I Believed in the Spreadsheet Until the Night of Lusail

On December 18, 2026, I stood on the pitch at Lusail, among 88,966 people all shouting the same name. Argentina had just beaten France 4-2 on penalties after a breathless 3-3 draw. Messi scored twice. Mbappé scored three times. The whole planet was talking about a 35-year-old man completing the final piece of his trophy cabinet. In that deafening noise, all I could see was a 23-year-old who had just scored a hat-trick in a World Cup final and was being forgotten on the greatest night of his life.

That night I wrote: Messi did not need a World Cup to become a legend, but Mbappé is the future. The press called me insane. Readers called me a contrarian. I called them the crowd. Three years later, with Mbappé still defining a generation of attackers, I do not feel I was right. I only feel I was not wrong.

That is how I have worked for three and a half decades: standing where the crowd has just turned away, looking directly at the place they refuse to look at.

When the whole world speaks in unison, my ears begin to ring with the echo of its mistakes.

Context: a sport sold to the spreadsheet

Over the past two decades, European football has voluntarily handed its soul to a new class: data analysts. The story is told beautifully. Brentford and Brighton rose through data models. Liverpool won the Champions League thanks to a sports-science department. Denmark's Midtjylland turned numbers into money. Everyone wants to believe football has become an exact science, where every decision has a model behind it.

Meanwhile, the global football media entered the age of the number. People stopped asking whether a match was good or bad. They asked what the xG was. They stopped telling stories about a beautiful move. They bragged about how low the PPDA was. Possession became a moral yardstick: the team with more of the ball plays beautifully, the team with less is negative.

I sit in Lyon, watching French pundits, then open my phone to watch Vietnamese pundits. Two completely different football cultures, yet the shared trait is strangely identical: both are obsessed with numbers that none of them truly understands.

One example I remember vividly. At the 2026 World Cup in Russia, I was reporting from Moscow. The final between France and Croatia ended 4-2, France champions. I immediately wrote a piece arguing that France won through tactical boredom, not talent. It drew two million views in 24 hours. On air, I cheerfully declared it the highest-scoring final in history.

I was wrong. The 2026 final between Brazil and Sweden had seven goals, not six. Viewers corrected me online within minutes. I read those corrections in a state of excitement so intense that I felt no shame at all. The 78,011 fans inside Luzhniki had carried me further than I was entitled to go.

But that mistake taught me something no spreadsheet ever could: raw, unfiltered emotion on site is a form of data, and it is often more accurate than what a machine assembles.

The core point: modern football is selling a counterfeit product

Let me go straight to the argument. Possession is the most deceptive metric in the history of football analysis, and the modern transfer market is inflating the value of players who create no value for their clubs.

Start with possession.

What does it mean when a team holds the ball for 62% of a match? Mathematically, it means their players touched the ball more than the opponent's. It says nothing about what they did with it. A team can play 600 sideways passes in their own half, keep 62% of the ball, and still lose 0-1 to a counter-attack. The stat sheet will say they dominated. Fans will leave the stadium furious, not understanding why the dominant team lost.

I call this the glitter trap. High possession is not a tactic. It is a style. Some coaches understand this perfectly. Didier Deschamps understands. Diego Simeone understands. They let opponents hold 65% of the ball in the first half, and when the opponent is drunk on control, they slide the knife into the exact gap left by a defence pushed too high.

That is not negativity. That is accounting.

Argentina at the 2026 World Cup had matches with under 45% possession and still went deep. Morocco played the entire tournament with extremely low average possession and reached the semi-finals. The spreadsheet says Morocco was lucky. The eye says Morocco understood space, tempo, and letting the opponent destroy himself better than anyone else in the tournament.

I am not saying data is useless. I am saying data is being misused. A good analyst uses numbers to ask questions, not to close answers. The problem with modern football is that analysts have turned a tool into a religion. A decade ago I believed in data. Now I believe in my eyes.

Second core point: the inflated transfer narrative

I remember a July evening in 2026. I was 41. Neymar had just broken the world transfer record by joining Paris Saint-Germain for 222 million euros. The world was stunned. I wrote a shocking piece on my personal blog: an 18-year-old named Kylian Mbappé at Monaco was worth more than Neymar.

