The Empty Spreadsheet in Da Nang: What Is Vietnamese Volleyball Actually Being Analyzed With?

6:12 a.m. The data file opens on my second monitor, the same hour I have sat in front of spreadsheets for ten years, before Tran Phu Street bothers to switch on its lights. Forty-seven rows. Twelve columns. The score column is full: 25-21, 25-19, 23-25, 25-22. The other eleven columns are blank, not a single character. Perfect-pass rate: absent. Successful digs: absent. Attack efficiency broken down by position: absent. The night before, a national league match had been played out in full. Three sets. Seventy minutes. More than a hundred rallies. Every rally is a chain of decisions lasting fractions of a second — the setter reading the block, the attacker choosing a line, the libero rolling a shoulder half a turn to absorb a heavy serve. All of that happened, was real, hit the floor and produced applause. Then all of it vanished. The only thing that survived the night to reach my spreadsheet was four pairs of numbers. I sat still in front of that white space for a long while. My job is not to read scores. My job is to find what remains after the score has finished speaking. That morning, what remained was a blank page. Vietnamese volleyball has a paradox outsiders rarely notice: the audience keeps growing, the public data stands almost still. Over roughly the past fifteen years, volleyball has become a sport with real arena pull in many provinces. Venues in Ninh Binh, Long An, Thai Binh, Quang Ninh and Khanh Hoa are often full for decisive matches. The VTV International Women's Volleyball Cup, held annually in Ninh Binh since 2026, has become one of the region's more respected invitational events, having hosted national teams from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and Kazakhstan. The national championship runs in two phases on a round-robin format, split between men and women, stretching across several months. The Vietnamese women's national team has for years sat inside the SEA Games medal-contention group. Everything emotional is very full. Everything numerical is very thin. Try to look up any national championship match from three years ago. You will find the set scores. You will find the top scorer's name, sometimes. You will find a short match report, a few photos, a few vertical clips on social media. You will not find the perfect-pass rate of either team, not attack efficiency by net position, not aces against service errors. Those numbers exist. They simply were never recorded. I call this the "four layers of data" in Vietnamese volleyball, and I want to walk through each layer slowly, because knowing which layer you stand on is the first condition for not fooling yourself. The first layer is the scoreboard. It gives you the live point score, the set score, and sometimes the name of whoever just scored. The scoreboard is the only layer that works perfectly, automatically, without human labour, and it is also the only layer most spectators ever touch. Its problem is that it answers exactly one question: who won this set. It answers nothing about cause. The second layer is the referees' scoresheet. This is where numbers begin to appear: attack points, block points, service faults, positional faults. But a scoresheet is designed to run a match and handle protests, not to analyse one. It records what happened at a coarse grain, not at a grain fine enough to reconstruct. A spike blocked out of bounds and a spike blocked back into the court are logged identically on many scoresheet templates. To an analyst, those two events differ as much as sky and earth. The third layer is a club's internal notes. I know a handful of V.League coaches who still log every rally by hand, in pencil, using a private notation system they invented themselves. That is the most valuable layer and the easiest to lose. The notebook lives in one person's drawer. If that person leaves the team, the notation system leaves with them. Nobody else can read it. Nobody inherits it. The fourth layer is video-linked data. This is the layer every developed volleyball nation lives on, where each rally is coded into dozens of attributes: serve origin, first-pass quality, which option the setter chose, where the block stood, who covered behind, where the ball went. In Vietnam this layer barely exists at club level. The absence of the fourth layer is not a money problem. One camera on a stand and one careful note-taker can produce the fourth layer for far less than an average foreign-player contract. The problem lies elsewhere: nobody believes the work is worth doing, because for years Vietnamese volleyball has won and lost without needing it. This is where I want to stop and put a concrete example on the table, to show how large the loss really is. Suppose you have exactly what I had that morning: four pairs of scores. You know Team A won 3-1. You know Team A took set two comfortably 25-19 and lost set three narrowly 23-25. Now you want to answer a question that sounds simple: why did Team A lose set three? With four pairs of numbers, you cannot. You can only tell a story. The most popular story will be: Team A got complacent after an easy set two. It is a good story, easy to believe, and entirely without data support. Another plausible story: Team A lost a main attacker to an ankle injury. Another: Team B changed setters and completely shifted the attacking rhythm. Another: Team A fell into a two-attacker rotation and was pinned by repeated serves at the libero. Four stories, four entirely different causes, four entirely different fixes. And nothing in the four pairs of scores lets you pick the right one. The most credible commentator will choose the most compelling story. That is how volleyball analysis in Vietnam operates most of the time: on the pull of the narrative, not the weight of the evidence. In twenty years of following domestic volleyball, I have seen two-attacker rotations decide a great many matches. It is a real, measurable phenomenon: when a team has only two front-row attacking options, the opposing block only needs to distribute two players, the libero reads the ball half a beat earlier, and the attack success rate falls along a fairly stable curve. But to draw that curve you must know exactly who stood where in each rotation, whether the first pass was good or bad, and what the actual attacking option was. Without the fourth layer, you have nothing. I have spent a great deal of time redrawing those curves from video, by eye, rewinding again and again. One match takes me four to five hours to code by hand. That is why I understand why almost nobody does it. But I also know something outsiders do not see: after you code about twenty matches, you start watching volleyball differently. You stop seeing beautiful rallies. You see repeating patterns. And those patterns appear in no commentary anywhere. Another example, closer to Vietnamese viewers. