The Empty Spreadsheet: Vietnamese Martial Arts and Its Data Problem

I was sitting in front of a screen in a small café on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, Saigon, when the clock struck 22:47. The spreadsheet opened with seven columns: fighter name, weight class, fight weight, between-bout weight, number of weight cuts in twelve months, cut cycle, recovery time. Six columns were empty. It was not that I was too lazy to fill them in. The organiser of a professional boxing event in Vietnam had just sent me a list of fourteen fighters — fourteen names, fourteen weight classes, and not a single figure about their prior weight-cutting process. I called back. The answer was four words: “We don't keep that.” And I understood that I had just touched a kind of crisis that Vietnamese sport rarely names: a data crisis. Over fifteen years covering the SEA Games and regional martial-arts events, I have watched people argue for hours over a single judge's score, yet almost no one argues over the condition in which a fighter entered the weigh-in room. Data never shouts, but it will repeat itself until you are willing to listen. In Vietnam, it has repeated long enough to become background noise — the kind of sound the human ear filters out automatically. The context is not new. Domestic professional boxing has only been officially recognised in recent years. Vovinam was founded in 2026 and now exists in dozens of countries. Muay Thai, kickboxing and MMA have flourished through gyms in Hanoi, Saigon and Da Nang. Each discipline runs on a completely different scoring logic, and that difference matters more than people think. That difference determines exactly which data matters. For an MMA fighter, significant strikes landed per minute and control time are life-and-death measures. For a boxer, punch accuracy and accumulated durability are the survival metrics. For a taolu athlete — a forms routine scored on difficulty and performance quality — a win-loss record says nothing at all. Applying the correct measure of one discipline to another produces systematically false conclusions, and that is the most dangerous kind of error: one that looks very convincing. I learned this lesson from athletics. In 2026, after a young editor dismissed my SEA Games article as “dry as a roof tile,” I went back to my statistics degree and compiled data on 232 Southeast Asian track-and-field athletes. I rebuilt a speed matrix by distance and found that Nguyen Thi Oanh accelerated by 0.8 metres per second in the final lap of the 1,500 metres to win gold — a figure no one had ever mined. The five-part series that followed raised the paper's traffic by 18 per cent. From that day, I set a rule for myself: no data, no writing. But that rule only works when there is data to read. And that is precisely the breaking point for Vietnamese martial arts. Of all the health indicators in combat sports, weight cutting is the single strongest predictor of serious risk — and also the least recorded. To make a weight class, the cut is often rapid and dehydration-based: hot baths, saunas, days of restricted water intake. The consequences are kidney failure, rhabdomyolysis, and in the worst case, collapse on the scale itself. Global sports medicine has known this for a long time. Yet in Vietnam, an event can stage dozens of bouts without recording a single figure on pre-cut and post-cut weight, cut duration, or each fighter's cutting history. When that data is absent, no one — not even the event doctor — can screen who is on the danger threshold. From my own experience watching bouts, there is a sign that is invisible on a stats sheet but plain to the human eye. A fighter who walks into the third round with cracked lips and dark rings around the eyes is someone who cut too much. I count every step of movement to find the man who does not want to move — and in combat sports, a heavy step after the second round is almost always an honest confession from a body losing water. The heel does not grip the ground, the centre of gravity drifts backward, every strike comes with a longer breath than normal. No slow-motion camera records it, no stats sheet counts it, but anyone sitting close enough will see it. If weight cutting is the leading acute risk, accumulated brain damage is the leading long-term one. Punches to the head do not disappear when the final bell rings; they accumulate into the number of head strikes a fighter has absorbed across an entire career. To screen that risk, at least four types of data are needed: the number of knockouts, the history of concussions and the return interval after each, the volume of hard sparring in training, and the rest interval between official bouts. In Vietnam, a professional fighter may have all four types of information scattered across four different places — and none of them willing to share with another. When a governing body has no data, the absence of a risk warning is often mistaken for the absence of risk. A null result is not a safety certificate. This is the most common and most dangerous logic