Keeping the Beat in Combat Sports Reporting: When a Writer Must Say 'Not Enough Data'

Every season begins on a morning when no one is awake yet. In Shenzhen that morning is around half past five, when the noodle shops at the foot of the building are still locked and the metro has not run its first train. I sat in front of a screen, looking at a message window that held exactly one line: 'Something is happening, but it is not certain.'

The sender was a familiar source. In five years on the job, I have learned that the shortest lines are usually the heaviest. A single 'not certain' can be the start of a series, or the end of a rumour. The line between those two possibilities is not on the source's side. It is on the writer's side, in whether I have enough data to take the next step.

In combat sports that gap is wider than in any discipline I have covered. Football has scorelines, video, head-to-head history. Combat sports have a judge's decision, and judge's decisions are contested. A three-minute round can be scored two different ways by two people sitting side by side in the same arena. That is why I always carry a stats sheet. Not to show off numbers, but to arbitrate between two streams of emotion running in opposite directions.

That morning my stats sheet was empty. I sat with that emptiness longer than usual, because in this trade, knowing when to stop is harder than knowing when to continue.

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There is a paradox outsiders rarely see in a combat sports newsroom. This is the sport that generates the most content per hour of competition, and also the sport with the least verifiable data per published claim. A ninety-minute football match yields thousands of data points. A three-round fight yields one scorecard, a few hand counts, and a mountain of narrative.

Meanwhile the volume of content pushed out every day is enormous. Transfer news, odds news, gym news, backstage news, news about fights that are 'about to be signed' and never are. The pressure of speed pushes many writers to fill the data gap with speculation. Speculation reads well. Speculation flows. But speculation without provenance eventually comes back to bite the writer.

I work between two markets. One is Vietnam, where I was born, where traditional martial arts such as vovinam and wrestling have long had a place in schools and villages, alongside a professional scene growing fast without a standardised data system. The other is China, where sanda and wushu taolu are organised to the point that every movement has a scoring scale, but where those are two entirely different analytical worlds.

That is how I arrived at something that sounds simple: before analysing anything in combat sports, a writer must decide what kind of martial art they are talking about. Is this professional combat sport, where wins and losses are measured by record and finish rate? Is this performance martial arts, where scores come from movement difficulty and execution quality? Or is this sanda, with throws and scoring zones?

These three require three different analytical logics. Use the wrong one and you produce conclusions that are wrong in a systematic way, even when every number you cite is correct. Applying win-loss and knockout-rate logic to a taolu piece renders the conclusion meaningless. Applying difficulty-score logic to an MMA fight is more meaningless still.

I remember the letter-writing hands more than I remember the goals. But in a combat sports newsroom, what I remember most are the notes I crossed out. That is where I ask myself: what am I analysing, and with what measuring system?

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Among the eight dimensions of a deep combat sports analysis, health risk must always come first, even when it breaks the most compelling narrative. This is what sets combat sports apart from most others. In football, the worst injury is usually a torn ligament, and people discuss it freely. In combat sports, the worst damage is in the brain, and it accumulates quietly across rounds, sessions, and years.

Three risk groups must be screened before any praise is issued. The first is brain health, measured by cumulative impacts, knockout count, and the number of times a fighter was hurt and continued. The second is weight cutting, where fighters push body mass below the level at which the body has enough water to function normally. The third is joint injury and post-career recovery capacity.

What matters here is that all three require data newsrooms usually lack. Weigh-in figures, rehydration afterwards, actual bouts across how many years, how much injury history is public. Without that, an honest writer must write that they cannot yet assess. That is an unattractive sentence, but it is correct.

I once watched a platform push the line: 'Fighter X is ready for the biggest fight of his career.' Nobody asked how many consecutive weight cuts X had just endured, whether he had rehydrated, or whether he was returning from a long layoff. Combat sports newsrooms very often forget a simple fact: an unrecovered body cannot express its own level. Every prediction built on top of that stands on sand.

A promotion season taught me this another way. I followed a team through a campaign and learned that form is not a number; it is the product of sleep, nutrition, psychology, and solitary morning runs. Combat sports are the same. A fighter's condition is decided on the days nobody films. A locker room cannot lie; it can only whisper.

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At the organisational layer, the picture grows more complex. Combat sports have no single power structure. There are promotion-style companies holding power through exclusive contracts and their own title systems. There are boxing sanctioning bodies with four major belts dividing territory. There are regional kickboxing circuits. There are grappling circuits with elaborate scoring. And there are village-level bouts with no regulator at all.

