Fourteen Empty Columns: The Data Pipeline Vietnamese Volleyball Is Missing

On the night of August 12, I opened a volleyball statistics file sent to me by a friend who coaches in Vietnam. The file had fourteen columns. The "perfect pass rate" column was blank. The "blocks per set" column was blank. The "hitting efficiency of the two outside hitters" column was blank. The "point distribution by rotation" column was blank. Only three columns held numbers: the score, the number of sets won, and the name of the top scorer. I sat looking at that spreadsheet for a long while in my small apartment in Osaka, and realised I was holding something else entirely: the record of a match whose memory had been erased.

Numbers do not lie, but the people who read numbers do.

Vietnamese volleyball is living its busiest months in two decades. The women's national team, built around Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, Doan Thi Lam Oanh, Nguyen Thi Kim Lien and Hoang Thi Kieu Trinh, appears regularly at Asian and world-level events. The VTV Cup is back with packed stands. The SEA V.League has become a viewing habit for fans. The national league has sponsors, television coverage and transfer contracts. On the men's side, names such as Nguyen Ngoc Thuan, Tu Thanh Thuan and the young generation at Sanest Khanh Hoa and Bien Phong keep the venues in Da Nang and Ninh Binh full.

But one thing has not grown alongside Vietnamese volleyball: its information infrastructure.

In Japan, where I work, every touch in a V.League match is coded. Who passed, where the pass went, how high it travelled, which position attacked, which direction the ball bounced — all of it sits in a public database, downloadable after every round. A head coach in Japan's top division can open a laptop at eleven at night and see exactly what an opponent's perfect pass rate was across the last two sets. That is not advanced technology. It is the discipline of a pipeline.

That pipeline has three layers. Collection: who records, what they record, and under which definition. Coding: a person sitting courtside or at a screen tagging every rally. Interpretation: turning numbers into tactical decisions. Vietnamese volleyball currently has a very strong third layer. The analysts speak well, the commentators catch the rhythm of a match, the coaches read the flow of play. But the first and second layers are almost entirely unbuilt.

When the collection and coding layers are empty, the interpretation layer fills the gap with emotion — and that is the moment Vietnamese volleyball starts analysing with poetry rather than with numbers.

Based on my experience covering matches, I sat down and counted. In one post-match panel about the women's national team, the words "spirit", "character", "fire" and "hunger" were used twenty-three times to explain a result. A specific metric was mentioned four times, and all four were point totals. Nobody discussed the perfect pass rate in the fourth set. Nobody discussed how far hitting efficiency dropped in the two rotations where an outside hitter had to receive from position one. We praise a defensive save with our eyes, then draw conclusions with our hearts.

It sounds harmless. It is not.

When a volleyball culture has no numbers, every argument can be right. A coach substitutes in the fifth set; a win is called a "change of rhythm", a loss is called a "loss of composure". No data can arbitrate. And when nothing arbitrates, reputation replaces evidence. Whoever speaks loudest, whoever has the largest following, is correct.

This is where I want to tell an old story. In 2026, at the World Athletics Championships in London, I built a heat map and running-trajectory dataset for Karsten Warholm in the 400m hurdles. I did not tell a medal story. I simply asked: where does he plant his foot, and how does his stride rhythm change between the last two hurdles. The six-minute video drew 1.2 million views, eight times the channel's daily average. The lesson I took was something else: audiences love clarity, and clarity only arrives when the data pipeline does not leak.

A year later I wrote a pre-match analysis ahead of Japan versus Belgium: Japan would lead by two goals through aggressive pressing, then lose in the final ten minutes because they could not manage the tempo. Colleagues laughed. People laughed at me before Japan–Belgium. After the match, they went looking for that article. But what I remember most is not the fifteen thousand shares. What I remember is that I dared to make a structured prediction, including both the conditions under which it would be right and those under which it would be wrong. If it is right, it becomes legend. If it is wrong, it is just a tweet. The difference between those two outcomes lies in stating clearly what you are basing it on.

Vietnamese volleyball needs exactly that: a place to state clearly what it is basing things on.

In 2026, when arenas closed and everything moved to screens, I made a documentary series about simulated competitions between real clubs. Four episodes, 2.8 million views. What I learned had nothing to do with gaming. The empty stadiums of 2026 taught me this: sport does not live in the arena, it lives in the heartbeat of the viewer. But a heartbeat is only raw material. Turning it into knowledge requires someone sitting down after the match and writing every rally into a spreadsheet. That person never appears on television. That person is an entire volleyball ecosystem.

So when I received a file with fourteen columns and eleven of them empty, I did not think about a lack of tools. I thought about a lack of people, of standards, and of the habit of publishing. A national league can buy expensive software and still have no data, if nobody defines "perfect pass" the same way across every match. A federation can purchase a modern coding system and still have no data, if the end-of-match statistics sheet is never uploaded.

And here is the contrarian angle I want to hold on to. The biggest risk to Vietnamese volleyball lies elsewhere: fake numbers arriving before real ones. When demand for analysis grows faster than the supply of data, the market manufactures spreadsheets that look highly professional, reports with percentages to two decimal places, judgements written by tools that never watched the match. Fans have no way to verify them. Vietnamese volleyball data may die because it was filled with something that looks like data.

I have seen this in the international sports analytics industry. A report with wrong figures, once exposed, needs only one article to correct. But a wrong definition used for three years, multiplied across thousands of articles, takes a generation to fix. A pipeline that leaks at the first layer is always more expensive than one that leaks at the third.

So the problem facing Vietnamese volleyball sounds very small and is in fact very large: standardise definitions, publish raw data, and state your sources. None of those three requires a huge budget. They require one person responsible enough to sit courtside with a laptop, and one person above them insisting the results appear before the first commentary piece is published.

I do not dream of a day when Vietnamese volleyball is flooded with spreadsheets. I want the opposite. I want debates about the women's national team to depend less on who is speaking and more on which rotation is hiding a hole. I want a young coach in Long An or Ninh Binh to open a laptop at eleven at night and see exactly what he needs to see, instead of hearing another compliment about character. From the 400m start line to the national team room, rhythm remains a language. But to speak that language to anyone else, you first have to write it down.

Fourteen columns. Three with numbers. I still keep that file on my machine, to remind myself that a sport can have millions of heartbeats in the stands and still not hold a single line of data about how the ball crossed the net. The heartbeat is the hardest thing to measure, and Vietnamese volleyball already has it. The rest is only discipline.