Empty Cells, Lost Ledgers: The Data Invisibility of Women's Football and a Manifesto for Recovery

When I opened Lieke Martens' file, there were two kinds of paper on my desk. On one side lay that five-thousand-word profile from 2026, which I had written after spending three days in Bergen op Zoom with her childhood coach — her injury-ravaged adolescence, her stubborn refusal to change her expressive style of play. On the other side lay a spreadsheet I had opened that morning. Not a single cell had been filled in. No shot map, no passing network, no duel-win rate, no sprint data. Every cell carried one word — insufficient information.

That evening stopped me. For thirty-nine years I have stood beside football, from the radio microphone to the press box. But that day I felt, for the first time, that women's football's greatest crisis is not on the pitch but in the archive. In men's football, every touch, every sprint, every pass is permanently recorded somewhere. In women's football, those moments dissolve into the air, as though they had never happened.

I call this the empty ledger. In the age of blockchain we have acquired a technology in which every transaction is stored immutably — practically impossible to erase. Yet the information-transactions of women's football never enter that ledger. The matches that most need analysis are precisely the ones whose records are most absent.

The data invisibility of women's football is no accident; it is the result of a structural decision, quietly repeated every day.

I have to go back three decades. When I joined Bangladesh Betar as a sports commentator in 2026, men's football at least had a convention of keeping match sheets, scorer lists and attendance figures. Women's games were almost invisible — a two-line result on an inside page of a newspaper, and that was all. From that time I noticed how a lack of data gradually becomes a lack of argument. If something cannot be measured, the question of whether to value it does not even arise.

This chain of logic is so perfect that it sustains itself. There is no data, so there is no analysis; without analysis, no one invests; without investment, no more data is produced. A circle whose centre is nothing but empty cells.

I was present at the 2026 European Women's Championship. The Netherlands won their first major title, and Lieke Martens scored three goals and was named Player of the Tournament. Yet how many know the history of her right-foot injury, her pattern of changes of pace, or the angle of her body as she broke an opposing defence? Barely ten per cent of what I saw on the pitch was ever written into any database.

Here I want to make one thing clear, because many young writers confuse it. A data gap does not simply mean 'fewer statistics'. A data gap means an environment in which the evidence of a player's labour, planning and talent weakens at exactly the moment her value is being determined. The greatest lesson of blockchain is this — what is not recorded is not provable; and what is not provable can easily be denied.

I look at Bangladesh's 2026 SAFF Championship victory with the same eye. It was history — a first title, a night like a national festival. But how much of the passing patterns, the defensive organisation, the wingers' overlapping runs behind that success is permanently preserved? My experience tells me, very little. We kept the photographs of the celebration, but we lost the technical language of how that success became possible.

From my years of watching matches I have learned to recognise a pattern. When a team in a women's match uses a particular diamond structure in mid-block, it is never captured, because there is no tracking data. As a result, that tactical innovation never even gets the chance to enter history. When a tactic cannot enter the archive, it also cannot become teaching material for the next generation.

This is where the most painful truth arrives. The tactical history of women's football has in fact advanced at the same pace as that of men's football — but we have counted the milestones of only one road. Where men's football produces thousands of analyses on the revival of 'three-at-the-back', the same structure was used in women's football, yet it was never tallied.

I believe this fashion of placing three players in the back line is not progress at all. It is a coach's risk-avoidance strategy — a way to escape the criticism that follows when a four-player defensive line fails. And in women's football this same instinct for tactical risk-avoidance is even more pronounced, because the level of criticism for a mistake is far higher. When there is no data, proving a mistake is hard, and admitting one is harder still.

Let us consider one specific match I saw myself. A women's league game, where a team moved from 4-2-3-1 in the first half to 3-5-2 in the second. That shift changed the pace of the match. But which player stood in which line during that transition, whose run was created when — there is no written record of any of it. With the final whistle, it moves into the realm of memory.

I keep a private journal — of players' unspoken fears, their unexpressed anxieties. I began this habit while writing the Lieke Martens profile. Because I understood that when institutional archives are empty, personal notes become the only ledger. But personal notes can never substitute for collective evidence.

Absence of data is itself a narrative — and the most dangerous kind, because it stays silent.

Now I come to the point I think about most. A strange gap has opened between the commercial value and the sporting value of women's football. Marketing departments tell the 'growth story' of women's football through attendance figures and social-media reach. Yet at exactly the same time there is no investment in preserving the technical information inside the pitch. In other words, the data that sells commerce is kept; the data that reveals the depth of the game is lost.