Each layer creates its own barrier. Exclusive contracts keep fighters inside one system and decide who fights whom. Fragmented titles let a fighter call himself champion while three others do the same. Cross-promotion superfights, the thing fans want most, are the thing the power structure blocks most.

An honest writer must pick the right layer. A fight with no regulator behind it cannot be judged by major-league standards. A fight inside an official title system must name that system, that region, that date.

In the two-perspective view, this matters even more. When I write for Vietnamese readers about a fight in China, I must explain their belts and scoring. When I write for Chinese readers about a fight in Vietnam, I must explain why a fighter is called 'champion' by a different standard. In Qatar, my heart beat in two rhythms, and both were on fire. But there is only one scorecard. I am not allowed to let either heartbeat score in its place.

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The fourth layer is money. This is where combat sports newsrooms are most easily led, because the numbers are usually hidden or inflated. A major promotion's revenue structure typically includes gate and pay-per-view, sponsorship, and broadcast deals. Each part may or may not be disclosed depending on who holds power.

The most worth studying is the opposite of the spotlight. I believe the genuinely valuable contracts in combat sports sit with small organisations, with teams that never make a magazine cover, with gyms that develop fighters for others. They earn by selling young labour to larger circuits. The arms race among giants is a branding arms race; real value sits where nobody films.

For writers, the consequence is clear. Without revenue-share, minimum-pay, and grassroots-earnings figures, any claim that 'this fighter earns a lot' is guesswork. I choose another route: ask structural questions instead of praising numbers. Structural questions can be wrong, but they do not create the illusion of a fact I have not verified.

One principle I have held for years: live data supplied to betting companies is the darkest side effect of sports digitisation. Not because numbers are bad, but because the supply chain behind them is often unverified, and because newsrooms sometimes take data from that very source and present it as independent statistics. When I analyse a fight, I state where the data comes from, when it was collected, and who paid for the collection.

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The fifth layer is rules and judging. Here combat sports sit closer to administrative procedure than to entertainment. Scoring, doping control, making weight in the right class, disciplinary handling: each step has a body behind it, and each body has its own rulebook.

A writer's first duty is to identify which body holds authority. A scoring controversy in an unregulated circuit plays out very differently from the same controversy under a formal commission. The same act, two legal consequences, two levels of transparency.

Performance martial arts are subtler still. Scores come from difficulty scales and execution quality, and a commentator must understand that a move that looks beautiful can be deducted for a technical fault the crowd never sees. Writing about performance martial arts with the language of striking combat gets the discipline wrong.

One area I always treat carefully: weight disputes. Missing weight can trigger fines, point deductions, even cancelled bouts. But behind the number on the scale is an entire physiology of a human body. A writer without rehydration and recovery data should not judge a fighter's professionalism on a number alone.

The ball rolls across two generations, and my job is to catch the right rhythm of its drop. In combat sports that drop is not the closing bell. It is the slip of paper the referee raises afterwards. I have to read that paper in the language of rules, not the language of emotion.

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The sixth layer is narrative. This is where pressure on writers is greatest, because readers do not read scorecards, they read people. And combat sports produce the strongest archetypes: the coronation, the dynasty, the revenge bout, the redemption arc, the farewell, the crossover.

Each archetype needs a data test. When a fighter is called 'undefeated', the writer must ask about the quality of that run. A long unbeaten streak may be built on weak opponents or on fights spaced too far apart. Has it held against elite opposition, and if not, what is it actually measuring?

I still remember my first fights as a sports reporter in Australia and then Vietnam. Back then I told stories through the pulse of the stands. I do not score goals, but I remember every breath of the crowd. It took me a few years to understand that crowd emotion is an ingredient, not a conclusion. Let it score and the writer becomes a fan with a keyboard.

My rule is concrete: put emotion at the opening to pull readers in, but close every judgment with a number, a rule, or a sourced quote. This keeps the empathy while keeping the referee's role.

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Across all these layers, one point deserves to be stated plainly: silence of data is not evidence of emptiness. If I have no information on a fighter's condition, the correct conclusion is not 'he is weak'. It is 'not enough information'. That state is not neutral. It is unknown. In journalism those two things are very far apart.

Many compelling articles are born from merging those two states into one. A compelling article says a fighter is declining, when in truth nobody knows what is happening in his private life and health. Another says a fight is unpredictable, when in truth it only means no data was collected. The truth is, 'unknown' does not sell many ads. But it protects both the writer and the written-about.

