A Goal Without Footage: The Discipline of Saying 'I Don't Know'

Minute 42, July 1, 2026. Spain faced Russia in the World Cup round of 16 in Moscow. Gerard Piqué jumped for the ball inside the penalty area, the ball touched his hand, and I said nothing. Four screens in front of me in the VAR room showed the same passage from different angles, but none gave me what I needed. When the referee awarded a penalty to Russia after review, I knew the signal that should have come from my seat had never been sent. The match ended 1-1, Russia won on penalties, and Spain went home. Three weeks later, I sat alone and rewatched all 64 matches of the tournament. I noted every VAR situation in a thick notebook, from the faintest group-stage incident to the final. I did not share that feeling with any colleague, not even those I sat beside every day. It was not a journey seeking forgiveness. It was a journey seeking a principle: that when there is no evidence, one must have the courage to say two words — "I don't know" — rather than words that sound certain but are empty. That principle, over the past seven years, has taught me more than any textbook on VAR technology I have ever read. What Happens When the Data Source Is Empty My job, put simply, is to stand between two streams of information. One stream runs toward me in raw form: images from cameras, audio from headsets, data from semi-automated offside signals, notes from the referee team. The second stream runs back, much thinner: condensed, verified signals sent up to the main referee and the supervisors in the stands. Between those two streams is a gap that journalism often labels with the glamorous term "artificial intelligence", but which is really just a manual process: read the data, check the law, deliver a verdict. This process has a fatal weakness few outsiders notice. It cannot run when the incoming stream does not exist. A broken camera, a noisy headset, a data table that failed to upload — any one of these turns the analyst into a blind referee. Over 25 years watching this industry, I have learned that most arguments in the stands do not stem from a decision being right or wrong. They stem from the information behind that decision not being transparent. In England — where I was born — Premier League clubs are used to the governing body publishing the audio of the VAR-referee dialogue after each round. In Vietnam, when V.League began trialling VAR, the first question I received from colleagues was not "is the technology accurate" but "when it is wrong, who is responsible". That question has never been fully answered, and I think it will haunt us for many seasons to come. There is a pattern I have noticed in almost every sports data room: people are forced to fill in a template before time runs out. When the template is empty, they tend to fill it with numbers that sound plausible. That is why many reports on transfers, expected metrics, or score predictions read very smoothly but say nothing. They are buildings erected on sand. I once witnessed a match in the 2026 AFC Cup where the automated offside signal system crashed in the first half. Our VAR team had to go back to the naked eye, drawing an offside line on screen. No digital signal, no 3D graphics, just a stretched frame and a virtual ruler. In the 78th minute of that match, the away side equalised, and I spotted that striker Fidelis Ikiri had been 0.3 metres offside before the ball hit the net. I sent the signal to the referee team. The goal was disallowed. Hai Phong won 2-1, but no member of the coaching staff knew that someone had sat in a dark room and saved the scoreline with a virtual ruler. That was the moment that shaped how I write. Not the moment I was right. The moment I understood that the truth often leaves no public trace. There are offsides nobody sees, but the camera never blinks. Yet the irony is that the same camera can blink, only in a different way. It blinks when its data feed is empty, and then the only thing left to analyse is silence. Three Types of Failure When Data Is Empty Before concluding anything about a match, a passage of play, or a VAR decision, I force myself to check the input source on three levels. The first level is analytical error. The text or video source exists, but it is read wrongly. A video at 60 frames per second is extracted at 25 frames, and a handball becomes a chest control. A data table has a decimal point misplaced, and 3.5 shots on target becomes 35. This is the most common error, and also the one modern data analysts commit most when they sit far from the pitch. The second level is a genuinely empty source. No text. No title. No information points. No named entities. In that case, anyone trying to build an analysis must invent players, scores, data — that is, must violate what modern analytical protocol explicitly forbids. The third and most dangerous level is the temptation to fill the template. When a template sits there empty, an invisible pressure forces the analyst to write something, anything, as long as it sounds plausible. That pressure comes from the newsroom, from clients, from search algorithms, from the need to produce content every day. It turns an honest observer into a text-production machine. I call it the "goal without footage" syndrome. A match declared thrilling that nobody has watched. A player declared the signing of the century whom nobody has seen run. A decision declared a mistake that nobody has seen from three angles. In those situations, the correct output is not a firm conclusion. It is a structured null result — a report stating clearly: insufficient information, cannot assess. That is the most polite answer a professional can give, and also the one most people in this industry dare not give. I found that offside at 2 a.m., after everyone had gone home. But there are also 2 a.m. nights when I sat staring at an empty frame and found nothing. The next day, I had to choose between silence and lying. The Industry Rewards Confidence, Not Truth This is the hardest part of the story, and perhaps the part my colleagues in Vietnam will least want to hear. The incentive structure of the sports industry — not only in Vietnam but globally — is working against honesty. An analysis that says "I am not sure" will get no engagement. An analysis that says "the data is insufficient to conclude" will not be shared. But an analysis that says "here are three reasons this player will fail" — even if those three reasons rest on nothing