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy is the best-known attacker in Vietnamese women's volleyball, a player who has competed abroad and become the face of a generation. Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen is one of the most powerful opposite hitters in the domestic women's game. On the men's side, Nguyen Ngoc Thuan and Tu Thanh Thuan are names any national championship viewer knows. But try to answer this: when the Vietnamese women's team has Thanh Thuy in the front row, by what percentage does the team's scoring rate rise compared with when she is in the back row? I cannot answer. Not because I have not watched enough matches. Because that number has never been recorded in a verifiable form. I call this blind single-point dependency. Every coach feels it intuitively. Every commentator speaks of it in words like "importance" and "influence". But a real phenomenon with clear tactical consequences is being discussed by feel, when it could be measured with simple numbers. And when a phenomenon is discussed by feel, the consequence is that it is never managed. Nobody builds a contingency plan for a problem nobody can quantify. I want to offer one personal memory, time-stamped, to separate it from the analysis above. In 2026, aged twenty-five, I was an intern at a sports data company in Da Nang. I calculated expected goals for a domestic football club after round twelve: 0.92 goals per match on average, yet the club sat third on 2.1 points per match. I wrote a report concluding they would slide, because luck does not last. My boss refused to publish it, afraid of losing a media contract. By season's end the club had taken four points from their last eight matches and dropped to ninth. I was hurt at being silenced and happy that the numbers were right. Since then I write everything with raw data tables attached so readers can verify for themselves. That memory is not evidence for anything about volleyball. It only explains why I am so uncomfortable with white space. Back to the spreadsheet in Da Nang. There is an objection I hear often: volleyball does not need that much data, because volleyball is a sport of moments and spirit. I partly agree. Volleyball is indeed a sport of moments. At the top level, a set can flip on a single hard serve at the right instant, and no model predicts who will produce that serve. But that is precisely why data matters more. When you have only one moment to win, you need to know exactly what you are betting on. The strongest volleyball nations do not use data to remove randomness. They use it to shrink the random band as far as possible, then let players do miraculous things inside that narrow band. In Vietnam we do the reverse: we let players roam a wide random band, then call good outcomes character and bad outcomes bad luck. That framing is emotionally safe, but it helps no coach deciding whether to keep a third attacker in the rotation. What I want to state clearly is a principle I learned after many mistakes: correlation is not causation, and missing data is not a gap to be filled with speculation. When I am asked why a team lost, the most honest answer is sometimes: I have not decoded it. I watched the tape three times, I recounted every rally, and I still have no satisfactory technical explanation. Saying that is far less comfortable than writing a paragraph about character. But it is true, and in my work truth is the only reusable thing. There is a deeper layer I always think about but rarely write. Sports data has an undercurrent. When a sport starts digitising everything, the value of granular data does not sit only in a club's analysis room. It also sits in a second market, where betting companies pay very well for information that is seconds fresher than anyone else's. I regard this as the darkest side effect of the digitisation of sport. In developed volleyball nations, much of the professional data infrastructure is fed by that money to some degree. That creates a temptation hard to refuse: good data needs money, and the easiest money comes from a purpose I do not want to serve. I have no clean solution. But I know I want Vietnamese volleyball to build its data infrastructure another way — slower, more expensive, starting in the clubs' own analysis rooms and with people serious enough to do the work for years without guaranteed fair pay. Before closing, I want to offer a personal judgement, beginning with the words "my data leans towards", as a handhold for the reader. My data leans towards a rather sad conclusion: the gap between Vietnamese volleyball and Asia's leading group is not physical, and not in basic technique, but in the speed of learning. Teams with better recording and analysis systems will learn faster after every match, and within three to four seasons that small gap will compound into a large one. This is a prediction that can be refuted. I am ready to be wrong if someone brings data proving otherwise. That is how I want this conversation to continue. As for the blank spreadsheet that morning in Da Nang, I kept it. I did not delete it. It sits in a folder named "not yet recorded", with four pairs of scores stranded on the first row. Sometimes I open it, not to analyse, but to remind myself that every white space in a spreadsheet is a real rally that was forgotten. Some attacker rose at exactly the right moment, touched the ball at exactly the right point, and scored a living point. More than a hundred moments like that in a single evening. And we kept exactly four numbers. If you sit on a club's board, I want to ask you one thing: do you know why your team lost set three last night? Not the answer in the form of a story. A number. Because if you do not have that number, then in three years you will still lose set three — just in a different arena, with a different attacker who has been forgotten in the same white space.