The Empty Table: 'Insufficient Information' as a Discipline in Combat Sports

On my desk in Incheon sits a twenty-page document, printed the night before, held together by a paperclip that has already rusted. I counted: the phrase "insufficient information" appears forty-seven times. Not an estimate, not a rounding. I counted with a pencil in the margin, exactly the way I still count shots every time I rewatch footage of an old fight.

The document was sent to me under the heading "Stage-2 Deep Analysis" for an article in the martial arts field. Inside are all eight dimensions: competitive tactics, athlete condition, organisational landscape, business model, rules and compliance, health risk, public narrative, industry transmission chain. Each dimension has a table. Each table has rows. And almost every row returns the same sentence.

The source article never arrived. No headline. No source. An empty list of information points. What arrived was a frame: a clean skeleton, built exactly to spec, with not one thread of flesh on it.

I read it twice. The first time to find what was wrong. The second time to find what was right.

What was right sat in the final line, where the author recorded that every cell without data had been marked "insufficient information", and that this was a considered conclusion — explicitly not a zero, not a negative finding, and not a low-risk verdict.

That is the sentence I want pinned to the newsroom wall.

Transfer season is the season of ownerless numbers. A player is valued by a single post. A deal is treated as done because of a blurred airport photograph. In combat sports the noise runs hotter, because almost everything there converts into money: pay-per-view revenue, fighter purses, takedown defence rate, significant strikes landed per minute, striking accuracy.

My experience of watching fights has given me a habit I cannot shake: whenever a metric appears in a piece without a source, I go looking for the spreadsheet that produced it. Most times, that spreadsheet does not exist. There is only someone at eleven at night, with a seven a.m. deadline, and an empty data cell.

That twenty-page report is that empty cell, scaled up to a document. It lays out three possible causes of a single failure: the system could not retrieve the article at all (paywall, JavaScript-rendered page); it retrieved the article but the field names did not map onto the input schema; or the source was never a written article to begin with — an image post, an embedded video, a results ticker line.

What matters is that it did not stay silent. It said, very clearly, that it did not know.

To me those three causes are not technical. They are three ways a bad fact enters the paper. The first is that the fact never arrives, and we write from memory — the most distortable source of all. The second is that the fact arrives but is filed in the wrong drawer, and we analyse a boxing bout with the measuring stick of a forms routine. The third is that there was no fact at all, and the piece still has to be filed.

The third is where people get hurt.

There is one passage in the report worth stopping on longer than the rest: the domain label "martial arts". It is so broad as to be useless. Under that single label sit at least four rule universes that cannot be swapped for one another.

The first is mixed martial arts under the Unified Rules, where results are counted in rounds, in the scorecards of three judges, in metrics such as significant strikes per minute, takedown defence and takedown accuracy. The second is professional boxing, where four major sanctioning bodies — the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO — each keep their own rankings and their own title pathways, and where a fighter can hold one body's belt while being ranked far lower by another. The third is kickboxing and Muay Thai, with different scoring emphasis on kicks and elbows. The fourth is wushu, where sanda and taolu must be kept apart, because sanda is a combat discipline permitting punches, kicks and throws under its own ruleset, while taolu is a choreographed forms event scored on difficulty and performance quality.

A domain label that is too broad is not a taxonomy problem. It is the problem of an article that can be entirely correct in its numbers and entirely wrong in its nature.

Applying win-loss logic to a taolu routine is a structural error. Applying difficulty-score logic to an MMA bout is the same error in the other direction. And if someone compares one body's rankings with another body's rankings without saying what is being compared, the reader receives a comparison that does not exist.

This is why I distrust any piece that opens with a single figure and builds the whole argument on top of it.

The second thing worth stopping on is the pressure to fill the table. A frame with eight dimensions, each with its own table, creates a very specific pressure: an empty table looks like a defect. And when an empty table looks like a defect, the writer has an incentive to fill it with something that resembles data.

