Empty Analysis: When Sports Journalism Loses the Field

Late at night, I received a document from a familiar contact. Its title was impressive: 'Comprehensive Assessment'. But when I opened it, every field was marked N/A. No fighter names, no data, no match was mentioned. The last page simply concluded: 'Insufficient information to analyze.' I closed my laptop, wondering: is this kind of 'analysis' being published as a legitimate journalistic product? The issue stems from a process many sports newsrooms are adopting: Stage-1 deconstruction. It's the initial step to extract information points from an article before deeper evaluation. But when the extraction returns all zeros, the system still proceeds to generate a 'Stage-2 analysis' with elaborate rating tables and risk warnings. Nobody pauses to ask: if the input is empty, is the output worth publishing? Based on my experience following matches, I know that a sports article lacking on-the-ground reality cannot be saved by any algorithm. In 2026, I wrote a 2,000-word analysis of Croatia at the World Cup, asserting they would run out of steam against England due to age and extra-time minutes played. My data was precise to the minute. Yet Croatia won 2-1 with 58% possession. Only when I rewatched match footage and logged all 214 dead-ball situations did I realize they deliberately slowed the tempo in extra time to conserve energy—something statistics could never reveal. I trusted the math before trusting the pitch; that was my costliest mistake. When I saw that 'Comprehensive Assessment' with all empty cells, I couldn't help but recall my own error. We are producing analyses not based on observation, lacking context, relying only on generic warnings. This is especially dangerous in martial arts—a field where the difference between a real strike and a feint can be missed if we look only at data. Here, one must read the silence between two rolling balls, feel the fighter's breath, notice the hesitation before a blow. That is what no machine can extract. The counterintuitive point is this: an empty analysis can actually be valuable if we treat it as a signal. It shows the original source failed at the collection stage. But when newsrooms print it alongside substantive pieces, we inadvertently create a counterfeit—something neither wrong nor right. For readers, that's deception. They have no way to distinguish a story written from the pitch from one generated by automation with warnings of 'no data'. The same outcome shows insiders and outsiders watching two different matches—and I suspect we are teaching them to accept emptiness. Some may argue this is the advance of automation, that machines are helping journalists. But I have lived through enough eras to know that technology is useful only when placed correctly. Data harvesting, extraction, suggestion algorithms—all need a human observer to verify. Without verification, we are just producing beautifully packaged garbage. I remember the 1980s when I was a reporter in Australia, then Vietnam, then China. Back then, there was no big data, no analysis software. We sat in the stands, noting every movement, listening to every shout from the field. An article was judged by the accuracy of its smallest detail. Today, everything is measured by publication speed and view counts. Accuracy has become a luxury. I am not against technology. I use it to dig through old archives, find patterns from matches thirty years ago. But I always remember: old files gather dust, but that long-range shot from years ago still curves through the data. And if I don't go to the field, I will never understand why the ball curved that way. An analysis only makes sense when born from someone who was there, who saw and heard—not from a machine reading numbers. So when I encounter an empty analysis, I don't throw it away immediately. I pause and ask: Why couldn't the original writer provide information? The answer often lies in laziness, time pressure, or their never having set foot on the scene. That is a wake-up call for journalism. We cannot let emptiness become the norm. Fake news doesn't die because people stop believing; it dies because people stop verifying. And if we believe an article full of N/A is a success, we have lost our reason to exist. I am old, but my counting heart still beats at 20—when I believed every article must be accountable to the truth. I refuse to print zeros. And I hope the young generation of journalists will also understand: only direct observation and patience create analyses worth reading. As for those 'empty analyses,' they belong in the drawer of failure, not on the front page.