The Empty Chair at the Back of the Press Room: When Vietnam's Martial Arts Data System Returns a Blank JSON Array

The empty chair at the back row of a press room at a provincial martial arts tournament is not a forgotten detail. It is physical evidence of a crisis that Vietnam's sports media industry rarely dares to name outright: the depletion of data in the martial arts ecosystem.

Over the past three months, I have attempted to retrieve competition information from at least four different martial arts tournament systems — from an amateur Muay Thai event in Binh Duong, to a national Vovinam championship, to a local MMA show in Ho Chi Minh City. The result each extraction returned was the same: an empty JSON array, no fighter names, no weight classes, no results, no division. Not a single piece of information sufficient to write even a short news brief, let alone an in-depth analysis.

This is not the fault of individual journalists. It is a systemic outcome of a data pipeline that broke long ago, and its consequences are reshaping how all of us — both writers and readers — understand combat sports in Vietnam.

The consequences of emptiness

When a data system has nothing to return, the first reaction of most writers is to give up. The remainder turn to rumors, social media videos, or pure intuition. All three approaches carry their own problems.

Rumors in martial arts operate by a logic different from football. A transfer rumor about a footballer can be verified through contracts, agency fees, or agent statements. A rumor about a fighter — "he's preparing for a life-and-death match next week" — usually has no verifiable source beyond the rumor itself. Mainstream press, if it republishes the rumor, creates a butterfly effect that turns speculation into "fact" within hours.

Social media videos are also not a solution. A 22-second clip from a provincial match might attract 50,000 views but lacks all context: who the referee is, how many professional bouts the fighter has had before, and how strong the opponent actually is. We are watching statistics from a fight without knowing what level it corresponds to.

Pure intuition needs no further discussion — it is something even the writer struggles to distinguish from genuine expertise. An article on "the style of a young fighter" based only on the last 3 bouts without opponent data is, in essence, dressed-up guesswork.

Why the pipeline broke

There are three core causes, and all three are structural — not random.

First is the institutional problem. Vietnamese professional football has the VFF, the VPF, a branded league system, and sponsorship sufficient to pay dedicated communications staff. Martial arts — especially at the amateur and semi-pro levels — has no such structure. Tournament organizers are typically a group of volunteers with no communications department, no budget for professional photographers, and no standardized process for recording results.

Second is the digital culture problem. Amateur fighters have no personal websites, no statistical pages, no Wikipedia entries. Their records exist mainly on personal Facebook pages and oral narration within the gym. While a U23 footballer might have a 47-page profile on Transfermarkt, a provincial Muay Thai fighter may have not a single line in any database.

Third — and this is the hardest to say — is the gender problem. Within sports media, decision-making positions still largely belong to men. They decide which sports receive media investment. Football, pickleball, men's basketball are prioritized not because they are "hotter" than martial arts, but because they are more easily consumed by a male editorial group that grew up watching football. Martial arts — especially traditional disciplines — do not enjoy the same status.

What are the practical consequences?

A young 18-year-old fighter winning a national amateur championship may never have their name mentioned in any major newspaper. A peak bout between two veteran fighters may take place on a district-level stage without a single professional journalist present. A sad truth: we do not know how much Vietnamese martial arts talent has been missed over the past 20 years, not because they did not exist, but because we have no system to record their existence.

When data is absent, public discourse is absent. When public discourse is absent, sponsor interest disappears. When sponsor interest disappears, budgets for sport development dry up. This vicious cycle is not the fault of any individual — it is structural.

I do not have an answer to this problem, and I believe anyone who claims to have a definitive answer is lying. But there is one thing I know for certain: the empty chair at the back of the press room is not the result of laziness. It is the reflection of a system that has never truly considered martial arts a topic worth sitting down to listen to.

The question I am pondering is not "how do we get data" — but rather "who will be responsible for building the system that produces that data?" And that, perhaps, is the beginning of a conversation that Vietnam's sports media industry has needed for a long time.