The Limits of the Spreadsheet: When Badminton Data Returns N/A

Late one afternoon at the arena, I was handed a twelve-page analytical report on a badminton tournament inside Vietnam's national competition system. Twelve A4 pages, printed double-sided. The tables were neatly ruled. The metric column listed everything: average smash speed, rally length, unforced error rate, net-point win rate, front-court movement count. In every result cell, one phrase repeated itself: "N/A – insufficient information to assess."

The match had been played. I sat in the fourth row and watched it unfold over forty-three minutes. Two players stood thirteen point four metres apart, covered nearly six kilometres between them, and struck the shuttle more than seven hundred times. What did not exist in that report was the person filling in the cells. That analyst had never set foot in the arena. He received the video file, opened the software, and the software could read nothing.

I almost laughed. Then I stopped, because I knew that report was being used to make real decisions: who joins the national squad, who gets shelved, which pair receives funding for the next SEA Games cycle. A stack of empty paper was carrying the fate of nineteen-year-olds on its back.

Since I entered this profession — I did not choose journalism; journalism chose me on the track in 2026 — sports data in Vietnam has travelled a long way. Back then, the press room at the national athletics championships in Binh Duong had one power socket and three reporters. Now every badminton event in the national system has at least one statistics provider, a multi-angle camera crew, and a data sheet exported after each match.

Badminton is technically well suited to data collection. The court is small, thirteen point four metres long and six point one metres wide, with two players and one shuttle. There is no eleven-man scramble across grass, no rebounding wall, no physical contact. Fixed cameras can cover the entire playing surface. In theory, it is an ideal environment for digitisation.

The Badminton World Federation tiers its tour clearly: World Tour Super 1000, 750, 500, 300 and 100, plus Challenger and International events. Each tier carries different ranking points, and ranking points decide Olympic qualification. Vietnamese badminton has its milestones: Nguyen Tien Minh, born in 2026, competed at four consecutive Olympic Games from Beijing 2026 to Tokyo 2026 and once reached the world top five; Nguyen Thuy Linh, Vietnam's long-standing number one in women's singles; Vu Thi Trang, a veteran of both women's singles and doubles.

But the analytical infrastructure lags far behind those milestones. And the gap shows most clearly in exactly the place where that twelve-page report was blank.

What can be measured and what decides a match are two different sets.

Badminton has metrics that measure very well. Smash speed is the clearest example. Shuttles have been recorded above 400 km/h under specialised measurement conditions, and that number always attracts media attention. Rally length is measurable. Net approaches are measurable. Fault rate on serve is measurable. Win rate on straight smashes is measurable.

All of these are outcomes. They describe the final score, not the cause.

Modern badminton has a technical vocabulary I always want to explain to newcomers. The serve. The clear, driving the shuttle to the back of the opponent's court. The drop shot, a soft stroke landing just behind the net. The net shot, taken tight to the tape, sometimes with spin. The drive, a flat, fast stroke at mid-height. The smash, struck downward from above at maximum force. And the split step, a small, almost invisible movement made the instant the opponent contacts the shuttle.

Of the first six elements, five can be counted. The sixth determines the other five.

The smash that decides a rally is the fourth or fifth stroke in a sequence. Before it comes a deep clear that forces the opponent back into the left corner. Before that, a drop shot that drags the opponent forward to the net. Before that, a small split step, almost invisible to the naked eye, that places the body's centre of gravity exactly where it needs to be to spring. No software scores the quality of that split step. It is not a shuttle contact, so it does not enter the contact column. It is not a step long enough to register, so it does not enter the distance column.

And that split step is what decides the rally.

Since 2026, the rally-point scoring system to twenty-one has been widely adopted. Every rally carries point value, so rallies have grown shorter but far more intense. Total distance covered in an elite match can exceed six kilometres, and most of that distance is small steps, not long strides. The statistics count the long strides. Nobody counts the small ones.

I still remember an afternoon at the national athletics championships in 2026. I was waiting for the women's 400-metre hurdles and by chance noticed a young athlete ranked seventh overall. She finished fifth. But the way she placed her foot before the hurdle, the way she held her balance after landing, was entirely different from the rest. The electronic board recorded none of it. I abandoned my prepared script, stood at the barrier for two hours, and wrote a long piece on her potential. The article caused an argument. But the field instinct was right, and the scoreboard had nothing to say.