error in sports administration: silence read as calm. Finally, there is the question of career length. A professional fighter typically concentrates almost a lifetime's earnings into a three-to-five-year window. There is no pension fund, no protective union, no clear transition path after retirement. Globally, this asymmetry has been quantified. Revenue-share ratios for fighters in major MMA promotions typically sit below 20 per cent, while top boxers can take more than 50 per cent, and team-sport leagues share out around 50 per cent. Pay for a newcomer can fall somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars a fight, while the training, nutrition and medical costs they must carry themselves often consume most of it. These figures are general industry knowledge, not data from a specific Vietnamese event. But they show the picture that Vietnamese data is still missing. A fighter does not only need a win-loss record; he needs a file that tells the future what he has been through. In Vietnam, that file barely exists. In developed sporting nations, after any knockout bout, the competent authority imposes a mandatory medical suspension — sometimes thirty to ninety days, longer if there are signs of concussion. This is a legally enshrined protective mechanism, and it only works when there is an authority with enough power to supervise and a shared recording system. In Vietnam, professional boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing and MMA fall under the management of several different federations and agencies. When the recording system remains fragmented, a fighter can move from one venue to another with no one holding his full injury history. A knockout this week may never appear in any file when he steps onto the ring next week. The data gap is not only a medical problem. It is also an economic one. A sponsor wants to know the probability that the fighter they back will appear in a big bout; they need win rate, opponent quality and fight frequency. A broadcaster wants to build a story; they need the past. A coach wants to know where his student stands against the general level; he needs comparative figures. Without data, everyone is guessing, and guessing is a poor foundation on which to build a sport. At the upstream level — gyms and training facilities — data all but disappears. A coach can lead dozens of fighters for years without a single digitised training record. When a fighter changes gyms, his entire history stays behind. The transmission chain from gym to ring to audience breaks at the very first link. The easy assumption is that the data is empty because people are lazy or unprofessional. I do not believe that is the whole story. For most of the history of Vietnamese martial arts, authenticity was tied to oral transmission, not to spreadsheets. A master was known through his students, not through numbers. A bout was remembered through stories, not through minutes. As martial arts shifted into professional sport — where contracts, weight classes and medical insurance become conditions of competition — the old record-keeping system stopped being sufficient, but the new one has not formed fast enough. In other words, the data gap is not one person's fault; it is the consequence of a culture that has not yet caught up. That makes the solution far more complex than blaming someone. It requires building infrastructure: mandatory pre-bout medical forms, a shared fighter-record archive, and an authority with enough power to require events to comply. Here I recall how I once read Luka Modric. People see Modric pass the ball; I see him plant his heel into the grass like a screw — that invisible steadiness is the foundation of every skill on show. Sports administration is the same. A tank's tyre never stands out in a photograph, but it decides which mud pit the vehicle can cross. Data is that tyre. No one photographs it, but without it the whole machine sinks — and when the Vietnamese martial-arts machine sinks, the one who ultimately pays is the fighter himself. In 2026, when the pandemic closed the stadiums, I wrote that an empty ground is a laboratory: with no crowd to hide inside, the truth becomes very bare. The data problem of Vietnamese martial arts today is another version of that laboratory. With no stats sheet, no medical file, nothing left to look up, people are forced to face what they actually have — and what they have is usually far less than they imagine. Three layers of verification do not exist to find the truth, but to calculate how many times the truth survives being distorted. For Vietnamese martial arts, the first layer has yet to be built. The story ends with an open question. When a Vietnamese fighter steps onto the ring, the only thing no one keeps is a record of his own body. If the next generation wants Vietnamese martial arts on the professional map, the first task is not to find another champion, but to build a complete spreadsheet for every human being who steps onto the floor. Because the mud ahead is very long, and no one wants to cross it on memory alone.