Empty Dossiers, Wrong Signings: Football Is Reading 'N/A' as 'No Risk'

In November, a sporting director at a Ligue 1 club received a twenty-two-page scouting dossier on a twenty-one-year-old winger. Every field was filled in neatly. Off-ball running metrics: present. Touches inside the box per minute: present. Heat map: present. On page nineteen, under "muscular and joint injury risk," the empty field was marked with three characters: N/A.

He skimmed it, closed the folder, and three days later signed.

That is how an information gap becomes a twelve-million-euro decision. In the language of the scouting room, N/A does not mean "no risk." It means "nobody knows." But once a dossier runs twenty-two pages deep, once every other field carries a number, the reader's eye assigns the blank the most comfortable available meaning: clean.

This is the single most serious error in the modern professional football decision chain, and it does not lie in missing data. It lies in missing data being presented exactly like complete data.

Context: an industry selling certainty it does not own

Over fifteen years, European football built an enormous information apparatus around itself. Every match in the five major leagues generates thousands of positional data points. Every player is tracked by GPS in every training session. Every Premier League or Ligue 1 club has an analytics department, usually between three and twelve people.

But that system is paid for by a revenue stream that is contracting, and that is the part that matters.

Ligue 1 is the clearest case. In 2026, Mediapro signed the domestic broadcast deal at roughly 814 million euros per season, a figure that stunned the industry. In October 2026, Mediapro failed to make its payments and the contract collapsed. Domestic Ligue 1 rights have never returned to that level: around 600 million euros per season for 2026–2026, falling to roughly 500 million for the 2026–2026 package with DAZN and beIN Sports. In August 2026, the clubs themselves launched their own channel, Ligue 1+, priced at 14.99 euros a month.

When broadcast money contracts, two things happen at once. Clubs cut staff in the departments whose output is hardest to measure, and scouting is among them. At the same time, pressure to find bargains rises, because buying low and selling high stops being a side strategy and becomes the business model.

The result is a paradox I have watched at at least four clubs over the past three seasons: analytics budgets shrink while the volume of data to be processed grows. Nobody has more people to read more data. They only have more dashboards.

And when people must read more in less time, they start reading by form. Bold fields matter. Blank fields are nothing to worry about.

Alongside that runs a different incentive entirely: betting markets and the sports media need certainty. A pundit who says "I don't know" loses airtime. A news site that says "unverified" loses clicks. Ambiguity does not sell advertising, so it is stripped out at the level of language before it is ever stripped out at the level of data.

I once sat in a meeting room in Marseille while a global sponsor presented on partnership performance. The entire presentation revolved around brand exposure metrics, seconds of logo airtime, social impressions. Not one line about whether the stands were fuller, or whether kids in the neighbourhood next to the stadium still bought tickets. Global sponsors do not buy clubs. They buy exposure indices. Once you understand that, you understand why so much sponsored football analysis has the shape of a table rather than the shape of a question.

The machine that turns gaps into news

Start where it is most visible: the transfer rumour market.

A transfer rumour passes through five layers before it reaches you. Layer one is a real source, usually saying only that a club made an enquiry. Layer two is a reporter who needs copy and rewrites it as "interested." Layer three is an aggregator who upgrades it to "top target." Layer four is a social account that compresses it to "done deal." Layer five is an analysis piece, and by then the thing being analysed is no longer the event but a version of the event bent four times.

The striking part is that every layer is honest within its own scope. The layer-two reporter is not lying when writing "interested," because an enquiry genuinely is a form of interest. The layer-three aggregator is not fabricating when calling him a target, because the name genuinely is on the club's list. Nobody lies. The aggregate is still wrong.

This is the point I want to press hardest: the largest distortion in modern football information does not come from fake news, but from true news filed at the wrong verification tier. Nobody in that chain has an incentive to fabricate, and precisely for that reason nobody in that chain has an incentive to stop.

I know this because I have stood on both sides. In late 2026, I wrote that Monaco would collapse after selling Kylian Mbappé. The piece cited a specific number: Monaco scored 107 Ligue 1 goals in 2026–2026, with Mbappé contributing 15 of them plus a run of decisive assists. That contrarian call was mocked for three months. Then the move to PSG was completed at 180 million euros, and the piece was shared more than fifty thousand times.