but a fifteen-second clip — will go straight to the trending page. That is why I believe the transfer market has become the stage where the truth is pushed to the margins fastest. The race between the big clubs is not a race to sign better players. It is a race to sign better stories. A contract is like an offside: stray one beat and everything collapses. But nobody scores the stray beat. People only count the money and the spotlights at the unveiling. Meanwhile, small clubs — those working on a fraction of the giants' budgets — are often where the genuinely valuable signings happen. They have no money for ostentation, so they are forced to buy precision. They must read data more carefully, test psychology more thoroughly, watch footage more times. It is there that data analysis truly delivers value rather than merely decorating a deal. The same logic applies to esports. Spectators often mistake a flashy teamfight for a high-level match. But at the macro level, what decides the game is not the pretty skirmish. It is map control, objective control, tempo control before the first fight even happens. In esports, the audience sees the play; I see the mouse click one-hundredth of a second before it. That is the span no single frame fully captures, and precisely because of that, it is where the truth tends to reside. The Truth Lives Where Nobody Looks That is why data analysts are now pushing deep into the dressing room — and also why I worry about them. A number can be mathematically correct yet physiologically out of rhythm. An expected-goals figure can be high while ignoring that the player has logged 270 minutes in seven days. Data cannot measure a striker's fear standing before goal in the 90th minute. It cannot measure a defender's feeling when he knows his foul may collapse an entire season. I once encountered such a case in Hai Phong, when the 2026 season was suspended by the pandemic. The club fell into financial crisis, three key players demanded to leave, and the whole city awaited an analysis criticising the team's form. But in the data I had, there was a little-mentioned name: a 17-year-old called Nguyen Van Truong, technically gifted but psychologically fragile. Read only the data table, and Truong is an unreliable player. Read more carefully, and Truong is a player who needs six more months training separately with the U19s. I chose to send a report on his strengths to the technical director rather than write a piece slamming the whole team's form. Six months later, Truong made his debut and scored a goal that helped the club survive relegation. I do not tell this story to praise myself. I tell it to prove one thing: data only has value when read by someone who understands that behind every number is a human under pressure. And when data is empty, the most reliable thing left is the analyst's capacity to wait — to wait until the source truly appears, instead of erecting a conclusion out of thin air. The biggest mistake is not blowing the whistle, but not daring to own your whistle. I missed a handball at the 2026 World Cup, and I owned it. But I will not own an error I did not commit, merely to satisfy an empty template. Those are two different kinds of courage: the courage to admit a mistake, and the courage to say there is not yet enough basis to judge. A millimetre changes a club's fate; I have learned to live with that. But I have also learned to live with the gap where that millimetre should have been. The More Worrying Thing In conversations with colleagues working VAR in different leagues, I noticed a common pattern. When the data system works well, people argue about decisions. When the data system fails, people argue about belief. The difference is enormous. Arguments about decisions can lead to rule reform. Arguments about belief only lead to the collapse of the entire system. And here is the counter-intuitive point I want to stress: an honest null result is worth more than a complete but fabricated one. While the industry flows the opposite way — rewarding confidence, rewarding speed, rewarding the appearance of certainty — those doing the quiet work are trying to hold a different standard. That standard is not attractive. It does not generate widely shared headlines. But it is the only foundation on which any later verdict can stand. I know there are 2 a.m. nights when my colleagues in many different countries sit rewatching a forty-second clip, skipping back and forth dozens of times, just to confirm that one player's foot was ahead of another's by exactly thirty centimetres. They are not praised. They are not even named. But they are the ones keeping this game credible. When everyone blames the 19-year-old, the person in the VAR room must stand up. But the person in the VAR room must also know when to stay seated, when the source does not permit them to rise. The referee is the only person on the pitch not allowed to pick a side — and I stand behind them. That job is not glamorous, but it is the only job that keeps every passage of play open to being judged by reason rather than emotion. So next time you read an analysis declaring that a certain player will certainly fail, or that a certain coach has certainly erred, ask yourself: how many frames did the writer have? How many camera angles did they watch? And most importantly — when their source was empty, did they choose silence, or did they choose to invent a story that sounds thoroughly plausible? The answer to that question will tell you everything about the writer, and very little about the match they are discussing. Emptiness is not the frightening thing. The frightening thing is those who fill that emptiness with words of certainty. Over my career, I have learned that an honest verdict is sometimes just a short sentence: not enough basis. And I believe it is those short sentences, not the long analyses, that keep the game's justice from ever falling asleep — even long after the cameras have gone dark. Closing: What Is Worth Pursuing If there is one thing I want to leave for those working in this profession in Vietnam, it is this: do not fear emptiness. Fear the counterfeit appearance of completeness. An empty template can be filled with real data tomorrow. But a wrong conclusion, once printed, will live forever in the audience's memory, and is very hard to erase. In football as in every information-driven profession, the discipline of saying "I don't know" is the hardest discipline to train, and also the most valuable.