Empty Cells on the Spreadsheet: When Modern Football Returns N/A

1:47 in the morning, August 12, at a sixth-floor apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, I open the analysis sheet for this week's podcast episode. Nine columns. Eighty-one cells. All of them N/A.

No team names. No player names. No xG, no PPDA, no pass completion rate, no minutes played. Only a nine-dimension framework — tactics, finance, results, standings, rules, dressing room, risk, public opinion, industry transmission chain — and inside that framework, a perfect void.

I laughed. Then I understood something thirteen years in this trade taught me but I always forget: a framework is not an answer. And modern football is drowning in frameworks that were never filled in.

Southgate did not collapse; he buried himself with safety. That is true of one national team. It is also true of an entire analysis industry.

Ten Years of Frameworks

In 2026, when I started writing for a sports paper, football analysis was a craft. You watched the match. You took notes. You remembered. You wrote. No nine-dimension spreadsheet. No xG model updated per half. No "systemic risk" and "industry transmission chain" columns in any article.

Ten years later, every sports newsroom in Europe has a dashboard. Every Premier League club has at least twelve data analysts. Every manager's press conference is sliced into fifteen-second clips, tagged, classified, archived. Every eighteen-year-old in the Portuguese third tier has a profile page with forty-two metrics.

This is the golden age of the framework. Tactics are split into "in possession" and "transition". Club finance is split into "broadcasting revenue", "commercial revenue", "wage bill", "net debt". The opinion cycle is split into "support", "neutral", "crisis". Everything has a template. Everything has a column. Everything waits to be filled.

The problem lies elsewhere. The framework grows nine-dimensional, but the truth grows thinner. And when the truth does not arrive, the analyst must choose: leave it blank, or invent.

I have seen both. And I have chosen both.

In 2026, when every league was suspended by the pandemic, I was twenty-three, a new staffer at a sports podcast in Paris. My boss postponed all live shows. I proposed a series called "Rerun Reboot" — digging up old matches and analyzing them with new data. My first episode was the 2026 Champions League final, Bayern Munich against Manchester United.

I had no Opta data for that match. Nobody did. But I had the tape, and I drew pass maps on my living-room floor with a compass and a ruler. I said into the mic: "Man United did not win through Fergie time. They won because Bayern's xG dropped sixty-four percent after the eightieth minute, when both wing-backs stopped running underlaps."

I did not have the real xG figure. I estimated it. But I said it as if I had it. Forty-five days later, I had made twelve episodes. Listenership rose from nine thousand to thirty-eight thousand per month. My boss signed me to a proper contract.

That was the first lesson about the danger of an empty framework. When you have a beautiful framework and a void, you will be tempted to fill it with the closest approximation. And the closest approximation is usually the worst.

Data gave me a body, but the match is what breathes a soul into it. If I only have estimated data, I only have a corpse.

Three Kinds of Empty Cells

Empty cells in a football spreadsheet are not one thing. There are at least three, and they are dangerous in three different ways.

The first kind: empty because the match has nothing to measure.

In the 2026-24 season I watched a Ligue 1 game between a small club and a big one. The score was 0-0. No goals in ninety minutes.

The small club's PPDA was 22.4 — meaning they pressed only when the ball entered their own third, and barely pressed in the opponent's half. Their passes in the final third: seven. Touches in the opponent's box: three. Shots: one.

My spreadsheet for that match had five N/A columns. Not because I lacked data. Because that club did not produce data.

This is the first kind of empty cell: a team playing not to create events. They do not defend by tackling. They defend by making the match not happen.

Analysts call it a "low block". I call it safe death. And it is spreading across Europe.

The second kind: empty because the analyst lacks the courage to look.

In July 2026, after England lost to Italy in the Euro final on penalties, I wrote a hot take: Southgate lost because his five substitutions all reduced pressure, not because of missed penalties.

I rewatched all seven England matches. I counted fourteen substitutions. I calculated that touches in the opponent's final third dropped fourteen percent after each change. I did not invent. I counted by hand.

But before that, while the final was still being played, I did not dare look at it. I wanted England to win. I wanted Southgate to succeed. And that desire blanked out three analysis columns I should have filled in my head.

This is the most dangerous kind of empty cell: one the analyst creates himself, because he does not dare look at what he does not want to see.

The third kind: empty because the tactical structure is designed to produce it.

In November 2026, I applied the Southgate framework to Morocco. I predicted Morocco would reach the World Cup semi-finals through a central pressing block and Hakimi operating as an auxiliary winger.

When Morocco beat Belgium 2-0, Hakimi made nine carries straight into the box. On December 10, Morocco beat Portugal 1-0. People who had mocked me began to tip their hats.

But the interesting part was not Morocco. It was Portugal. Portugal's spreadsheet in that match: sixty-two percent possession, six hundred and seventy passes, ninety-one percent pass completion, twelve shots, no goals.

Portugal's spreadsheet looks full. But if you divide passes by real chances, you find a giant empty cell in the "chance quality" column. Morocco did not need the ball. They only needed Portugal to hold it somewhere harmless.

