N/A Does Not Mean 'No Risk': Reading the Blank Columns of Indian Football

A scouting report sat on my desk in a small Pune room last month. Nineteen-year-old midfielder. Nine columns — formation fit, passing under pressure, duel win rate, distance covered in ninety minutes, injury history, contract status. Seven were blank. Blank did not mean "weak." Blank meant: we do not have the information. The club that sent it had forty minutes of video of the boy and no data behind it.

Somewhere outside, an old match played on a television, and the only sound in the room was the fan. I read the sheet twice. The first time I thought the club had been careless. The second time I understood the carelessness belonged not to the club but to the way we keep records. In Indian football, what is not measured becomes, a few months later, "no risk identified." An empty box turns into a clean sheet. That is the quietest lie the game sells.

Empty data, full stands

Indian football's data architecture is oddly incomplete — a bright upper floor over a silent foundation. The Indian Super League has run since 2026; every match of every season is on camera, every goal clipped onto a club's social feed. Yet through 2026-25 there was no relegation. When there is no fear of falling, no club feels obliged to publish its players' load, its injuries, its development record. We have the league's scoreboard. We do not have its ledger.

Look downward. In 2026-24, for the first time, a club — Punjab FC — was promoted from the I-League into the ISL. Mohammedan Sporting followed in 2026-25. One slot a season, after a decade of a closed pyramid. The direct consequence is that an entire cohort of young Indian footballers played years whose competitive record was never properly logged. Who do you compare them against? Their minutes were not counted; the quality opposite them was never graded.

In August 2026, when FIFA suspended the AIFF, there were twelve days in which the country's football administration had no official voice. The records not created in that fortnight, the contracts that stalled, the transfers left sitting in files — none of it sits in any column. Its absence later read as "nothing found wrong."

The bench is the real table

My notebook has two halves — "scenes" and "numbers." The notebook remembers what the scoreboard forgets. And in Indian football nothing is more honest than the bench.

Sunil Chhetri retired in June 2026 with 150 caps and 94 international goals. That number is, by any measure, our finest achievement. Behind the same number sits an empty column, and it never appears on a scoreboard: who is the fourth-choice striker now? Count the names and we stall at two or three — and none of them has played 1,500 league minutes across three consecutive seasons. That information is not gathered anywhere. No analyst can sit down and say how many minutes Indian strikers aged 21 to 23 have played in the last three years. The question is not asked, because the apparatus to answer it does not exist.

Let me be clear here, because it took me thirty years to understand it. Not having data and misreading data are two different diseases, but the cure is the same — writing honestly that we do not know. When I sat in the Salt Lake press box in Kolkata in 2026 for the Under-17 World Cup final, I had a sheet showing England's five goals came from four different build-up patterns, and that three of Rhian Brewster's eight goals came from inside the six-yard box. Without the sheet, that match was a 5-2. With it, the match was a story — Kolkata schoolchildren chanting a foreign name. Both were needed. But even that day something was missing: nobody told me how often Spain's defenders had their line broken. I estimated it, then left the box empty. Today people fill that empty box their own way, and the filling is the dangerous part.

In Kazan, the hush was louder than the roar

Watching France against Argentina in Kazan in 2026, I understood something the data books cannot teach. Nineteen-year-old Kylian Mbappé had already scored twice and won a penalty — the first teenager since Pelé to score two in a World Cup match. But the moment I still replay was not a goal. It was the crowd's half-second hush, just before his first sprint into Argentina's back line. The stadium held its breath before it roared.

I built that essay on the silence, then used France's transition numbers to hold it up — how often they turned a regain into a shot within ten seconds. The hush was not decoration; it was forewarning. The same method works in India, only in reverse. Here silence is rarely the sound of something coming. It is usually the sound of nothing being recorded. Watch the national team outside Kerala, Goa and Bengaluru: no drums, no echo, and nobody who can tell you how many turned up last time. A stadium whose attendance is never counted is, to any administrator, always "fine."

The contrarian angle: not a measuring problem, a telling problem

Here is an uncomfortable thing to say, and it cuts against my own profession. The people who preach a data revolution in Indian football assume the problem is measurement — put up cameras, strap on GPS, generate xG, and all will be well. The truth runs the other way. The problem is that what we do measure we do not publish; and what we do not publish we treat, in the next meeting, as "no risk."

The second paradox matters more: too much data, in the wrong context, is more dangerous than too little. In a league of eight to ten teams, on pitches whose quality shifts week to week, with a wide gap between the strongest and weakest, a model like xG loses its average meaning. When I hear a club analyst say "our xG differential is positive, so the process is fine," I think of the team that won three, lost four, and never asked how many minutes its fourth striker played. Analysts have entered the dressing room; their conclusions are cut off from the actual rhythm of the match. They measure what can be measured, not what matters.

And the third, which stings most. When my report on "six games in ten days" was published — the third consecutive year of fixed matches in Goa — the hardest part was not proving the allegation. The hardest part was proving the order in which those matches were played, because no official portal held the full calendar in one place. In a sport where investigating match-fixing requires you to assemble your own dates, missing data is not a technical inconvenience. It is a deficit of accountability.

Forward

So back to that scouting sheet. Seven blank columns. I am not arguing all seven should be filled — some information may never arrive, and honesty means learning to leave the box empty without rushing to colour it green. What I am arguing is that we need a rule and a habit: every report, every meeting, every season review should carry one line that states plainly, "we do not know this." And beneath that line, a space naming who is trying to find out.

An empty stadium still knows how to breathe. An empty spreadsheet does not. It waits quietly for someone to read it as "fine." India's ranking sits in the 120s, and we keep debating that — when the debate belongs on the column nobody filled. At the next season review, one official should be asked one question: how many Indian strikers under 21 have played five hundred consecutive league minutes in the last three years? The day that answer appears written on a sheet, we will not need speeches about a data revolution. One question, with no answer in anyone's hands — that is the clearest statistic Indian football has today.