Football Cannot Be Written With Fabricated Data

Football Cannot Be Written With Fabricated Data

Six pages with no question marks

On a late-May Saturday, a young reporter sent me an analysis of a final-round V.League 1 match. Six pages. There was a heat map, expected goals for every player, even sprint distances for both centre-backs. I read all of it, then replied with one line: that match was postponed because of rain, it was replayed four days later.

He went quiet for two hours. Then he wrote: "I asked a tool to write it, ma'am."

I opened those six pages again and went looking for a question mark. There was none. Thirty-seven lines of data, all as certain as if they had been counted by human eyes, describing a match that never took place.

What chilled me was not that the tool knew how to invent. What chilled me was that a reporter who had spent three years on the touchline read those six pages and found them reasonable. He did not check, because the analysis was prettier than his memory. But he had no memory of that match — the match had not happened.

I am writing this not to tell the story of a tool. I am writing because that reflex has lived inside my trade for a long time before machines arrived.

From a paper notebook to a stream of data

In 2026, a touchline reporter's kit was a notebook and two pencils. I noted minutes, direction of play, who touched the ball last before it crossed the line. I noted the sound of the crowd too, even though there was no box to fill it into. By full time the pages were damp with sweat and rain, and that was the only data I had.

Thirty years later, I sit in front of a screen with thousands of lines of numbers. A single V.League 1 match now produces more data than an entire 1990s season. Every pass is counted, every run converted into metres, every shot converted into probability. From the 2026 season, VAR officially entered V.League 1, and since then every on-field decision can be measured against a frame. That is not a bad thing in itself. I sat in the press room in Kazan in the summer of 2026 and understood that one passage of play can carry more meanings than the roar the stands had just produced.

But something else changed, and it took me years to name it. Data went from being a tool to being a shield. Writers no longer use numbers to see more clearly. They use numbers so they do not have to be responsible for what they say. With numbers you are safe. Without numbers you must observe, must remember, must admit you do not yet understand.

My trade runs on speed. A match ends at ten in the evening; by eleven there must be a piece. In that hour nobody has time to rewind the tape and count. So people fill the gap with numbers that sound plausible. First a few exaggerated numbers. Then numbers that never existed. Now numbers generated by a machine, signed by a human.

A player like Nguyen Quang Hai can have every touch in V.League turned into a line of data, that line is sold onward, and that buyer writes another piece. After four hops, the original line has changed its meaning entirely. Nobody in that chain lied. Yet the final product is wrong.

That is the point I want to sit with longest.

The ruler and its shadow

Expected goals, xG, is one of the most useful inventions this sport has produced in twenty years. Its mechanics are simple: take hundreds of thousands of past shots, record location, distance, angle, body part, type of pass received, number of defenders ahead, then use a statistical model to estimate the probability that a similar shot becomes a goal. A penalty has an xG of roughly 0.76. A shot from beyond 30 metres sits around 0.02.

The problem is that xG answers exactly one question: how many goals is this chance worth according to the historical average. It answers nothing else. It does not know whether the team is 1-0 up or 0-2 down. It does not know an opposition defender was sent off on 60 minutes. It does not know the referee has just waved away a clear penalty. It does not know the striker has had an aching ankle since the first half.

I once watched a match in which the home side finished with 2.8 xG and lost 0-1. The next morning, seventeen articles called them unlucky. But if you were in the stadium, you saw that 14 of those shots came after the 75th minute, when the visitors had dropped everyone behind the ball and the hosts had run out of ideas and were simply swinging crosses in with their eyes closed. Those shots added up to a large xG block, but they said nothing about tactics. The model cannot distinguish a shot from a team controlling the game from a shot by a team that has run dry.

The data is not wrong. The person reading the data is wrong, when they read an index the way one reads a verdict.

This is where I want to say something plainly that many colleagues do not enjoy hearing: xG has been abused. It is abused to fill the gaps left by writers who are too lazy to observe. It is abused to turn a match into a spreadsheet. And it is abused most where it is least checked.

A wrong figure in a league table can be fixed in ten minutes. A wrong figure in an analysis piece can live inside a reader's head for ten years.

Money, and the places money hides

Expected goals is only the visible part. The submerged part is money, and there my trade fabricates in a far more polite manner.

Start with amortisation. When a club buys a player for 100 million euros on an eight-year contract, that outlay is spread evenly across eight financial years, 12.5 million euros per year. The arithmetic is entirely legitimate; there is nothing shady in it. But it creates an obvious incentive: the longer the contract, the lighter the annual burden, and the more room the club has to buy again.

Chelsea used that approach through 2026-2026, signing players such as Enzo Fernandez and Mykhailo Mudryk to seven- and eight-year deals. In June 2026, UEFA closed the door with a rule capping amortisation at five years. That rule was written not because the arithmetic was wrong, but because the arithmetic was used exactly as designed.

Then come free agents. A free transfer carries no transfer fee. It sounds like saving. In reality it merely shifts the money into another column: signing-on fees, agent commissions, higher wages, loyalty bonuses. Kylian Mbappe left Paris Saint-Germain and joined Real Madrid on a free transfer, officially from 1 July 2026. No transfer fee was announced. But there were many other payments, and almost none of them were disclosed in full.

This is the paradox I keep explaining to younger editors whenever they ask which column to watch. A transfer fee is the most scrutinised kind of money in football, because it is large and it has a common denominator for comparison. A free agent's signing-on fee has no common denominator, no league table, no clearly labelled line in the accounts. What is not scrutinised swells. If you want to find the weakest point in financial control, do not look at the most expensive deal. Look at the deal nobody names.

