The Empty Data Sheet of Women's Football: The Analysis That Was Never Written

At the end of the last tournament season I opened a match data file. Pass completion, expected goals, pressing intensity, the number of passes allowed before a defensive action — every cell was empty. In that same week, a comparable men's match file carried several hundred entries, each with a source and a date. I sat in silence. This emptiness is not an accidental glitch; it is a habit built over decades, one almost nobody admits to.

When I opened Lieke Martens — Root: The Lieke Martens Profile | Scenario: opening a biographical deep dive on a women's footballer — I knew that at the 2026 European Championship she scored three goals and was named Player of the Tournament, because the Netherlands won their first major title. But the rhythm of her passing, the direction of her dribbles, the geography of her pressing were nowhere written in numbers. At 46 I travelled from Barishal to the Netherlands to watch the game up close. The gaps in analysis grew clearer; they did not close.

Writing about women's football is still done mainly in the language of emotion. The moment of a goal, the hardship, the struggle, the family's resistance — those are present. The tactical framework is not. Where the men's game gets whole chapters on formations, build-up patterns and press triggers, the women's game is often trapped inside a story of feeling. That habit is not harmless; it shuts an entire route to understanding the game.

My own career has watched this shift. When I began commentating for Bangladesh Betar in 2026, the game was understood through the voice, through narration. In the hands of a writer like Utpal Shuvro, a player's inner life rose to the surface; an archivist like Dulal Mahmud stored up history; and in Mohammed Musa's voice the radio era came alive. Yet even in that tradition the game was never measured — it was remembered, and memory is never as neutral as a number.

The same picture holds in Bangladesh's women's football. — Root: The Sabina Khatun File | Scenario: tracing a South Asian women's footballer's unrecorded career — what a player like Sabina Khatun does on a domestic pitch does not survive in numbers after the final whistle. There is no central database to hold a season of her goals, assists and dribble success rates. So the proof of her worth has to start from zero every time.

A tournament cycle compresses emotion. It is easy to float away on flags and stories, but hard to grasp what is actually happening on the pitch. In such a moment the reliable guide is numbers, not narration — yet in women's tournaments numbers are the scarcest thing of all. As audiences grow, the appetite for analysis grows; the supply does not.

Think about how a match should properly be read and the matter becomes clear. How high a line a team defends, how many passes it allows before a defensive action, what the quality of its chances is, how fast it turns possession into attack — without these, any tactical explanation is incomplete. That Dutch side of 2026 created attacking overloads by design. But no quantitative trace of that design was ever preserved.

Without xG and pressing data, we cannot separate luck from skill. An unexpected win is then easily dismissed as 'excitement', when behind it may lie precise planning and the mark of training. This blindness hurts the women's game more, because here every success must carry the burden of proving itself separately.

That analytical void calls up a real loss. When a smaller side beats a bigger one, its best player is quickly taken by a larger club, and the upset survives only as a story — not as a method. A win that is not measured cannot be repeated. Without data, imitation is impossible; without imitation, there is no durable development.

From my years of watching matches I can say that in a tournament the real difference is built on rest management, squad depth and opponent-specific planning. All three are measurable. In women's tournaments they are discussed least, because the underlying data simply is not supplied. So a team learns the limit of its depth after losing, never before.

Women's football's transfer market, too, surfaces in headlines as curiosity, not as economics. Who moved where, what the wage is, how long the contract runs — these are often vague. So the large signing fee handed to a free agent, which in the men's game already dodges financial control, sits in complete darkness in the women's game. Money that is not measured cannot be regulated either.

I have doubts about the fashion for three at the back as well. Often it is not progress but a safe way to avoid the risk of a four-man line being exposed. In the women's game this tactical argument barely happens, because the very basis for the argument is missing. Before debate comes information.

A coach's decisions rest on data too. When to press, when to drop the line, how many minutes a player can carry — these need calculation behind them. In women's football such decisions are often made on the naked eye alone, which slows the path to raising the standard of play over the long term.

Here the usual reckoning flips. The market assumes that whatever it measures is what matters. In women's football what gets measured most is attendance and broadcast revenue, not tactics. A game judged only by its crowd never gets the chance to prove its tactical worth. Yet the game's real value sits on the pitch, not in the stands.

There is an uncomfortable truth here that is hard to admit as a supporter. We too, who want to push the women's game forward, often privilege the story — because a story spreads fast and data spreads slowly. That short-term preference keeps the game unanalysed in the long run. Solidarity and analysis are not the same thing.

Looked at from the other side, in the women's leagues that have recently drawn investment, the first improvement has come in video quality, not in data. Because visibility sells quickly, while analysis is hard to sell. That very sequence builds the game's depth slowly, and widens the distance from one trophy to the next.

Part of the solution may lie in technology. Blockchain-based records — where match data, once written, cannot be erased or altered — could be a shield against the women's game's information void. Had such a public ledger existed, no one could have deleted a season of Sabina Khatun's statistics. At the 2026 Russia World Cup I was one of only 12 women among 800 accredited journalists; that day a colleague said women do not understand tactical shifts.

The question now is no longer one of emotion. The question is this — when the next generation opens the Lieke Martens file, will it find a complete data sheet, or another empty page? The answer will be written in today's decisions, at the table, not on the pitch.