People laughed at me for three months, but laughter never scores a goal.

But the lesson I took was not "I was right." It was that I was right for the wrong reason. I was right because 107 goals is a real number, yet I never counted how many of them were scored in the final fifteen minutes when opponents had already stretched open. I never went back to the tape to count how often Monaco's midfield played through the gap between left-back and left centre-back for Mbappé. Had someone done that work and found that most of those goals came from a structure that could not be reproduced, I would have had to rewrite the entire argument while keeping the conclusion. Being right for the wrong reason is a kind of luck that should never be celebrated.

That is when I set my own rule: go to the ground first, write afterwards.

The denominator trap: right number, wrong story

Now to the heaviest technical part, and this is where I want you to read slowly.

Almost every football broadcast in Europe now displays expected goals. That is genuine progress. But the metric has a technical property rarely mentioned on air: it only means something next to its denominator.

Three matches is about two hundred and seventy minutes. For an average team, that is fewer than thirty shots. At that sample size, the gap between expected goals and actual goals carries almost no information. But a television graphic has no room to write "sample too small." It has room to write a number. And the number gets written.

The consequence is a structured form of perceptual distortion. Viewers remember the number, not the sample. Three weeks later, when the club sacks its manager, that number resurfaces in every post-mortem, this time with no note about sample size at all.

The same mechanism runs on pressing intensity. That metric measures how many passes an opponent completes before each defensive action. Lower is more aggressive. It is a beautiful metric, easy to grasp, and extremely easy to misread, because it depends almost entirely on the opponent and on game state. A team that presses ferociously for twenty minutes then drops into a low block will post a modest full-match average. Someone reading the table concludes the team was passive. Someone in the stand tells you the opposite story.

I watched a Ligue 1 match last season where the home side's figure was nearly twice as bad as the away side's, and afterwards a television show concluded the home team lacked ambition. What actually happened: the home side pressed extremely high for twenty-five minutes, went two goals up, then shifted into a 4-4-2 block and let the opponent hold three hundred harmless passes. The metric recorded a deliberate concession and called it weakness. The tape recorded a tactical decision and called it a win.

Data walks me to the stadium gate; eyes walk me into the dressing room. No spreadsheet tells you the story of those first twenty-five minutes.

One more example, at a different level. Every season at least one team is praised for its spirit and its system when it goes deep in a cup. Most of the time, what carried it there was a favourable draw and one match in which every shot went in. That is not a system. That is variance. But a favourable draw does not produce a television graphic, and "tactical identity" does. So identity gets written, and variance gets forgotten.

Scouting dossiers and the art of hiding gaps

Back to the twenty-two-page dossier.

There is a technical reason why N/A turns up under injury risk far more often than under off-ball running. Data providers track almost everything that happens on the pitch. They track where a player runs, where he receives, where he shoots. They cannot track orthopaedic history. That history lives in medical files, which belong to the owning club, and the owning club has no incentive to share it.

So the modern scouting dossier is very full on grass and very empty on people. And that emptiness is not flagged red. It is left white, and then read as clean.

This mechanism explains a pattern I keep seeing: a player arrives with a beautiful dossier, plays well for seven matches, then suffers a soft-tissue injury and vanishes for two months. Later the coverage says "nobody could have predicted this." Somebody could. That somebody simply had no data to prove it, and in a decision culture built on dashboards, an unplotted concern does not exist.

This is where I part company with the analytics community I belong to. We have taught clubs a dangerous habit: trust only what is measured. Meanwhile the largest risks in a transfer sit in unmeasured territory: dressing-room relationships, adaptability to a new language, injury history, the capacity to absorb pressure in a new city.

No model computes that. But a person can see it. Matches are decided where the audience is not looking, and so are transfers.

The price tag and the accounting trap

Now to money, where the same class of error appears as arithmetic.

When a club pays one hundred million euros for a player on a six-year contract, it has not spent one hundred million this year. In the books, the fee is amortised across six years, roughly seventeen million per year, plus wages. If that player is sold in year three, the remaining book value is about fifty million, and anything above that is booked as profit. This is why clubs can sell players below market value and still report a gain.

I walk through the mechanics not to teach accounting but to make a point about coverage. Almost no outlet in Vietnam or France prints those three numbers together: transfer fee, contract length, and remaining book value. So every "expensive or cheap" debate happens without a denominator.