Morocco was not a shock; it was a reverse problem Europe forgot to solve. And that reverse problem creates a new kind of empty cell: the empty cell of the dominator. You hold the ball much, you pass much, you own every metric, and you go home.

These three kinds of empty cells are not the same. But they meet at one point: they are all products of modern football.

Modern football has become a game of frameworks. Every match is a dataset. Every player is a profile. Every manager is a model. And when everything is a framework, the most beautiful framework wins — until it meets a team that plays to blank the framework.

That is Southgate's tragedy. He built a perfect framework not to lose. And he did not lose. He only did not win. Across seven matches at Euro 2026, England conceded only two goals. No manager at that tournament had a better defence. But when the final came, when a goal was needed to be champions, his framework had no cell for it.

Southgate did not collapse; he buried himself with safety. And his spreadsheet will forever carry an N/A in the row labelled "goals in the final".

At the same time, in another corner of European football, a similar phenomenon was unfolding around Mbappé. In the France-Argentina round of sixteen at the 2026 World Cup, I sat in front of the screen as a statistics student and posted one line: "Mbappé is already the most important player of the next generation; Griezmann is only the assistant." Five hundred replies in ten minutes. Seventy percent of them insulting.

To defend the claim, I stayed up all night, rewinding the first half again and again. Mbappé had forty-five touches, seven successful dribbles, and hit thirty-seven km/h. Griezmann had thirty-two touches and zero successful dribbles. I wrote a two-thousand-word piece based on Opta data. A producer in Paris called me for a trial recording.

Mbappé does not erase statistics; he burns them in the most beautiful way. But what I learned was not about Mbappé. It was about the framework. A shocking sentence only survives when a specific number stands behind it. Without a number, it is just noise.

The Transfer Market: The Most Expensive Empty Cell

The transfer market does not sell players; it sells unverified promises. And the best way to sell an unverified promise is to put it in a framework.

In the summer of 2026, a twenty-two-year-old striker from the Dutch Eredivisie moved to a Premier League club for a reported fee of forty million euros plus ten million in add-ons. Three days before the deal closed, I read a seven-hundred-word analysis on a French sports site. It contained five numbers: goals last season, minutes per goal, touches in the box, key passes, and top sprint speed.

None of those numbers related to how he would play in a league where defenders are twenty percent stronger. There was no column for "adaptability". No model for "pressure of a forty-million contract".

The framework was beautiful. The empty cell was huge. And the buyer paid for the framework.

Six months later, that striker had three goals in twenty matches. Not because he was bad. Because nobody filled in the empty cell called "adaptation".

This is what women's football endures too, but worse. Women's leagues are not invested in for their sporting value; they are placed inside corporate social-responsibility campaigns and ESG indices. The women's football spreadsheet is not empty because of a lack of good players. It is empty because of a lack of people who genuinely want to measure.

Where I Might Be Wrong

I might be wrong here. And I must say that clearly, because I am the man who once invented an xG figure on a 2026 podcast and lived with it for years.

If you read this with a red pen, you will say: "You are sophist. You are turning a lack of data into an argument. You are doing exactly what you just criticized."

Yes. And that is the risk I accept.

But there are three ways to behave when the spreadsheet returns N/A.

Way one: you invent. You fill the empty cell with estimation, intuition, inspiration. This is the worst way, because you create a fake truth that looks like a real truth. I did this in 2026 with the sixty-four percent figure. I was lucky that my estimate was close. But luck is not a method.

Way two: you skip. You delete the row and analyze only what has data. This is the most common way in sports newsrooms. It is clean, it is safe, and it makes every article look identical.

Way three: you publicly state that the cell is empty. And you turn the emptiness itself into the object of analysis.

Way three is what I choose now. Not because it is more correct methodologically. Because it is more honest humanly.

I believe the modern football reader is mature enough to recognize the difference. They are tired of full spreadsheets that say nothing. They are used to three-thousand-word analyses built on a single misunderstood metric. They are waiting for someone to say: "Here, we do not know."

The frightening thing is: readers are not fooled by emptiness. They are fooled by fake fullness.

But I must also say this. An empty cell is not always an answer. Sometimes it is just laziness. If an analyst leaves a cell empty because he will not watch enough tape, that is not honesty. That is evasion.

The line between "honest with emptiness" and "lazy with emptiness" is thin. And I have walked back and forth across it for thirteen years. I am still not sure where I stand.

My Prediction

I will bet on something you can verify this season.

In the coming season, at least three major analyses on European sports sites will be built entirely on empty data cells — meaning the author has no accurate figures for his central claim, yet presents it as if he does.

How to verify: when you read a line like "he is the best pressing player in Europe", look for the number behind it. If there is no source, no metric name, no date — that is an empty cell painted over.

And I will bet one more thing: the team that wins the Champions League next season will be the one with the lowest systemic-risk index across the three knockout rounds. Not the team that scores the most. Not the team that holds the ball the most. The team that exposes the fewest empty cells.

If I am wrong, I will sit in front of my nine-dimension spreadsheet and this time I will leave it blank. Publicly. No paint.

And if there is one thing thirteen years of writing about football has taught me, it is this: the best writer is not the one with the most data. It is the one who knows when to leave it blank.