The Empty Column: Women's Volleyball and the Price of Unrecorded Data

At a press-row seat in Hua Mak Arena in Bangkok, on the night of June 23, 2026, the stat sheet for the VNL women's final between Italy and Japan passed through seventeen pairs of hands before it reached mine. A single A4 sheet printed on both sides. On the front: set-by-set scores, attack points for each spiker, successful blocks, direct service aces, errors. On the back: a positional breakdown, percentages calculated to two decimal places. In the bottom right corner — the place where the data column on first-pass quality should have lived, the column that determines almost the entire tactical menu a team can unlock — there was blank paper.

Three weeks later, in Łódź, I held the stat sheet for the men's VNL final. Same governing body. Same dedicated software. Same rotation of technical operators. The sheet was thicker. And that bottom right corner was not blank.

I still keep both sheets in a grey folder, side by side, like two pages of the same notebook. They are not precious. They are only the cheapest possible evidence of something expensive: in women's volleyball, data is not lost. It is left behind.

Across thirty-two years in press rows — eight Olympic Games, eight football World Cups, countless national championships and continental cups — I have learned that my job is not measured by the number of articles I have filed. It is measured by the number of unanswered questions I have had the patience to keep. And the biggest question in women's volleyball this decade is not at the net. It is in the archive.

An Archive With Holes

To understand why a blank space matters, you have to go back thirty-five years.

Volleyball's statistical culture was born in the Italian men's league. From the late 1980s, Serie A men's clubs began hiring people to record every touch: who blocked, who was blocked, which position the ball came from. By the early 1990s, DataVolley was developed in Italy and turned scattered note-taking into a unified coding system. Within a few years it became the sport's unofficial standard.

FIVB later built its own competition information system with DataVolley as its base layer, applying it to major events. Technically, the tool does not distinguish between men and women. Same software. Same keyboard. Same command codes.

But a tool does not run itself. It needs an operator, and an operator needs to be paid.

The cost of collecting data is a fixed cost, and fixed costs are only paid when there is expected revenue. Women's volleyball data is not missing because the technology is missing. It is missing because not enough people have bet on its value.

That is the whole story in two sentences. Everything else in this piece is a consequence.

Over the past fifteen years I have repeatedly asked organisers of women's volleyball competitions why the stat sheets released to media are thinner than those at men's events of the same tier. The answer, repeated in different languages, always resolves to one idea: we publish what people watch. Nobody writes about perfect-pass rate.

But that is a closed circle. Nobody writes because nobody publishes. Nobody publishes because nobody writes. And in the middle of that circle, a generation of female athletes competed, won medals, retired — and then vanished from history without leaving a single line of data detailed enough for anyone ten years later to reconstruct them.

Who Pays for the Counting

At a Serie A1 women's match, a statistical operator sits in the highest row of the stand, eyes fixed on the net, typing at a speed no outsider can follow. Every rally lasting three seconds is coded into five or six characters. Over two hours, that person records thousands of data points.

The cost of that position — including licensed software, hardware and training — sits at a level only clubs with mid-range budgets or better can sustain. And where does that budget come from? Sponsorship, broadcast rights, ticket sales. In women's volleyball across most markets, all three sources are substantially smaller than in the equivalent men's competition.

The result is a system designed to create uniformity but operating as a money valve. Teams with money measure more. Teams that measure more analyse deeper. Teams that analyse deeper win more. Teams that win more have more money. The unfairness is not in the rules of play. It is in the recording infrastructure, and recording infrastructure never appears in a league table.

During the transfer window, that valve opens widest. A spiker from a league with full data enters the market with a numerical dossier readable from Tokyo, from Istanbul, from Conegliano. A spiker of the same calibre from a league with no data enters the same market carrying only a forty-second video clip someone filmed from the stands on a phone. Two women can score the same number of points in a season. One has a price. The other has a rumour.

The Invisible Counters

I have spent most of my career writing about people who never appear on the scoreboard. Ball retrievers. Line judges. Medical staff. And above all, the people who count.

At most women's volleyball competitions I have covered, the statistical operator role is paid by the day, with no long-term contract, no insurance, no promotion path. In many Asian leagues they are students called in for shifts, or volunteers given a travel stipend. In some leagues, reserve or recently retired players are used to type, because they understand the rules and do not demand a professional wage.

What is worth noting is that most of these people are women. Women's volleyball is recorded by women paid less to do a job that is itself undervalued.

Their work is invisible in the precise technical sense: when they do it well, nobody mentions them; when they mis-code a single entry, a player can lose part of her market value, a coach can make a wrong decision, and an article can tell an entirely skewed story. I once watched a Japanese spiker be judged "inefficient in attack" for an entire tournament because the software had mis-coded an entire set of plays from position four to position two. Nobody checked. Nobody had the authority to check. The number went into the file, and from the file into a contract.