At the time, Mbappé had scored around 15 Ligue 1 goals. Nobody believed me. Hundreds of accounts mocked me. People called me insane. A few weeks later, PSG paid 180 million euros to buy Mbappé outright through a loan-then-purchase structure, and the story closed itself.

What I learned was not that I was smarter than the crowd. What I learned was that the transfer market operates on a logic the price tag does not reflect. A player is priced like another player only because the market is looking at the wrong place: reputation, age, spotlight. It rarely looks at development trajectory, physical structure, and where that player will be in four years.

I do not write to be loved. I write to be read. And the only way to be read in this industry is to say what others know but dare not say.

Third core point: the Saudi Pro League and the illusion of a new market

Since Cristiano Ronaldo signed with Al Nassr in early 2026, the global media has repeatedly called the Saudi Pro League a new threat to European football. Karim Benzema to Al Ittihad. N'Golo Kanté to Al Ittihad. Riyad Mahrez to Al Ahli. European stars flocked to the Middle East on wages that made Europe frown.

I never believed that story. Not because I dismiss Asian football — I have watched the J-League since the 1990s, and I watched Qatar win the 2026 Asian Cup, which earned my respect. I do not believe it because I am too familiar with how new leagues advertise themselves: buy ageing stars, post photos on Instagram, then call it development.

The Saudi Pro League is not developing football. It is turning ageing European stars into tourism ambassadors.

Look a little closer. A 38-year-old player does not go to Saudi to build a football culture. He goes to shoot commercials, pose with officials, sign contracts, and serve as the face of a project that is essentially national image investment. This model has a precedent. China did the same between 2026 and 2026, and when the money stopped, the league collapsed, clubs dissolved, and the stars left in silence.

What worries me is not that the Saudi Pro League attracts stars. What worries me is that European leagues are starting to fear that game and breaking their own rules to keep people. When a European club offers triple wages to a 33-year-old whose output is already declining, that is not competition. That is collective panic.

That is why I always tell my journalism students: when a football story becomes too beautiful, look for the less attractive structural cause behind it.

Fourth core point: the myth of 'fighting spirit'

Every World Cup, the media builds a legend about fighting spirit. A team weaker in every department beats a stronger one, and the story is told as if the players summoned some supernatural force.

I have sat through those matches. I have been inside the dressing room of a mid-table club in France. I have seen what actually happens before a big game.

Fighting spirit is not a magical substance. It is the output of a very concrete chain of material conditions: players paid on time, no negative news about the club's future, a medical staff good enough that they do not walk into the game with a sore hamstring, and a coaching staff that makes them believe there is a plan. With all four in place, a weaker team can cause an upset. Missing one, spirit becomes a curse.

Football is a massive entertainment industry. The clubs within it operate like businesses with strategies, budgets, and managers. When a team wins unexpectedly, we tend to call it a miracle, but in most cases it is the result of a correct decision somewhere in the system: a smart transfer policy, a well-coached youth squad, a coach who reads games, or simply an opponent who prepared badly.

The crowd believes in the spreadsheet. I believe in the pain on the pitch.

Pain here is not a literary metaphor. It is physical fact. When you watch a match from the stands, you see what cameras miss: where a player hurts, where a player hesitates, where a player refuses to commit to a tackle out of fear of injury. No data model encodes that moment. Only the eye of someone sitting close enough can read it.

A story from the summer of 2026

In 2026, I was 44. When the pandemic forced every league to halt, I wrote a piece arguing that football without fans is a cheap fake and called for the season to be cancelled. I believed what I wrote. I believed crowd atmosphere is fundamental, and that removing it leaves a counterfeit product.

Then the Bundesliga returned. On May 16, 2026, I watched the Ruhr derby between Borussia Dortmund and Schalke 04 in a completely empty stadium. No fans. No singing. No flares. I sat before the screen believing I was about to witness a farce.

The players threw themselves at each other as if 80,000 people were screaming from the stands. They pressed in the third minute. They fought for the ball in the ninetieth. Dortmund won 4-0 in a match whose emptiness was so total you could hear the coach shouting from the technical area. I sat still for a long time after the final whistle.

