Null Result: When Football Analyses Itself With a Blank Spreadsheet

Manchester, a July morning. I open the file from the 2026 World Cup semi-final between England and Croatia in Moscow — the very file that got me called "a kid who has never kicked a ball, what does she know about tactics" to my face by a former international. The file has forty columns: distance covered by half, touches, heat maps sliced into fifteen-minute blocks, passes into the final third, pressures by zone. Not one cell is empty. The spreadsheet is full, symmetrical, formatted for any boardroom.

And it explains nothing.

England led through Kieran Trippier's free kick in the fifth minute. Croatia equalised on 68 through Ivan Perišić's header. On 109, Mario Mandžukić finished it. My spreadsheet said England controlled, England passed more, England held the ball better in the first half. No cell recorded that Croatia stepped up and squeezed England's midfield from around the twentieth minute, that England lost the ability to play out of pressure in exactly the zone where I had not even built a column.

What kills football analysis is not a shortage of data. It is spreadsheets presented in perfect format that contain no judgement at all.

It took me seven years to understand that. I still have to remind myself every week.

An industry that has learned to fill every blank cell

Twelve years ago, when I first walked into the sports department of a broadcaster in Belgrade, "analysis" meant rewatching tape and writing in a notebook. Today every Premier League club runs a full analysis department, and every match is captured as millions of positional data points. Broadcasters overlay expected goals on screen within thirty seconds of a phase of play. Heat maps are drawn live in studio as a form of unassailable evidence.

Viewers have learned to read them too. After every match, forums fill with screenshots of heat maps and a single conclusion: this player runs, that player is lazy. A snapshot of position becomes an indictment of attitude. Nobody asks why the player was there, or what he was supposed to do once he arrived.

The transfer market speaks the same language. In August 2026 Chelsea paid £115 million for Moisés Caicedo — at the time the highest fee in the history of English football. Six months earlier the same club had paid £106.8 million for Enzo Fernández. Both deals were justified to the public with decks of metrics. In the other direction, numbers became the language of punishment: Everton and Nottingham Forest were docked points in the 2026-24 season for breaching financial rules, while Manchester City face 115 charges. English football now buys and convicts in spreadsheets.

In Vietnam the story moves more slowly but in the same direction. The V.League has data, but thin data: a few international providers, a handful of fully tracked matches, the rest still depending on the eye of someone in the stand. On the international stage, Vietnam finished bottom of their group in the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, against Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, China and Indonesia. In exchange, on 5 January 2026, Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 in Bangkok in the second leg of the ASEAN Championship final, winning 5-3 on aggregate — their first title since 2026.

None of us can claim that title came from data. It came from a new head coach, a naturalised striker who scored in the second leg of the final, and a group of domestic players who had been undervalued for years. Yet switch on Vietnamese football talk today and you will find exactly the format I just described: a spreadsheet full of cells, and not one line answering the question "why".

That is the starting point. What follows is four ways a football culture produces null results, and one validation gate to stop it.

The heat map has become a fortune-telling device

A heat map tells you where a player was. It does not tell you what he did there. That is the largest gap in mainstream analysis, and the gap gets filled with guesswork.

Sergio Busquets at his peak had an almost modest heat map: a faint smear around the centre circle. Look at it and you would think he was a safe passer. In reality he was the reason Barcelona never lost the ball. Andrea Pirlo was the same. Conversely, some players have heat maps spread across the whole pitch and are celebrated as engines — when all they are doing is running to places the ball will never arrive.

The problem is not the heat map. The problem is when it is used as a conclusion. On television it is projected like an indictment: look, this player will not run. A heat map has no such function. It is a photograph of position, not an assessment of role.

Based on my experience tracking matches, I keep one rule: never judge a midfielder by a heat map, but by how many times he receives the ball facing the opposition goal. That metric appears in almost none of the commercial data packages sold to broadcasters. It is too small to sell, and yet it is the thing that separates a player who controls a match from one who follows it.

When I tracked Vietnam's matches at the ASEAN Championship, the gap between those two states was uncomfortably clear. In one game the central midfielder kept receiving on the half-turn, facing forward. In another, the same player produced a nearly identical heat map but only ever received in safe positions and played backwards. The heat map cannot tell those two games apart. A human watching can. That is the whole problem.

The back three: abdication dressed as progress

In 2026 Antonio Conte introduced a back three at Chelsea and won thirteen consecutive matches on the way to the Premier League title. It was a genuine solution, tied to a specific group: two wing-backs running like shuttles, a target striker holding the ball, a three-man defence screening the box. Then England copied it. That is when the concept curdled.

A back three has a property few admit: it dilutes responsibility. In a back four, the gap between centre-back and full-back belongs to somebody — a name, a duel, a mistake you can say out loud in a press conference. In a back three, the same gap becomes a systemic issue, a half-space problem, a build-up structure. The coach stops being wrong. He becomes sophisticated.

I am not saying the back three is wrong. I am saying most of the switches to a back three over the past decade were not a tactical advance but a retreat, repackaged. This is truest at big clubs afraid of losing their position: a three-man defence lets them defend with five and attack with three, a piece of tactical accounting that hides a midfield no longer able to control a game.

