The N/A Lines and 47 Years of Watching Vietnamese Women’s Football

On the morning of November 17, 2026, a young journalist at VuaBong.vn put a nine-section sports analysis report on my desk. He hesitated: “This part is completely empty, uncle.” I opened every page. There was no discipline, no athlete name, no record data, no event date. Every conclusion was reduced to three letters: N/A. People see a match; I see fates passing the ball. But today I saw no fates, because they had been left outside the spreadsheet.

In 47 years of sports journalism, I have read many data-heavy analyses that were empty inside. This was the first time I saw a document empty on the surface and empty underneath. A colleague said: “It is just a file-transfer error.” I did not argue. But that technical error matched a disease I have seen for decades in women’s football: nobody enters the data, nobody is responsible for entering the data, and the story simply disappears.

I remember the first phone call from Huynh Nhu that broke down the house of words I had built. In 2026, I started the podcast “Half the Ball” in Saigon. For three months I tried to persuade the captain of Vietnam’s women’s team to sit before the microphone. We recorded at Thong Nhat Stadium. She told me about selling lottery tickets as a child to buy football boots. When the red recording light went off, I cried. The episode reached 10,000 listeners, a small number compared to men’s football. But I understood: her story did not need to speak to the masses; it needed to be recorded systematically.

A year later, in July 2026, I watched the U20 Women’s World Cup final between Japan and Spain. The Japanese girls pressed high, covered a total distance of 18.7 km per match, and made nine ball recoveries in the final third. I wrote an article and submitted it to the men’s World Cup section. The editor said it was off-topic. That rejected article is now the scar I cherish most. I published it on my personal page. Vietnam women’s national team coach Mai Duc Chung shared it, and the article passed one million views in 72 hours. When data exists, attention does not wait for gender.

In April 2026, the national women’s football league stopped after round four. I stopped writing for 54 days, locked my room, and refused to answer the phone. One evening, Nguyen Thi Thanh Nha, then 19, called me by video. She wore a shirt dusted with flour and proudly showed me 100 loaves of bread she had baked to fund her football dream. She only made one video call, but it pulled me out of the depths. After that call, I withdrew 20 million VND from my retirement savings and set up the “Pitch 2026” fund to support five female players in difficult circumstances. No one asked me for data to prove they deserved help. They just needed to be seen.

In 2026, in Tokyo, I watched the women’s football final between Canada and Sweden. Christine Sinclair, 40 years old, was playing in her fifth Olympics. After the match she cried, not because of victory, but because Canada’s women’s team received only one-eighth of the men’s budget. A Canadian reporter and I compared sponsorship figures and wrote an investigation called “The Diamond Unpaid.” Canada Soccer later increased the women’s budget by 25 percent. The data did what pleading could not do.

Back to that N/A report: if I only complained about carelessness, this article would be just lament. I tried to read it as a data journalist would: nine empty sections were nine audit points. The performance evaluation section was empty, meaning there was no yardstick for achievement. The athlete condition section was empty, meaning injuries and form were not tracked. The competition structure and qualification section was empty, meaning there was no standard for comparison. The rules and anti-doping section was empty, meaning there was no transparency mechanism. The risk section was empty. The public-opinion section was empty. All of it was empty. An empty analysis does not reflect female players’ ability; it reflects an infrastructure that has not paid them enough attention.

Why has the data infrastructure not paid them enough attention? The first answer is commercial. Media buyers often ask about viewership numbers and ROI. They rarely ask: How did the women’s team’s tactics change after adding an outside back? If nobody funds a data department, women’s coaches must rely on the naked eye. Sometimes the naked eye cannot see the moment a striker peaks in the 70th minute, nor can it see why the midfield press disappears after the first half.

Men’s football once faced exactly this problem. In the 1980s, when I started covering women’s sports, experts also wrote about male players with instinct more than data. Then computers, GPS, and tactical cameras arrived. The market paid for measurable products, and men’s football had money, so it quickly built a system. Women’s football lacks that loop: no money means no data, no data means no sponsors.

But I am not pessimistic. In July 2026, Vietnam’s women’s team played in the World Cup for the first time, on the soil of New Zealand and Australia. In three matches they pressed, attacked, and stood beside the strongest teams in the world. After the tournament, many children in Saigon, Hanoi, and Da Nang asked for jerseys. That is data about aspiration. Sponsors call it emotion; I call it an asset measurable by jersey orders, youth football registrations, and celebration videos. Just because those numbers have not been entered into official statistics does not mean they do not exist.

Critics will say women’s football must start with pitches, insurance, and scholarships; data is a luxury. I disagree. Data is the fastest way to identify who benefits from their sweat. A public salary sheet would embarrass sponsors. A distance-covered chart would make coaches unable to deny the hard work of women’s teams. A sponsorship figure would cool down articles that only flatter emotion.

At the end of the day, the young reporter asked me: “So what will today’s article be, uncle?” I pointed to the file: “Today we are not writing about achievements. Today we are writing about the cost of silence.”

I am old now, but every call from Huynh Nhu, Thanh Nha, or any other woman footballer makes me young again. They do not need me to write their ambition for them; they need me to record the things others leave behind: pitch fees, electricity bills, training sessions, sleep, a mother’s meals, the smell of medicated oil in the dressing room. Data lives in those fragments. An N/A report tells us one thing: the system is not yet worthy of the people playing football out of passion.

Do not rush to erase the N/A lines. Leave them there as witnesses. When a women’s club is given a real statistics system, when tactical reports appear on sports pages, then those N/A lines will turn into metrics by themselves. The change is already happening, not from a call to action, but from writers determined to re-enter the world into the ledger.