World Cup 2026 taught me that stars are not born in the stands; they are born in the scramble. That year I was sent to Russia. At one group-stage match, I abandoned a planned piece on a famous attacker to follow a nineteen-year-old full-back. He did not score. He was not voted man of the match. But the number of times he dropped back to cover for his teammates, the metres he ran in the second half, appeared in none of the statistical sheets the newsroom sent along.

That is when I understood something about my trade. Data answers the question of what happened. It does not answer the question of why it happened. And at the elite level, the second question is the one with value.

In 2026, when the pandemic wiped out the calendar, I sat at home for three weeks without writing a word. In 2026, with no athletes around, I discovered I could still run on imagination. I contacted fifteen national track-and-field athletes, persuaded them to film training sessions at home, and built a column that people later called "virtual athletics." Two months, three hundred thousand reads. There was not a single technical metric in it. Only people, and how they adapted.

That experience taught me that a sporting nation can lack facilities, lack funding, even lack athletes — but it cannot lack storytellers. And the storyteller has to stand where the event happens.

Back to the twelve-page report. Its problem is not that it is wrong. Its problem is that it is right in a useless way. Every cell returns N/A, and that is an accurate conclusion for a methodology placed in the wrong spot. The software cannot read the split step, cannot read the athlete's eyes at the service line at 18-19, cannot read the coach's sigh after a missed shot.

But the decision-makers do not read that report as a confession. They read it as a verdict. And so a young athlete who ran six kilometres in forty-three minutes is judged by an empty cell.

There is a paradox here that I consider more important than the technology story itself.

Over the past twelve months, the number of sports data providers in Vietnam has risen noticeably. Budget for camera rental, software licences and analysts now competes directly with budget for strength coaches, physiotherapists and athlete nutrition.

That is a resource-allocation choice, and I think it is tilting the wrong way.

A badminton team on a limited budget gains more from paying a good strength coach and a rehabilitation specialist than from buying a premium analytics package. The reason is simple: data only has value when someone can read it, and the person who can read it must have stood on the court.

Transfers are not a story of numbers; they are a story of sprints and separations. I wrote that about football a few years ago, and it holds for badminton in a different way. An athlete moving from a provincial team to the national training centre does not go because his metrics look good. He goes because a coach saw something in a six a.m. session, when no camera was rolling.

There is a deeper layer I want to address.

Medical confidentiality in sport leaves fans and media almost entirely blind to an athlete's real condition. Clubs and training centres release only what benefits them. An injury announced as a "minor ankle knock" can be a ligament tear requiring six months. An athlete "resting to recover" may be wrestling with a psychological issue nobody dares to name.

In that asymmetric information environment, the public data sheet becomes the only thing outsiders can hold onto. And so they hold on far too tightly. They forget that the data sheet is filtered through the very apparatus that is hiding everything else.

The Qatari sprinter of Nigerian descent, Femi Ogunode, once caught my eye in a World Cup stand because of the carbon-plated shoes he was wearing. I dropped my main assignment to interview him about shoe technology. The resulting series became my own brand. But the lesson I drew was not about how advanced carbon plates are. The lesson was that people look at the final product — the shoe, the number, the medal — and skip the entire chain of causes standing behind it.

So what should be done with that twelve-page report?

I am not proposing to throw it away. I am proposing to read it for what it is: a document about the limits of a method, not a verdict on an athlete. When every cell returns insufficient information, the right question is not where this athlete is weak, but who we are missing outside the court.

The answer is usually this: we are missing the person in the fourth row, taking notes by hand, seeing what the software cannot see.

Between the grass pitch and the piste, between esports and the transfer market, I find one shared pulse. That pulse is preparation. It is thousands of training hours nobody counts. It is young coaches working in provincial towns on wages that will not cover rent. It is the veteran referees sitting quietly in the corner of the hall, who have officiated thousands of matches and whose names appear on no poster.

Based on my experience covering matches, Vietnamese badminton will not climb a single rung if we keep buying software before buying people. Nguyen Tien Minh did not become the first Vietnamese player to reach the world top five because of a spreadsheet. He got there through fifteen years of training in an unairconditioned hall, under the eye of a patient coach.

If there is one thing to do immediately this season, it is to send an analyst out to the arena. Sit him there for twelve consecutive matches. Make him take notes by hand. Then look at how many N/A cells remain in his data sheet.

My guess is very few. Because what the software lacks is not an algorithm. What it lacks is feet that have stepped onto the court.