When the Data Is Empty, Sports News Asks Permission to Stay Silent

Three in the morning, Shanghai is still awake, but my screen is asleep. The analysis file I received is ten pages long, and every page repeats one line: “Stage one is empty.” No player’s name, no game number, no time control, no result, not a single recorded position. My finger touches the spacebar like a conductor standing on the podium after the entire choir has gone home. The hall remains lit, but not one note has been played.

That feeling is not strange to me. It is like the afternoon I stood in Hongkou Stadium in the 67th minute of a match with no spectators, hearing the referee sigh inside a pocket of silence. When football returned after the pandemic, I asked to record the sound of the stadium, and I learned that absence has its own signature. Today, that absence is spreading through my newsroom in the form of an analysis with no data. I call that news.

In thirty-seven years with a pen, I have never felt the line between true news and invented story as thin as I feel it now. I could type a few famous chess players’ names, choose a major tournament in the current sports cycle, add a tactical comment that sounds expert, and immediately have a long piece. But that piece would be a decorated corpse. It would reflect no real game, illuminate no real person, and would betray the very craft I have lived with for three decades.

There are sentences I love and keep in my notebook. “When the seventeen-year-old prodigy does not yet know he is about to become a legend” is one of them. But it only matters because in 2026 I actually stood at a Shanghai youth-team training pitch, watching a boy named Zhou Junjie dribble past three defenders and hit the top corner seven times out of ten. I was allowed to write about the poetry in the left foot of nameless children because I had seen their sweat. Today I have seen nothing. There is no boy. No chessboard. No report. If I keep writing, I will be writing about a legend who was never born, and that is how romance dies at its most fragile point.

A proper chess analysis must have real names, move sequences, accuracy figures, deviations from preparation, win-probability swings and time pressure. Without ACPL, without a game number, without player information, all eight dimensions of my analysis must come back empty. That sounds dry, but it is honest. A beautiful chart drawn from imagination is never worth as much as an empty cell with a clear source note. In an age when machines can write for us, the value of a sports journalist is not publishing speed but the ability to say “there is nothing here” before saying “I will create a story.”

My most romantic mistake is to believe that a football can make poetry. I still believe it, but I understand now that a ball can only make poetry when it actually rolls on grass, when a real foot touches it, when a stand—no matter how empty—has witnessed it. An empty analysis page is not a football; it is only a white sheet someone wants me to cover with an imaginary match. I cannot do that. I once mispronounced a player’s name live in front of millions, and I learned that a mistake can become a kind of portraiture if the writer is honest enough. But inventing a match that never existed is worse than saying the wrong name. It is not a romantic mistake. It is betrayal.

Many newsrooms will think an empty analysis is the writer’s failure. I beg to think differently. Chess has slow, boring games, wasted moves, dry draws that empty the stands. A writer needs that boredom in order to understand the real condition of a game, just as a newspaper needs silence in order to avoid false news. When no event is ripe enough to be written, running after it is self-deception. Empty material can be the sign of a broken feed, a lost summary, or simply a day when nothing significant happened on the chessboard. None of those cases should be covered by a fictional article. Readers have the right to know that today there is nothing yet to believe.

I used to think: “An empty stadium still holds the applause of those who have gone.” To hear that applause, there must first be a real stadium, a real match that was played, real people who once sat in the stands. Today I have not even the ashes of an event. I only have a digital recorder in my pocket, with full batteries, but no sound of studs scraping across the grass to record. I can sit for hours in an empty stadium and listen, but even silence needs a defined space. My space right now is a white screen with the words “no data.” I cannot call that a stadium. I cannot call that a muse.

The story I still tell colleagues is about the morning I skipped an editorial meeting to watch Zhou Junjie practice free kicks. Nobody asked me to write about that boy; I went because I was curious. But I never invented one extra detail about his life. A beautiful memory of a golden second must be paid for with respect for real people, even when they have not yet become legends. Today, if I wrote a chess analysis, I would have to invent a player who does not exist, assign to him a style, a record, a future. That is the fastest way to turn myself into a deceiver. And I am too old to start wearing the mask of a sports prophet.

There is a question I ask myself whenever a piece does not arrive on time: what makes a sports article truly alive? It is not a beautiful long-range shot, not a new record, not a star’s famous line. It is truth seen through the eyes of someone who was there, felt through the breath of the writer, frozen in a language that cannot be bought from a chart. A move cannot appear if no ball ever existed. A chess move cannot be analysed if no one ever sat at the board. And a sports article cannot be born when all its raw material is only an empty notice. Truth sometimes loses to a long-range shot, but truth never surrenders to an invented article.

I do not know what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps a new chess prodigy will emerge in a small club on the outskirts of Hanoi, or an important match will be announced at dawn. When that happens, I will again grab my recorder and run out the door, as I have done for thirty-seven years. But today I refuse to wear the clothes of a storyteller before any story has been born. I owe you a long article, and the longest article I can write right now is the confession that I have nothing to write. Silence is not failure. Silence is a way of telling the truth in the language of someone who has watched too many matches.

The next generation of chess players is still growing out there. They may sit in a poorly lit training room, open an old chess book, or listen to the tap of esports keyboards as a heartbeat of the modern pitch. I will find them. But until I do, I will not write about them. I will remain silent, like a faithful gatekeeper of sports journalism, waiting for the golden second to truly speak. When it does, the line “an empty stadium still holds the applause of those who have gone” will return to its real meaning. For now, I ask your permission to be silent. This silence is a complete article, because it promises nothing except the truth that I have not yet seen anything.