An empty cell marked correctly is a conclusion. An empty cell filled with an estimate is a structured lie.

I have tasted this. In 2026 I followed Incheon United through a relegation fight. After a 0-3 home defeat to Jeonbuk Hyundai the dressing room was so quiet you could hear the steel lockers settle. I wrote a piece full of feeling. The supporters' forum came back hard: "Sentimental rubbish, he doesn't understand football." They were right. I had substituted atmosphere for numbers, because at that moment I had no numbers.

The dressing room does not lie. Only outsiders need to embellish it.

The third thing is silent transmission. One empty cell in a stats sheet, copied through three articles, becomes a fact. Nobody rechecks it because it was "already in the earlier piece". In combat sports the metrics most prone to this are pay-per-view revenue and fighter purses — the two figures only the promoter knows, and the promoter almost never discloses in full.

The greatest risk in a complete analysis table is not that it is wrong. It is that it is right in the cells nobody checks.

The fourth thing is the line between allegation and adjudication. A public accusation that a fighter missed weight is a narrative event — worth reporting, but still only words. A ruling by an athletic commission or a sanctioning body is a compliance event. The two get blended constantly, and when they are blended, even the best-written piece becomes the most legally exposed one.

An allegation is a story. A ruling is law. Blending them is the fastest way to turn a good piece into a contestable one.

The fifth thing, and the one I think too few people writing about martial arts in Vietnam pay attention to: weight-cut risk is the most dangerous empty cell in a fighter's entire file. In combat sports, a missed weight or a severe dehydration cut is the most common reason a bout collapses at short notice, and the most common cause of an acute medical event. It must never be inferred from the tone of an article. It can only come from a documented cut history.

The same principle applies to age. A fighter's biological age is not on the birth certificate. It is in the strikes absorbed and the number of stoppage losses. In the lighter divisions, decline arrives earlier because everything there depends on reflex speed. A thirty-two-year-old with two hundred rounds in the tank is not the same asset as a thirty-two-year-old with forty.

And the sixth thing is the heat cycle of a story. Every name in combat sports passes through four phases: embryonic, accelerating, climax, backlash. Misplacing the phase is the surest way to overpay for a name whose market premium has already peaked. I watched this in Incheon, when a player was celebrated for half a season and then turned on by his own stand after exactly three matches.

There is one night I keep. Kazan, June 2026. South Korea beat Germany 2-0, with goals from Kim Young-gwon and Son Heung-min in stoppage time. I stood near the tunnel and watched the players hold each other and cry. I filed a piece full of feeling immediately. My editor killed it: "No tactical analysis." He made me rewatch the tape and count. Nine shots, against twenty-five from the opposition. Nine out of twenty-five. I counted three times because I did not believe it.

The final piece carried both: the tears in the tunnel and the number nine. Since then, every piece I write carries one number I counted myself.

There are nights that need no goals to be remembered for a lifetime. But every night needs a number so that we do not say something false.

The most counterintuitive thing this week: that empty analysis table is the most honest document I received. In a week when everyone had a full table, clean metrics and confident forecasts, a document that said plainly "I do not know" was the only one that could not be caught out.

People fear artificial intelligence because it makes things up. The scarier thing sits on the newsroom side: a system that rewards the completed table, penalises the empty one, and never asks where any cell came from. When the reward sits with completeness of form, honesty becomes a career disadvantage. That is why empty cells rarely survive an editorial meeting.

When the stadium empties, the only applause left is your own heartbeat.

If there is one thing to do right now, in this transfer window, it is to reread your own stats sheet and find the cells that never had a source. Not to delete them, but to print them exactly as they are — empty, and empty responsibly. An article that leaves one cell blank will annoy a reader for three minutes. An article that fills that cell with an estimate will make them believe something false for three years.

Next time an analysis table reaches you and one row reads "insufficient information", leave that row alone. It may be the only line in the whole piece that somebody actually checked.