N/A: The Football Data No One Ever Wrote Down

Last week a sheet of paper landed on my desk. It was divided into nine sections. Each section had tables, headings, neat little boxes — the architecture almost perfect. Yet every cell carried a single word: N/A. No data. No match name anywhere, no player's name, no date. The paper was full, and yet completely empty. I sat on the bench at the tea stall and thought: this sheet is a mirror of our football. Every box that should hold information about our game is blank. The evening light was fading, a radio was playing commentary of an old match. The commentator was giving the score, but not how many kilometres anyone ran, not how many times someone lost the ball, not who sank to a knee in which minute. This is nothing new. Back in 2026, watching the Russia World Cup at a tea shop in Mymensingh, I understood it early — we remember scores but forget moments. That day Belgium beat Japan 3-2, Chadli scoring from a late counterattack. Afterward I wrote that the corner had ended, but the fourteen seconds after it kept rewriting the story. That essay first taught me that a match is not merely a result — a match is memory. And memory survives only when someone writes it down. I have been doing this for twelve years. Early on I kept a notebook where I recorded not the score but the smell of the match — whether the grass was wet, how many people were in the stands, which player sat alone tying his laces before kickoff. Now when I leaf through it, I see my own handwriting is the only record. There is nothing official. It is not in any federation archive, not in any online database. The match happened, then it was erased — as if it never did. I remember 2026. Sport had stopped everywhere. Our Premier League was cancelled after six rounds. I was following a thirty-two-year-old captain of Mohammedan Sporting Club. Zahid Hossain. He had not been paid for five months. Yet alone, on an empty pitch, in sun and rain, he kept training. I listened to the sound of his boots on dry grass, and where the crowd once stood I heard silence. I called that piece 'The Empty Pitch'. From that writing I learned that absence itself can be a character. Silence, unpaid wages, empty seats — these are not mere background, they tell the story themselves. Since then, before I ask a player about tactics, I ask which months he went unpaid. But after all these years, I feel what I am really doing is not football journalism — I am drawing an empty map. Wherever information should exist, there is a hole. And this map is the most honest portrait of our football. Think about it — the fourteen seconds after a corner. In Europe every frame of those fourteen seconds is broken down. Who turned when, who dropped back, how many centimetres the defensive line shifted — it is all recorded. Here, those fourteen seconds are described by one commentator, as far as his memory holds. When he goes, the seconds go with him. I keep a notebook of the goals that never made the highlight reel. That is my private work. But a nation's football cannot live in one journalist's notebook. That is not sustainable. In 2026 I watched the Qatar World Cup final. Argentina drew 3-3 and then beat France 4-2 on penalties. Messi scored twice, Mbappé scored three. But I was watching the hands of a thirty-five-year-old Messi, and the twenty-one-year-old Enzo Fernández, who won the Young Player award. Weeks later Enzo Fernández joined Chelsea for £106.8 million. I wrote 'The Boy Who Became a Price Tag'. For days I could not write, afraid that in writing about money I would lose the poetry. Then I understood that in football money and emotion are two sides of one coin. One side holds the boy's childhood, the other the buyout clause. Here our problem becomes clear. Enzo's childhood, his first club, his first boots — all of it exists, documented. Because someone decided this boy mattered. Here no one makes that decision. So our boys grow up outside the archive, in the dark. I have one photographer and one editor — two colleagues in all. We avoid marketing. We work in a small circle. Because what is built in a large circle often loses its own memory. This small-circle memory is our real wealth. But here I must speak against myself. Because this is our biggest blind spot. Everyone says we have no data because we are poor, because there is no technology, no facilities. That is partly true. But the real reason is different. To keep data, you must first decide that this moment matters. We never make that decision. Instead we fall in love with the absence. And here is my own trap. I go back to the empty pitch to hear what the crowd left behind. I turn the silence of empty stadiums into poetry. But when an absence becomes beautiful, it stops being urgent. Then we call the empty room lovely, and forget someone was supposed to be in it. I have to change this mistake. Emptiness is simply space left blank — no decision, no effort, no responsibility taken. Those still playing today, their memory is real, their pain is real. I believe data is never neutral. Who keeps which data, who discards it — the real power hides in that selection. So a country that does not write down the fourteen seconds of its matches loses its own story. And there is another trap in football. Some think data means only the metres run. Distance and sprint counts are used to prove how hard a player worked. But pointless running also produces pretty numbers. The boy who stands in the right place and changes the match has fewer entries in the ledger, yet greater value. Numbers are one witness — not the judge. I recall that after Qatar, when Enzo Fernández set foot in London, the number of his fee was in every headline. But where was his smile? Where was his village pitch? A fee is the start of a story, not the end. We forget that before he was a fee, he was a boy who played until the streetlights came on. And here, that boy has no photograph, because no one brought a camera. No one took notes. No one thought this moment was worth keeping. So what this empty sheet taught me is this — it is wrong to see absence as a curse. It is a to-do list. Knowing which data are missing tells us what we must create. Where the room is empty, that is where our hands must go. I closed my notebook. The commentary on the radio had ended, and the stall owner did not switch it off. In the dark the bench is still warm, as if someone has just risen. I know tomorrow there will be another match, another corner, and the fourteen seconds after it will live or die in someone's memory — depending on whether anyone is writing it down today. The question is clear to me: who will write the next fourteen seconds?