At the same time, add-on clauses change the nature of a deal yet are almost never disclosed: performance payments, sell-on percentages to the previous club, buy-back rights. Two transfers both reported as "thirty million euros" can differ by fifteen million in real value. Fans read the price tag and think they know. They know nothing.

And here is where I connect it to a wider view of the football business. Shirt advertising is eroding the link between clubs and their local communities, not because sponsorship money is bad, but because that money is measured in aggregate indices rather than in relationships. You cannot measure the child in Marseille's thirteenth arrondissement who buys a ticket because he sees a local taxi firm's logo on the chest of the player he loves. You can measure the seconds a global logo spends on air. What gets measured gets protected. What does not gets cut.

And here is the line I want football people to read aloud: do not look at the number on the price tag; look at the team after the player leaves. Marseille selling off its biggest names through the past decade is a free case study for anyone wanting to understand what happens when you collect the money but lose the structure.

What the cameras do not show

Let me tell you about a match I attended.

July 2026, Moscow, the semi-final between Croatia and England. The night before, I wrote that Croatia would reach the final because Luka Modrić and Ivan Rakitić would control midfield. The next day Croatia won 2–1 after extra time, Mario Mandžukić scoring the decider on 109 minutes.

People usually tell that match through two defensive headers and a goal in extra time. That is the part the cameras cover. The part I want to tell sits elsewhere.

In the first half, I kept my eyes on England's wide midfielders whenever Croatia had the ball in their own half. When Modrić received, those two pushed up with the midfield line, and space opened behind them. Croatia did not attack it immediately. They let the game flow. Around the thirtieth minute I started counting: each time Croatia switched play from one flank to the other, the gap between England's midfield line and back line stretched by another beat. Nobody recorded that number. No metric measures "beats of stretch."

In the second half, when Croatia accelerated, that stretch became chances. Not because England played badly. Because England had run more, at a younger age, and were forced to run into spaces the opponent had deliberately left open.

Matches are decided where the audience is not looking. Decided in the first thirty minutes, at 0–0, when nobody had any reason to remember them.

A shocking opinion is only worth something when it stands on a detail others overlooked. Had I simply written "Croatia are stronger in midfield," that would be a meaningless sentence. What turned it into a forecast was watching the running rhythm of England's two wide midfielders across thirty goalless minutes.

But I have to be honest about my own limits here, and I will say so in the next section.

Where I might be wrong

If you have read this far, you may think I am arguing to throw out the dashboards and return to the eye. That is not what I mean, and if I have left that impression, I have failed at self-correction.

Three places where I might be wrong.

First, data quality is improving faster than I acknowledge. I described gaps in medical records as though they were a constant. They are not. Injury-prediction models built on running load and mechanical stress over the past three seasons at some European clubs have reached accuracy sufficient to change transfer decisions. If I hold the line that "data never reaches the dressing room" for another three years, I will become the conservative who needs to be right.

Second, my comparison between eye and number is structurally biased. When data and intuition conflict, I tend to remember the times intuition was right and forget the times it was wrong, because the times it was right are the ones that get retold. That is a memory error, not a method. And when a number contradicts what my eyes saw, the correct response is not to wave it away but to name the anomaly and go find the cause.

Third, and most importantly: my argument that "a blank field gets read as clean" can be used for bad ends. Some clubs can use it as an excuse to reject all quantitative judgement, retreat to one man's gut, and call that field experience. I have seen it happen. Field experience without data is not a method. It is a habit protected by seniority.

I do not want to steer the ship from one side to the other. The issue is not numbers against eyes. The issue is unlabelled blanks.

Closing, open

My forecast, laid down here for you to check: this season, at least one club in one of Europe's five major leagues will be found to have signed a player on the basis of a dossier containing fewer than nine hundred tracked minutes, in a competition where the data provider does not have complete positional coverage. When it happens, the default reaction will be to blame the scout. The right reaction is to ask why a gap was never flagged red inside a process everyone believed was controlled.

And while we wait for that, I will still go to the ground, still note the things no dashboard holds, still call the people I trust, and still publish my judgement before kick-off, so that when I am wrong I have no road back.

When the world pauses, I go back to where the audience is still listening. That is the only rule I have kept for thirty-one years.