keeps its own scouting department, has someone watch a target live at least five to seven times, and maintains an internal database recording every touch. In Vietnam most clubs have one or two people doing this work, and they usually carry other duties as well. They watch live when the target plays domestically. When the target is abroad, they watch a highlight reel.

A few years ago a German scout asked me to help assess a Vietnamese central midfielder. He watched exactly one match, one in which the player was booked and looked ordinary. He pulled the organiser's GPS data, read a top sprint speed of 27 km/h, compared it with European benchmarks, and struck the name off. A contract worth 1.8 million euros died in a single email line.

It took me two weeks to find the cause. The GPS equipment at that stadium had failed that day; several satellites lost signal early in the match. The player's real speed was 33 km/h. The German knocked once, and I opened an entire archive of unpublished scouting files — and inside that archive, the biggest lesson was not the wrong number. It was that a qualified professional had trusted a single number.

The piece that followed reached 1.2 million reads. What I remember most is not the readership. It is a message from that player, sent close to midnight, four words long: Thank you, brother.

What actually gets written down in the meeting room

After that I began paying attention to how Vietnamese clubs make decisions. I recorded what I heard in meeting rooms, in training-ground corridors, over lunch with coaching staff. Three years, four clubs, one repeating pattern.

Vietnamese football's biggest blind spot in the transfer market is not a shortage of metrics. It is that empty cells in a report get read as cells that have been confirmed.

Nobody says we do not yet have data on this player's adaptability. They say this player will adapt. The blank becomes a fact through a single sentence in a meeting. And when the player arrives, plays four matches, then sits out, nobody reopens the old file to ask why the forecast failed.

I once spent all 250 days of a season following a club in Saigon. Thirty-four training sessions. Eighteen away trips. I recorded every session in a notebook and in memory, not on a recorder. A young player wearing number 29 scored seven goals that season. Yet in the supporters' online vote he barely registered.

That pushed me to run a survey on the fan page, drawing 12,000 interactions, just to ask one thing: why the indifference? The answer had nothing to do with the player. Supporters did not believe in how the coaching staff were using him — even though the team was on a five-match winning run. The dressing room was whispering, and from the stands, people could hear it.

From that season on, every piece I wrote carried a section called Voices from the Stands. I do not treat it as an appendix. To me it is data, the kind hardest to digitise and the kind most easily struck out.

The Xuan Son case and the trap of opinions with numbers attached

In January 2026, Nguyen Xuan Son scored in the second leg of the ASEAN Cup final on Thai soil, helping take Vietnam to the title. Days later, on that same pitch, he broke his leg. Two events sat beside each other in one week.

Before the tournament, many people spoke about him using data that did not exist. A naturalised player will not have enough hunger. A striker from a lower Brazilian division will not suit Southeast Asian football. Those lines were delivered as though they were measurements. Nobody offered a denominator. Nobody said: based on how many matches, across how many seasons, in how many different situations.

He answered with goals, and with a trophy. That is the visible part. The harder part to see was the injury. A player judged mainly on goals — that is, on the metric easiest to count — will never be fully assessed on load tolerance, on fixture density, on soft-tissue stress. Those blanks only surface when the body surfaces them.

I think this is what Vietnamese football needs to say more clearly than anything else: we have a generation of players assessed by picking the easiest metric to measure, then calling that the whole person. Nguyen Quang Hai was measured by goals during an injury spell. Nguyen Hoang Duc was measured by assists in a season when he had to play three different positions. Both measurements were right in number, and wrong about the man.

The counter-argument: more data may not be the answer

There is a reading of the problem that sounds very reasonable: Vietnam needs more digitisation. GPS for every session. Analysis software. A dedicated data department at every club.

I am not against it. But I have seen enough 40-page reports ending in a conclusion the reader cannot contest, because nobody understands where it came from. I have seen analysts attend three sessions, hold a tablet, log every pass, then leave before the squad splits into two teams. I have seen metrics presented so beautifully that no one in the room dares ask: what does this metric measure, in what situation, and does it match the match I just watched?

Digitisation did not make me faster, but it forced me to be more honest with each number. That is the whole benefit of it, and the whole limit of it. Data does not replace watching football. Data only makes watching football contestable in a clear way.

Vietnamese football's problem is not a missing analysis system. It is a missing habit: when a cell is blank, say that it is blank.

I picture a meeting where a scout says: I have not watched this player live. I have three clips sent by an agent, with no recording date and no identified opponent. I hold no injury data. I recommend a six-month trial, not three years. That sentence sounds weaker. It is also more honest, and vastly cheaper than a three-year deal built on three minutes of video.

The stands are never empty of data

In 2026, when stadiums closed and the club I followed lost forty percent of its revenue, I sat in front of a screen and organised an online gathering between players and more than three thousand supporters. We spoke plainly about a debt of eight billion dong. Nobody dressed anything up. Within two weeks the community raised 2.3 billion dong. The club escaped the threat of dissolution.

In that empty season I heard the community's rhythm through the window more clearly than ever. What I learned then was not about the money. It was that when people are given accurate data — even bad data, even the debt figure — they act. When people are handed a polished report, they sit still.

Vietnamese supporters are the most careful readers of football I have known. They recall a starting eleven from seven years ago. They know which player performs better when pushed to the left. They do not need a translator. What they need is to be trusted.

What I am watching for next season

The annual season is still running, and I am still following it match by match. What I am waiting for is not a blockbuster signing, nor a new technology unveiled at a press conference. I am waiting for a very small sentence in a very ordinary meeting: We do not have data for this yet.

When that sentence becomes ordinary, Vietnamese football will buy less, and buy better. Academies such as PVF, Nutifood, or training centres built on multi-year partnership models will get a real chance, because data on young players generated by those academies themselves will be worth more than any clip sent by a stranger.

If that sentence never arrives, we will keep witnessing the same transfer windows: a few successful signings, many deals dissolving after six rounds, and nobody reopening the file to ask why.

At 52, I still keep the rhythm with my ears — the one thing nobody has managed to digitise. I still go to training in the morning, still sit in the lowest row, still write into my notebook the details a machine cannot capture: who talks to whom during the break, who is first out of the dressing room after a defeat, who stays last.

Those details are data too. They simply do not fit in any cell of a report left blank.