This selective attitude does not seem accidental to me. It is a conscious priority. When people talk about women's football, they easily drift into stories of emotion and inspiration, because those are easy to sell. But tactical analysis demands patience, investment and infrastructure — and no one wants to give those.

My long experience tells me this data gap later creates a great trap. Suppose a small team suddenly beats a big one. We celebrate the story of the upset. But within a few months the best player of that team moves to a big club. Because without data, the small club has no proof of how valuable its player actually is, nor the power to negotiate on her behalf. The upset then turns into yet another proposal for a talent raid.

I have long been uneasy about one thing in the transfer market. In women's football the financial details of many contracts are simply not made public. Where there is no transparency, there is no accountability. When someone joins as a free agent and receives a large signing-on fee, it generally escapes the eye — yet such transactions are far more opaque than an actual transfer fee. Here too my question is the same — where is the ledger?

I know that writing this, some will think I am speaking against women's football. That is not so. I am saying the exact opposite. I want women's football to be taken so seriously that every decision, every contract, every tactic is scrutinised — just as in men's football. A movement built only on praise and emotion does not last. Only evidence lasts.

Here I admit the dilemma inside me. I am a women's sports narrator, and my instinct is to protect and support this game. But solidarity and analysis are not the same. If I do not speak of the internal problems — the lack of transparency, the neglect of the archive, the absence of internal competition — then I am not really helping the game but covering its weaknesses.

Now I come to what some may find unexpected. We usually assume that women's football lacks data because it is 'new' or 'small'. But my observation says otherwise. The tactical history of women's football is in fact very old — in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka this game has been running for decades. The problem is not size, but attention.

When I sat in the press box at the 2026 Russia World Cup, only 12 of 800 accredited journalists were women. In the Croatia versus England semi-final, Luka Modric wore the number ten shirt, played 120 minutes and completed 89 per cent of his passes. After the match an older colleague told me, 'Women don't understand tactical shifts.' I wrote a piece about those invisible women who sit in the press box yet are never counted.

That experience taught me something big. The silence of the archive and the silence of the press box are two sides of the same coin. In both cases a woman's presence exists, but her recognition does not. What happens when there is no data? Witnesses are erased from history. And without witnesses, memory falls under someone else's control.

Root: The Lieke Martens Profile | Scenario: opening a biographical deep dive on a woman footballer, and finding that the very data that should anchor the story has never been recorded.

From this point I began to look in a new direction. I now raise a separate demand for data collection for women's football. In my view, every women's league match should preserve at least a basic level of tracking — shot maps, passing networks, positional data. This is no luxury; it is minimum infrastructure, like grass on a pitch being a minimum condition.

The idea of the blockchain works here as a metaphor. A public ledger in which every transaction is visible reduces inequality of power. Football should be the same — every match, every contract, every tactical decision should sit in a visible ledger, so that no one can say 'we didn't know' or 'there is no proof'.

I know some will say that such infrastructure is expensive in small-budget women's leagues. I do not accept that argument. Because the cost of tracking is not only money but will. A smartphone, a static camera, a team of volunteers — with these much basic data can be preserved. What is needed is a sense of responsibility.

I have already begun this work. In Barishal I run a monthly workshop for young women sports writers. There I teach them that they cannot stop at writing a match report — the technical details of every match must be preserved in a separate notebook. Small notes, arranged by date, so that one day together they form a ledger.

In my view, the next advance of women's football will come not from a star player's goal count but from the information infrastructure around her. The day we can say — 'this defender has played in this structure with this success rate over three seasons, and it is on record' — that is the day women's football reaches the door of true professionalism.

I know this change is slow. Whether I, at fifty-five, will live to see it, I am not sure. But I want to work for the generation that comes after me. Just as I myself waited for a generation that never came.

After that five-thousand-word profile was published on my own blog, two mainstream outlets said the piece was 'too emotional'. I did not see it as a rejection; I saw it as a symptom of resistance. Where evidence is weak, emotion is the crutch. But I want that one day, for this game, data — not emotion — will be enough.

I leave one question, which troubles me every day. If every women's football match were preserved in an immutable ledger like a blockchain — every pass, every run, every contract, before everyone's eyes — how many stories would not be lost? And how many lies, which today go unwritten, would be written down?