I was wrong. Not wrong that football without fans is a poorer experience. A stadium without spectators is just a parking lot painted the colour of grass. But I was wrong to think the crowd is the only energy source for players. Motivation lives elsewhere — in contracts, in careers, in the fear of being replaced, in the memory of a poor childhood. Football goes on even when you strip away the crowd.

I wrote a self-rebuttal on my own blog. I admitted I was wrong. It was the first I Was Wrong piece of my life.

Some readers unfollowed me. Some French colleagues began to see me differently. And I learned something that has since become a core part of this style: being contrarian does not mean being stubborn. Being contrarian means having the courage to correct yourself when the truth stares you down.

What I saw on the night of Lusail

Back to the 2026 final. I want to tell it in more detail.

Argentina led 2-0 after Messi's opener from the penalty spot in the 23rd minute and Di María's second in the 36th. For nearly forty minutes, France barely existed. Their right flank was carved open. Their midfield left gaps so wide you could watch Argentina pass through them like a knife through butter.

Then in the 80th minute, Mbappé scored from the spot. In the 81st, one minute later, also Mbappé, equalising at 2-2 with a move that made even me — sitting more than a hundred metres away — feel the ground shake. Extra time. Messi made it 3-2 in the 108th. Mbappé equalised again at 3-3 in the 118th with a penalty so cold it was hard to believe from a 23-year-old. Penalties. Argentina won 4-2.

The world left the stadium with the image of Messi lifting the trophy. I left with the image of Mbappé standing alone in the middle of the pitch, head down, amid cheers not meant for him.

One thing the spreadsheet would tell me immediately: Mbappé scored three goals in a final, the first time that had happened since the 2026 final. Another thing only the eye could tell me: it was one of the most physically intense finals I have witnessed live in three decades of work, played in December heat in Qatar after a season compressed by a brutal international calendar.

I do not deny Messi's greatness. He deserves every word of praise. But I refuse to let the story end there, because ending it there means ignoring what is actually happening to world football.

The contrarian angle: I might be wrong, and here is where I doubt myself

I need to be honest here.

When I say the spreadsheet cannot be trusted, I am pushing an argument to its limit. There is an uncomfortable truth I must admit: I have read football wrong many times. There are matches I left convinced that Team A played better, only to rewatch the tape and discover Team B created twice the xG. Live emotion, however powerful, can deceive me in ways data cannot.

And when I criticise the Saudi Pro League for lacking a development identity, I am also trapped in European thinking. Who says the only valid development model is ours? European football has had seasons where foreign owners poured in money and turned clubs into image projects. Chelsea under Roman Abramovich, Manchester City under Abu Dhabi ownership — all shared the same driver: using football to trade for national, corporate, or personal image. Europe has no moral standing to lecture the Middle East about this.

People call me a contrarian. I call them the crowd.

But what do I call myself? A 50-year-old man, born in Vietnam, working in France, standing between two football cultures that do not understand each other. I have watched Vietnamese football praised as a fairy tale, and I have watched French football criticised for lacking emotion. I know both stories are half-truths.

When I say the crowd believes in the spreadsheet, I am punishing myself. Because for a decade I was the crowd. I used to open Excel and believe I understood football.

Takeaway: what I will be watching at the next finals

I do not write these pieces to predict scorelines. Predicting scorelines is a game for people who want to be loved. I write to put a progressive observation on the table.

The expanded 48-team World Cup will be the biggest test of my two hypotheses. If teams have genuinely improved in quality, we will see average goals per match stay high and few matches ending in lopsided scorelines. If my hypothesis holds, we will see the opposite: diluted goals, declining defensive quality, and media explaining dull matches with the phrase that smaller nations are improving.

I will track one specific metric: the average number of passes per match by teams considered weaker. If that number rises sharply while goals do not rise correspondingly, we will know football is becoming a game of form, not outcomes.

A major finals is when the crowd is largest, and also when collective mistakes are amplified most. I will be there. And I will keep writing what the crowd does not want to hear.

When the whole world speaks in unison, that is usually when I fall silent and listen to the ringing in my own ears.