I enter the arena through the side door, but I write about the match with my whole heart.

I still say that whenever journalism students ask me how to approach a sports event. But today I want to add: the statistician also enters through the side door, and none of them is allowed to write with her heart. She is only allowed to type correctly.

The Forgotten Contract

If I had to pick one sentence to define how I work, it would be this: a forgotten contract usually tells more truth than a celebrated one.

The celebrated contract is the one with a transfer fee, a press conference, a social post shared ten thousand times. The forgotten contract is the one that does not exist. And in women's volleyball, most contracts do not exist in any sporting sense.

Take Japan, because I live there and have followed this game for two decades. Most of Japan's top women's volleyball teams are owned by corporations. Hisamitsu Springs, NEC Red Rockets, JT Marvelous, Toray Arrows, Denso Airybees, Suntory, PFU BlueCats, Toyota Auto Body, Hitachi Rivale, Okayama Seagulls. That structure has an enormous advantage: it gives female players a stable career in a market where most countries cannot manage anything similar.

But it also produces a consequence few people discuss. Most Japanese women's volleyball players do not sign a sporting contract with a club. They sign an employment contract with a company. They are employees. They clock in, they have departments, and they train in the evening.

What does that mean for the market? It means that for most Japanese female players there is no transfer fee, no published salary, no searchable price list. A spiker who scores six hundred points in a season and a spiker who scores four hundred may earn comparable incomes, because both are paid on the pay scale of two different companies, not on the value scale of the volleyball market.

When there is no price, people replace price with narrative. And when narrative replaces price, the rumour writer becomes the valuer.

The Transfer Window and the Information Vacuum

We are in the middle of a transfer window. I know because my inbox is full of messages beginning with "a source close to the situation has indicated."

My method for handling them has not changed in fifteen years. I sort them into four tiers. Tier one: information with a contract, a clause, a signature. Tier two: information confirmed on both sides but not announced. Tier three: information from one side, benefiting the side that supplied it. Tier four: information nobody will put their name to. I write about tiers one and two. Tier three I keep in notes. Tier four I read for amusement and delete.

But the problem for women's volleyball in a transfer window is not the quality of rumour. It is that tier one is almost empty.

In football, a journalist can look up a release clause, remaining contract length, wage structure and injury history in minutes. In women's volleyball, even the contract length of a national team player is sometimes information nobody can confirm. Not because it is secret. Because nobody recorded it.

In a vacuum like that, the market does not run on information. It runs on trust in a narrator. And trust in a narrator is a very old, very opaque mechanism for distributing power — and a deeply disadvantageous one for players from markets that have no narrators.

Japan: When the Company Is the Club

In October 2026, SV.League tipped off, replacing the old V.League system with a model designed to move clubs closer to independent governance and professionalisation. On paper, this is the largest shift in Japanese volleyball in three decades.

I watched the opening matches of that season from the stands and from press rooms. What caught my attention was not the standard of play but a small detail: clubs began hiring people for communications, for content, for data.

That is the most important signal of the season. A professionalising league is not measured by whether players earn more — though that matters. It is measured by whether clubs begin paying for work that used to be done for free: filming, writing, counting.

I once spent my own money on camera equipment, back when I was making a documentary series about youth women's volleyball teams. The first episode reached a viewership nobody at the time believed possible for women's sports content. But what I found while making that series was not the viewership. It was the number of young players who had no document at all confirming their status.

I bet on new media, because audiences are smarter than people think.

I still bet that way. But I have learned that new media can only replace tiers three and four of rumour. It cannot replace tier one. To have tier one, someone has to pay the wages of the person at the keyboard.

Italy: Where Data Is a Commodity

In Italy, women's volleyball is the most commercially developed women's sport in Europe. Serie A1 women's clubs publish post-match data. Local press write about block rates, attack efficiency, successful defensive plays. There, a spiker can build a personal brand on data.

Even there, however, public data is only the outer layer. The detailed layer — coding every rally, analysing by setter combination, by opponent serve type — belongs to the club and is not shared. During a transfer window it is a strategic asset worth more than money.

It is a paradox I always have to explain to editors: the league with the world's best data is the league where data is most concealed. Publishing and transparency are two different things. A club can post a full stat sheet on its website and still withhold the information that determines a player's value.

Vietnam: Full Stands, Thin Data Columns

I grew up in a family with Vietnamese roots, and I follow Vietnamese women's volleyball with an attention I do not give to many other volleyball nations. It is a biased attention, I admit.