This is why I retell the story of a short message from a source. In many cases the only information I had was one line reading 'not certain'. What decided whether I wrote was not exclusivity, but how many verified data points I held.

I once followed a promotion campaign where a young man's whole career depended on how many kilometres he ran each morning. I once watched a team stranded abroad during a pandemic, six positive tests with a cause impossible to verify. When the whole world went quiet, 1,204 letters still rang out amid the lockdown. Those letters did not say the team would win. They only said someone was waiting for the team to come home. Journalism is the same. Its greatest value sometimes lies simply in being honest about what it does not know.

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There is a counterintuitive angle few in the trade will state. In combat sports, the best writers are not those with the best predictions, but those who ask the best questions. Predictions can be right by luck. The right question cannot be right by luck. It has to come from understanding structure.

This runs against the market instinct. Platforms want conclusions. Fans want conclusions. The whole social atmosphere around a fight wants conclusions. And in combat sports, conclusions are always more available than evidence, because the discipline is built on adversarial emotion and on impacts outsiders cannot fully see.

Yet that is precisely why a journalist can create rare value. When everyone shouts one conclusion, the only thing left with weight is a person saying they cannot yet conclude, and explaining why missing data leaves every circulating conclusion standing on sand. This is the referee's role in its subtlest form: not adjudicating, but marking the limits of the arena.

I learned this in a season when I was criticised as 'cold'. The team hit a crisis, the forum demanded the coach be sacked, and I refused to follow that current because the data did not support it. I checked duel statistics, possession in dangerous zones, distance covered when the ball was lost. The real conclusion differed from the crowd's feeling. Possession, the metric crowds trust most, is the most deceptive. Many teams rack up sixty per cent through meaningless sideways passes while creating nothing. I kept my conclusion, not to provoke, but because the numbers led there.

In combat sports the temptation is stronger, because emotion in an individual fight is fiercer than in a team. A weak-willed writer turns that emotion into judgments about a fighter's class, future, and limits. A strong-willed writer uses it to open, then steps back to let the data speak.

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So what is the minimum needed to produce a genuine combat sports analysis? I built my own criteria after being forced to stop mid-draft many times.

First, title and source, with a publication date. Without these three, an article cannot be graded for reliability or timeliness. Information without a date is information whose validity cannot be established.

Second, identify the kind of martial art. This step selects the analytical system. The wrong system means everything afterwards is systematically skewed.

Third, at least a few concrete information points with names, events, organisations, dates, and figures. Without them a writer has two options: stay silent, or fabricate. I stay silent.

Fourth, a clear list of subjects. Fighter names, coach names, gym names, organisation names, regulator names. When these appear, narratives have an anchor. When they are absent, narratives are only smoke.

Fifth, clear tiering among three kinds of statement: directly stated in the source, a reasonable inference by the writer, and personal speculation. Keep these tiers and readers know where they stand.

These criteria sound strict, but they are the brake. In an information environment moving faster than our capacity to verify, the brake matters as much as the engine.

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In my own newsroom there are days when all four of the above are absent. I have one message, one feeling, one hunch. On those days the best thing I can do is close the laptop and go to the gym, where I can watch fighters prepare for real bouts. There I always collect something without speculation: the breathing of a man cutting weight, the sound of wrapping hands, a coach's reminder between drills.

People remember goals; I remember the letter-writing hands. In combat sports people remember knockouts; I remember the hands that wrap tape. Those hands never make a magazine cover. But without them, no fight happens safely.

That is why I believe the right direction for combat sports newsrooms in the coming years is back to the backstage, where data can be observed directly instead of inferred from afar. The gym, the medical room, the weigh-in corridor, the press room where a coach says half a sentence and then goes quiet. There, a writer can produce original information without inventing anything.

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It is also worth speaking about Vietnam, where I was born and still consider my root. Vietnamese martial arts have depth in vovinam, in wrestling, in famous martial villages passing craft across generations. But the data system for professional combat is young. Fight data is not standardised, head-to-head history is not fully digitised, and regulators are fragmented.

This puts Vietnamese writers in a particular bind. To compare a Vietnamese fighter with a foreign one, a writer must rebuild the dataset from scratch and state clearly where gaps remain. Otherwise the writer drifts to two extremes: overpraising to sell a story, or undervaluing for lack of a fair comparison base.

I choose the middle road. I state plainly that I lack data, where I lack it, and what can be said within existing data without inference. This does not please those who want high drama. But it preserves credibility, and in this trade credibility is the only asset that cannot be bought back with money.

