When the Data Is Mislabeled: Why a Sports Column Cannot Be Built From a Tragedy That Never Belonged to the Pitch

There are articles I have to refuse to write, and this is one of them. Not because I have run out of ideas, and not because I am dodging a difficult subject. But because the source document placed in front of me — with a 'football' label slapped on top — contains not a single word about football. Its title speaks of a fire at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), where newborn infants died. That is a public tragedy, a story of medicine and public safety, and there is no team, player, league, transfer contract, or tactical situation in it.

I sat in front of the screen for a long time. I was asked to write 3,928 words of pure Vietnamese sports copy from that material. But if I did as asked, I would have to fabricate something that does not exist. I would have to speak in the name of a match that never happened, to narrate an event whose victims were infants. That is not journalism. That is desecration.

Once you start fabricating your data domain, you are no longer a journalist; you are an ownerless content-production machine.

In more than thirty years of holding a pen, I have learned one simple but stone-hard thing: every decent sports article must grip onto a real domain — a scoreline, a passage of play, a tactical decision, a line of transfer money. When that domain vanishes, what remains is only empty form. And the most evil thing about empty form is that it still looks professional. It has a headline, a lede, figures, a conclusion. But behind it there is nothing but a hole smeared over with chalk.

The source I received confessed this itself. The accompanying analysis states plainly: 'every dimension is inapplicable,' 'no tactical content,' 'no financial information,' 'no players.' It says outright that feeding this article into a football-analysis pipeline is a labeling error. I agree with that labeling error. But I do not agree to turn that error into raw material for stacking up a fake sports piece. A hospital fire is not a subject for a sports column, no matter who labels it as such.

In Liverpool, where I live, I often walk past Anfield on days with no match. The stadium is empty, the grass still watered, the lights still on with no one singing. I have learned to write about the absence of a match — but only when that absence genuinely holds a football grief. Here, what is absent is not football waiting to be written. What is absent is football that never arrived. And I cannot water grass onto a pitch that does not exist.

What troubles me most is not the request. It is the machinery behind it. We live in an age where the speed of content production is placed above the veracity of data. One system mislabels an article about infants as 'football.' Another request turns that false label into an order. If I take the order, tomorrow there will be a 3,928-word piece about the 'defensive tactics' of something that is not a team at all. And it will be published, shared, cited as if true. That is how misinformation is born — not through bald lies, but through perfectly structured articles containing a truth of zero.

If the source story contains no football, then the only honest sports article is one stating there is no football — not a piece stuffing tactical vocabulary onto a headstone with no body beneath it.

I can picture exactly what that fake sports article would look like. It opens with a fabricated moment. It inserts a father, a child, a discarded shoe — symbols I still use, but this time dragged out of context. It weaves in a few inflated data lines. It closes with a memory-freezing sentence that sounds poetic. My craft is enough to produce that in a few hours. But craft is not a moral exemption pass. What I need is not the ability to write, but the clarity to not write.

I know some will say: it's a small thing, just write something, readers don't check sources. But that very argument — 'readers don't check' — is what cheapens this trade. One reader cannot check one article, two readers cannot check it, but a whole industry trusting itself collapses fast. Trust in sports — in sports journalism — is built by millions of correct articles and can be lost by a single one assembled from nothing.

There is one thing I want to say clearly, decisively: I am not refusing because the subject is hard. I have written about defeat at the Euro 2026 final, about a child stroking a father's cheek after three missed penalties, about English fans weeping at Wembley. I am not afraid to go into the dark places of human beings. What I fear is different — I fear dragging a non-football tragedy into a football article, then molding it into a symbol for something I invented myself. That is not empathy. That is appropriation.

If one truly wants to write about PIMS, the right place is a health page, a public-safety page, a human-rights page. There, victims are remembered by name, by a childhood cut short, by the responsibility of those who should have protected them. And the pitch — if it must be mentioned at all — deserves only a minute of silence, not a column of tactical data.

I put this question to myself before putting it to anyone else: what makes us feel permitted to write sports about something that is not sports? Is it because sport is where we are used to assigning meaning to everything? Is it because the structure of a sports article is so easy to fill that we forget the frame was never the content? The frame is only the frame. Place a pitch frame over a morgue, and the frame does not turn the morgue into a stadium — it only turns your article into something terrifying.

In my editing career, I have had to reject contributors many times. The most common reason was not bad writing. The most common reason was writing too beautifully with nothing real behind it. That is the occupational disease of those who learn grammar before they learn truth. I once had that disease. I once wrote flowery passages about a match I never watched, simply because I trusted my own rhythm more than my own eyes. My editor that year pulled me back. He said something I never forgot: 'You are writing about a match described by the smell of grass, but you have never stood on that field.' Since then, I have learned to write only from what I have truly witnessed or truly verified.

Honesty in sports journalism does not lie in avoiding all emotion; it lies in ensuring every emotion in the piece has an anchor in the real world.

I realize I am writing this in exactly the voice I always use — but this time that voice serves a different purpose: to say no. No to mislabeling. No to turning a tragedy into content. No to using storytelling talent to blur the line between fact and fabrication. Perhaps, across my whole career, this is my strangest sports article: a sports article about why it should not exist.

Some will ask: did you waste an article? I don't think so. A piece about limits is not a discarded piece. It is a piece about the very trade that needs those limits to survive. In an era where machines can write ten thousand articles a day, the value of a writer no longer lies in word count, but in knowing when to stop. Stop before a headstone of infants. Stop before a false label. Stop before the temptation to turn everything into a pitch.

I do not chase the ball like Mbappé — I have said that. But I learned to chase its story, and more importantly, to know when a story does not belong to the ball. Tonight, in Liverpool, it rains again. Anfield has no match. There is no singing. And somewhere very far away, very different, families are weeping for reasons entirely unrelated to football. I do not write about their grief in the language of match commentary. I leave them be. That is the least I can do as a journalist.

If you operate a content-production system, treat this refusal as a gate. Before feeding an article into the pipeline, ask: does its domain label match its actual content? If an article about infants is tagged football, the problem is not with the final writer. The problem is with the gate that let the error through. Patch that gate, and you save more than one article. You save the credibility of an entire information flow. Sport is the only place where adults may cry like children without explaining — but only when those tears are real, flowing from a real match, beneath a real stand. Do not use another child's tragedy to decorate a sports article with no field beneath it.

Every season that passes is a book closing; careful readers find themselves in it. And a careful writer, on a night like tonight, finds himself not in what he wrote, but in what he chose not to write.