And what about financial control itself? In February 2026, the Premier League charged Manchester City with 115 alleged breaches of financial rules spanning 2026 to 2026. The case has still not concluded. In that same period, Everton were docked 10 points in November 2026, reduced to 6 on appeal in February 2026. Nottingham Forest were docked 4 points in March 2026.

Three clubs, three speeds. I am not saying who is right and who is wrong, because I do not hold the case files to say it, and I do not want to commit the very sin I have just described. But I observe one thing: when the rules become complex, what gets measured is no longer conduct, but each party's capacity to endure time.

Then there is the stock market. Manchester United listed part of their shares in New York from August 2026. Borussia Dortmund went public in Frankfurt in 2026. Juventus have traded in Milan since 2026. Football walked into the meeting rooms of people who do not watch football. There, supporters' emotions become a forecastable revenue line. And when the quarterly number misses, squad decisions are made by whoever answers to shareholders, not by whoever understands football best.

Transfers are not numbers; they are farewells trying to find the right words. I wrote that years ago and still believe it. But I must add one clause: some farewells are designed to look as if nothing happened at all.

The fabrication industry

In January 2026, the technology site CNET published a run of articles generated by artificial intelligence, then had to issue corrections because the content was wrong. In August 2026, Gannett paused machine-written high-school sports reports after errors were found. In November 2026, an investigation revealed that Sports Illustrated had published articles under invented author profiles, complete with machine-generated portraits; the pieces were removed, and the relationship with the content supplier was terminated.

Those three dates are usually told as the history of artificial intelligence. I read them as the history of an old habit.

Because long before machines, sport already had a complete fabrication ecosystem. There were quotes placed into a coach's mouth after a match that nobody checked. There was the phrase "a source close to the player" when nobody knew who was close to whom. There were transfer stories translated from Italian papers, then Turkish ones, then from an anonymous social account, and after three hops it became sourced news.

In Vietnam, an editor once told me something very blunt: readers do not buy hesitation. A headline containing the word "unconfirmed" gets no clicks. A piece opening with "I do not yet have enough data" is treated as laziness. So the writer chooses: either say what they do not know in a confident voice, or lose the slot.

I chose a third way: say what I know, and state clearly what I do not. But that third way has no place in the click chart, which is why it is rare.

Machines only amplify what was already there

Here I want to go against most of what is being written online.

When a tool produces six pages of data about a match that never happened, the usual reaction is to blame the tool. I do not blame the tool. Where did it learn? It learned from a body of text written by humans. It learned what a football analysis piece looks like: full of confident adjectives, full of numbers, with no room for doubt. If that body of text were full of question marks, the machine would know how to ask questions.

The problem is not the machine's speed. The problem is that my trade spent twenty years preparing the ground for its arrival.

The second thing I want to push back on is the assumption that more data produces better analysis. Across almost thirty years of watching matches in V.League, at ASEAN Cups and at international tournaments, I have found nearly the opposite. The best writers I know are the ones who know how to leave things out. They hold three metrics and use one, because the other two do not explain the match. Weak writers use all of them, lay them out in rows, and believe that completeness is truth.

The analyst's job is subtraction. Machines are good at addition.

The third belief I want to push back on is that readers only want certainty. Readers do want certainty, but they want a certain person more than a certain number. If you tell me you were in the stadium and what you saw, I believe you more than I believe an unsourced statistics table. Faith in data is borrowed faith; it only stands when a person stands behind it as guarantor.

The person who says I do not know

There is a detail I have not yet told.

At the 2026 World Cup in Kazan, during France against Argentina, I sat in the press area. A nineteen-year-old named Kylian Mbappe ran almost sixty metres. I did not write about the 4-3 scoreline. I wrote about speed. A colleague laughed and said women know nothing about tactics.

I understood the language of that sentence. It meant: if you cannot produce a number, you have no right to sit here. For years, women in sports press rooms had to prove they belonged using someone else's language. The easiest route was to sound more certain than the man beside them.

Saying "I do not know" in a sports press room is treated as weakness. But in my trade, "I do not know" is the only sentence that lets a reader trust the rest.

In 2026, I sat in front of a screen watching Christian Eriksen collapse during Denmark against Finland. Players formed a circle around him; the crowd sang his name in the dark. That night I wrote very little, because I did not know what was happening. I only knew my heart was beating fast. The next morning, once I knew he had woken, I wrote. A veteran editor called me and said: "I was wrong to think women do not understand football."

He was wrong about me. But the industry was not wrong about me. It simply waits for data, and when I do not supply data, it treats me as someone who arrived late.

Eriksen fell, and the whole world realised that football is only one way for us to hold each other. No index measures that moment. Anyone who wrote that the match had 1.4 xG misread the match. That match was not measured in goals.

What remains when the data leaves

In June 2026, in the middle of the pandemic, I returned to Nha Trang and stood in the empty 19 August Stadium. The sound of a ball rolling on grass was audible beat by beat. I called the old groundsman, and he told me that for the first time in forty years he could hear birds on the stands.

There was not a single metric that day. No xG, no sprint distances, no heat map. Only birdsong and an old man who remembered his trade. That piece was shared more than ten thousand times.

The empty stadium that year taught me that football is the voice of people. Applause without a crowd still echoes, but the heart of football missed a beat.

I am not asking young colleagues to abandon data. I am asking something smaller: read a number the way you read a sentence spoken by someone you have never met. They may be right, may be wrong, and may well be talking about a different match.

If you check the data and find nothing, write that there is nothing. If you remember the match but have no numbers, write from memory. If you neither remember nor have numbers, stay quiet for one more hour and call the groundsman.

Football does not need another certain article. Football needs another accurate one.