On the Chinese side, where I now work, the data system is more professional but no simpler. Sanda scores by target zone and includes throws, generating specific scoring debates. Wushu taolu has difficulty scales and technical requirements audiences often do not fully appreciate. Cultural differences between honouring endurance and honouring efficiency mean the same fight is told two ways.

I must write so that I do not impose two-way stereotypes on either side. A referee has no homeland. Neither does an honest writer.

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Across every layer I have walked through, one question repeats and will not leave. What should a writer do when data is insufficient while the pressure to publish is enormous? My answer is unattractive: do not publish. Wait. Or, if the newsroom insists, publish a piece about that very insufficiency, turning it into valuable information.

Such a piece might report that an organisation does not disclose fighter revenue share. That a promotion does not release injury history. That a regulator has no clear disciplinary process. These stories deliver new information without a single line of speculation.

When a forum clamours for a coach's dismissal, I do not chase sensationalism, nor do I fully take a side. I open the data. I check. And if the data supports no side, I write exactly that. This is the hardest work in the trade, because it demands the writer stand alone between two shouting crowds.

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One thing I always remind myself before hitting publish. Numbers are only the skeleton. They cannot replace human story, still less empathy. With only numbers I write an analysis as cold as paperwork. With only emotion I write a fluent but hollow cheer.

What combat sports need is the combination, with a clear boundary. Emotion opens the door. Data keeps the house.

And when data is insufficient, keeping the house does not mean closing the door. It means leaving it open and saying honestly that I do not yet know what is inside.

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I return to that morning in Shenzhen. I looked at the line 'Something is happening, but it is not certain' for another ten minutes. Then I replied with three words: 'Enough yet, sir?'

There was no reply for hours. I used that time to check head-to-head history, to reread my own old pieces, to test whether my feeling was the feeling of someone reading too many forums. By afternoon the source answered: 'Not enough.'

That was one of the most valuable replies I have ever received. Because of it, I did not publish a piece containing something that might be wrong. I waited, and saved that curiosity for another day.

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Broadly, combat sports analysis stands at a fork. One road leads to automation, where machines produce thousands of pieces a day, each full of assertions, most without provenance. The other is slower, requiring every piece to carry new information, sources, and a clear line between fact and inference.

I believe the second road is the survival route. Not because it is more ethical, but because it lasts. Readers may be drawn by a bold assertion for a few seconds, but they stay with someone who tells the truth for years.

In Qatar my heart beat in two rhythms, and both burned. The first beat for the match, for crowd emotion, for the roar. The second beat for the notebook, for data, for the question of whether what I had just seen was really what I had seen. My job is to let both hearts beat without letting either score in place of the other.

And when both beat while the notebook stays empty, I choose to remain inside that emptiness. Because I learned from a morning when no one was awake yet that the purity of a blank page is worth more than filling it with things I do not know.

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There is one image I keep from my years following teams, and it has become my working principle in combat sports. It is the image of people preparing towels and bandages in the corridor, before anyone steps onto the mat. They never receive medals. But they keep the beat. If they get it wrong, no fight can take place.

I want my writing to be like that. Sitting in the corridor, preparing exactly what must be prepared, and when there is not enough, saying plainly that there is not enough.

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So the question I leave is not which fighter will be champion this season. It is this: among the conclusions we read every day about combat sports, what share genuinely has provenance, and what share is only the echo of a silence unwilling to admit it knows nothing?

Next season too will begin on a morning when no one is awake yet. There will again be a short message. And I hope I still have the courage to reply with the familiar three words, instead of letting the fear of missing out turn me into a writer I would no longer want to read.

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Appendix: Signals to track

In daily work I keep a short list of signals to observe rather than trust outright. One, whether an analytical source publishes title, source, and date. Two, whether the analysis system is chosen correctly for the type of martial art, since the wrong system yields systematically wrong conclusions. Three, whether subjects are named with enough people, organisations, and regulators. Four, whether there are at least a few concrete information points with dates and figures so readers can verify independently. Five, whether the author tiers clearly what is directly stated and what is personal inference.

When any of these five signals is missing, I lower my confidence in the source rather than decorating it to make the story more exciting. This is a simple discipline with weight, and it is the only thing that keeps my stats sheet from becoming a decorative piece of paper.

In the end, in a sport where every impact leaves a mark on a human body, a writer losing a little for waiting, checking, and saying 'not enough' is the smallest debt we can pay to those who step onto the mat.