The test is simple. A genuinely progressive back three creates an extra man in midfield — the ball should circulate through the middle more, not through long diagonals to the flanks. An abdicating back three produces the opposite: more sideways passes, more recycling to the wing-backs, a slight drop in goals conceded accompanied by a steep drop in goals scored. Coaches call that balance. I call it a spreadsheet full of cells with no judgement in it.

The patch is an invisible referee

In esports this is well understood: an update can hand a championship to whichever team adapts fastest. What gets called skill is often a lucky alignment between a team's style and the game's current balance state. When the next patch reverses that state, the same team, the same people, exit in the group stage — and nobody calls it decline.

Football has patches too. They simply do not ship with release notes.

The five-substitute rule permanently changed how big clubs cope with congestion. The crackdown on added time from the 2026-24 season pushed many matches past one hundred minutes, turning fitness into a variable with a very different weight. VAR rewrote defending inside the box. And from 2026 the World Cup expands to forty-eight teams — an extra round, an extra qualifying slot for third-placed group finishers, and with it a completely different risk calculus in the opening phase.

Every one of those changes creates winners and losers. And every time, we attribute the outcome to character, tradition, a winning culture. That is how a patch becomes an invisible referee: it decides the result, then lets us award the credit to each other.

I learned this the expensive way. In March 2026, when the Premier League shut down and I lost my part-time job at a sports café, I started a podcast called Tactical Quarantine with an old friend. By the third episode I said that Liverpool — more than twenty-five points clear at the top — would not be themselves when football returned, because gegenpressing had drained them physically. Thousands of comments called me a rebellious little girl. Football returned, and Liverpool took just 18 of the remaining 33 points. I was not smarter than anyone. I simply read one variable nobody wanted to read at the time: distance covered.

The pandemic took my job, but I took back an entire community. And it taught me that in football, the patch matters more than the form table.

The validation gate: one question

There is a failure mode in analytical work I call the null result. It happens when a system returns a perfectly formatted product — headings, sections, tables, cells — with no conclusion inside. Every field reads "insufficient information to assess". It looks complete. It says nothing.

Football produces null results every weekend. The post-match report with twelve metrics and no sentence. The line about needing to be more clinical, repeated across three press conferences in the same round. The heat map of a midfielder projected on screen to deliver a verdict on his attitude.

Blocking it takes one thing: a validation gate before publication.

Before every piece I force myself to answer exactly one question: what question does this answer? If the answer cannot fit in one sentence, I do not write. If the answer is that it answers nothing, I have two options: rewatch the whole match, or say plainly that I do not know yet. The second option has never cost me a real reader.

That is why I still rewatch full highlights before writing, even when I watched the match live. Not to find more numbers, but to find the answer to a question my spreadsheet left out. In England against Croatia in 2026, that question was: how did Croatia take back midfield? The answer was in none of my forty columns. It was in the column I never built.

Where I might be wrong

I have to be honest here, because it is the entire reason I still get read.

Maybe the null result is the most honest thing in this story. A dead spreadsheet does not lie. A person does. If forced to choose between a silent analysis department and a pundit shouting that he knows everything for certain, I am not sure which side I would pick. People say I run hot, but what I burn is the truths they will not say. The trouble is that sometimes I burn things I have not finished verifying.

Maybe this entire article is a null result written long. I criticise analyses that carry no judgement, using an analysis that carries judgement but lacks publicly verifiable data. If so, I am doing exactly what I condemn, only with more words.

Maybe Vietnam's problem is not a shortage of data. The 2026 ASEAN Championship title came from a new coach, a naturalised striker and a group of undervalued domestic players — not from an analysis department. In other words, smaller football nations might be better off investing in coach education before buying data packages. I believe that about sixty per cent.

And maybe I am the clearest example of the problem. After the 2026 World Cup in Doha I wrote that I had seen Liverpool's next leader in a nineteen-year-old named Jude Bellingham. Qatar 2026: I staked my entire career on a nineteen-year-old kid. When England went out to France in the quarter-finals and he was quiet, people called me a clown. Six months later he moved to Real Madrid and scored 23 goals in his first season. Plenty came back to apologise. But I know better: I was right for a reason not entirely identical to the one I gave. I saw the running intensity and the decisive passes. I did not see the contract, the position, the squad with a hole in midfield. A large part of that prophecy was luck, renamed in data.

A thought moving forward

I will make one more bet, because that is my signature.

At the 2026 World Cup, the champion will be the team that publishes the fewest public metrics among the four semi-finalists. The condition that breaks this prediction: if a genuinely low-seeded side wins its group and reaches the final, my argument is wrong, and cleanly wrong. The reason I believe the prediction: with forty-eight teams and a qualifying slot reserved for third-placed finishers, the group stage becomes a cheap gamble. Strong teams need not risk anything, weak teams get an extra match to survive, and the edge goes to the group that holds its structure inside chaos — not the one with the prettiest spreadsheet.

And I will do something I encourage all of you to copy. Before the opening match I will publish my entire analysis file, empty cells included. If a cell is empty, I will mark it empty instead of filling it with a plausible-sounding guess.

That mocked kid from back then is now teaching people how to watch football. But the teacher has to learn again every week, and this week's lesson is that a wrong judgement still beats a full spreadsheet that says nothing. Because tactics are not there to be explained, they are there to be felt with your heart — after you have rewatched the whole match.