What I see in Vietnam is a familiar paradox. National championship matches fill the stands. Clubs such as LPBank Ninh Bình, VTV Bình Điền Long An, Bình Điền Long An, Vietinbank, Hoá chất Đức Giang, Than Quảng Ninh, Kinh Bắc Bắc Ninh and Geleximco Thái Bình have loyal fan bases many European clubs would envy. The national women's team has produced results that forced the whole region to look again.

But the data column for that league is far thinner than the applause in the stands.

When Trần Thị Thanh Thúy moved to Japan to play, Vietnamese fans followed her mainly through short clips and through Japanese stat sheets that not everyone could read. One of the best spikers in Southeast Asian women's volleyball in a decade played in a league with Asia's finest data infrastructure, and most of her story was still told in words, not numbers.

The promise in Amman has no minutes, but journalism has a kind of contract more sacred than a signature.

I wrote that in an article years ago, standing in the press area of a large stadium when word arrived of a call-up. I still think it holds for Vietnamese women's volleyball today. Nobody signs a contract with memory. But memory is the only asset a women's sport can hold for the long term, if nobody commits to recording it as data.

Injury and the Cruel Benchmark

There is one consequence of the data gap I consider the most serious, and it concerns injury.

When a female player returns from a ligament injury, she enters a market with no baseline. There is no longitudinal data to compare her before and after. There is no workload data showing how many jump repetitions she has accumulated across her career. There is no phase-by-phase performance data to separate a player who has slowed because of age from one who has slowed because she has not recovered.

So what replaces that baseline? The memory of her best match. And the memory of her best match is the cruellest of all benchmarks, because it does not measure the player. It measures the distance between her and the most perfect version anyone ever saw.

I believe demanding that a player prove herself in her first match back is a systemic cruelty. It increases re-injury pressure, because the player is forced to jump higher, hit harder and defend further than her body permits in week one. And that system is fed by a data gap. With longitudinal data we would know how long a player needs to return. Without it, we have only a fixture list and a need to win.

I once wrote about 78,000 people at Luzhniki who did not cheer. They breathed together, and I understood what sacred means. Women's volleyball deserves moments like that, and it has had them — in Bangkok, in Apeldoorn, in Tokyo. But a sacred moment nobody records is sacred only to those who were there. Ten years on it becomes an oral story, then a legend, then nothing.

More Data Does Not Mean More Fairness

At this point I have to say the thing I know will irritate many colleagues.

The natural response to everything above is to demand parity of data: women's volleyball must be counted exactly like men's. That demand is correct in principle, but I think it is insufficient, and in some cases counterproductive.

First, data does not automatically produce fairness. It only produces a new battlefield, and on that battlefield the richer team still wins. If we demand parity of metrics without demanding parity of access to metrics, we are only building another layer of inequality, decorated with expensive software.

Second, applying the full men's metric set to women's volleyball assumes the women's game is a lighter version of the men's game. It is not. Women's volleyball has a different collective rhythm, a different point distribution, a different share of extended rallies, a different balance between blocking and defence, a different role for the setter. A statistical system designed on men's data may mis-measure precisely the qualities that decide women's volleyball.

Third, and this is the point I want to stress most: the right question is not "why don't we count women's volleyball the same way." The right question is "what should we count." There are things of value in women's volleyball for which the sport's current metric set has nowhere to put them: a team's ability to hold rhythm through long rallies, a spiker's tolerance when she is repeatedly targeted in the same position, the quality of third-touch defensive contacts. None of these appear in the summary sheet. Not because they are unimportant, but because nobody designed a box to record them.

A data system is never neutral. It encodes what its designers considered important, and it silently discards the rest. For women's volleyball, that silence has lasted three decades.

What Is Changing

But there is one thing I have observed over the past two years that makes me cautiously optimistic. The change is not coming from the top.

It is coming from fans who build their own spreadsheets. From social media accounts that film rallies on phones and post them with detailed annotations. From Vietnamese fan groups that translate Japanese stat sheets into Vietnamese within hours of a match. From young people in Manila, in Jakarta, in Hà Nội teaching themselves statistical software because nobody pays them to do it but they want to.

This is what I call the bottom-up archive. It cannot replace official infrastructure. It lacks the resources to code at professional level. But it leaves traces. And traces, for a women's sport that has been left out of the record, are everything.

Ten years from now, when someone wants to reconstruct the career of a spiker in Vietnam's 2026 national championship, they may not find an official database. They will find a spreadsheet file in a shared folder, maintained by someone nobody ever paid. And they will understand that women's volleyball survives not thanks to federations. It survives thanks to people who decided it was worth recording.

Two sheets of paper are still in my grey folder. One has a blank space. One does not. And I have not yet decided how long I will keep them — until that blank is filled, or until someone pays the person who fills it.