Insufficient Data to Judge: Notes from a Night of Combat Sports in Vietnam

The announcer read three numbers. 49-46. 48-47. 48-47. The scream from the red corner flared and died quickly, replaced by a heavier silence — the silence of someone who has just understood they have nothing in hand to object with. I was sitting in the fourth row of the press section, I opened my notebook, and I wrote exactly one line: "Insufficient data." The ring was still intact. The two fighters still stood on either side of the referee, sweat still printed on the canvas, the lights still on. But the scorecards had been folded and slipped into an envelope. Nobody in the arena got to see them. Nobody knew which judge scored which round, how any single round was assessed, which criterion was prioritised in the third. A decision had just changed the career trajectory of two human beings, and we had not a single shred of data to verify it. For someone whose trade is reading rules, that is the worst possible starting point. Professional combat sports in Vietnam are accelerating in event volume while lagging at the data infrastructure layer. LION Championship, the professional MMA promotion operated by VTVcab and launched in 2026, now runs monthly cards with fighter contracts and rankings. Boxing and Muay Thai nights in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang have thickened considerably over the past two years. But the things that come with professionalisation — public scorecards, judges' worksheets, written scoring regulations, video review protocols — have not kept pace. The result is a paradox: events grow more professional, while the way people argue about them stays amateur. In a single fight night in Vietnam today, at least three scoring systems coexist. The first is the 10-point must system — the standard in boxing and most MMA promotions under unified rules, scoring each round across four categories: effective striking, control, aggression, and defence. The second is the ONE Championship criteria, where damage sits at the top and every other factor only breaks ties when damage is equal. The third is traditional Muay Thai scoring, where a strike that lands but costs you balance is worth less than a lighter strike that preserves posture. These three systems produce three different results for the same fight. That is normal in professional sport. What is not normal is that spectators frequently do not know which system the fight in front of them is being scored under. Back to that night. The red corner pressed forward for almost the entire third round. The blue corner retreated, blocked, and threw fewer strikes — but each one produced a clear visual reaction: a knee buckling, a foot changing axis, a guard dropping for about two seconds. Scored under criteria that put damage first, the third round belongs to blue. Scored under the 10-point must system with heavy weighting on control and aggression, the third round belongs to red. Both are correct. Both are defensible in writing. And both are unverifiable, because detailed scorecards do not exist in public form. Video review protocols, where they exist, usually permit only certain categories of review: injury caused by a foul, clear illegal strikes, procedural errors. They almost never permit review of a scoring decision. This is the point most misunderstood by fans. Video is not a second-instance judge. It is a tool for establishing events, not for evaluating their weight. A camera can answer whether a strike landed. A camera cannot answer what that strike was worth, because the answer to the second question lives in a book, not in a frame. Referees do not create errors; they only record what the rules already contained. If the rules are unclear, the fault lies with the people who wrote them, not with the person applying them under thirty seconds of pressure. I have a habit of keeping my first mistake rather than erasing it. In 2026, while still a final-year student commentating for an online sports channel in Hanoi, I mispronounced the name Nguyen Quang Hai three times in a single half. The editor told me plainly. I did not argue. I wrote it in my notebook, and the following month I sat through footage of both teams until I knew every shirt number. The first mistake is not there to be forgotten; it is there to serve as a calibration marker. It gives me a baseline to measure how far I have travelled, and it forces me to recognise that most sporting arguments are not about who is right, but about people who never agreed on a baseline at all. In 2026, at the World Cup in Russia, I was assigned to Group H while every colleague chased Kylian Mbappe. In the final group match between Japan and Poland, Japan's passing data shifted sharply after the break: they were almost exclusively passing sideways and backwards. I wrote a long analytical piece concluding that Japan was running down the clock to preserve a narrow defeat and advance on fair-play points — the first time in World Cup history a team progressed from the group stage on that criterion. The piece was rejected on the grounds that there was "no conclusive evidence". Data stays silent until someone asks the right question. The question I asked was not "did Japan play badly", but "which set of rules is Japan optimising against". That is a different question, and it has a verifiable answer. Applying that method to a combat sports night in Vietnam, I build three layers of data before allowing myself an opinion. The event layer: who threw what, when, whether it landed, whether it was illegal. The context layer: which rulebook governs this bout, issued by which organisation, which version is currently in force. The analysis layer: under that rulebook, which outcome is reasonable. That night, I had the first layer at a middling standard, the second layer at zero, and the third at zero. Two of three layers empty. There was nothing to rule on. That is what I wanted to write down, even though it satisfies nobody. The crowd that night booed loudly. I do not think they were wrong. Let me reconstruct their argument seriously: across three rounds, the red corner was the only side actively trying to end the fight. Blue retreated and defended. In most combat sports Vietnamese fans habitually watch — from boxing to Taekwondo at the SEA Games — the aggressor is usually rewarded. To them, a blue victory is not a controversial decision; it is an absurd one. That reasoning has a foundation in a different scoring system, not in pure emotion. Refuting a position does not require refuting the person who holds it. The real problem in Vietnamese combat sports is not the competence of judges. It is that the scoring system is designed to be unreadable from the outside. When scorecards are not published, when regulations are not fully released, when organisers do not state which criteria set they are using, every decision becomes suspicious — and there is no way to clear anyone. Opacity is not an accident. It is a choice, and it creates a market for explanations that cannot be checked. Broadcast rights work like rules — whoever holds the clause controls reality. That applies equally to television money and to scoring regulations. At the 2026 SEA Games in Phnom Penh, the dispute over whether to call the sport Kun Khmer or Muay Thai was not an argument about vocabulary. It was a dispute over the right to define rules, and the right to define rules is the right to distribute medals. Professional sport operates precisely this way, even when organisers prefer not to admit it. The media carries its share. After the fight, the most popular headline was "robbery". That phrasing is attractive because it assigns intent — someone robbed someone — while most controversial decisions involve no robber at all. There is a different criteria set, a different reading of the same round, and a judging panel that was never asked to explain itself. Writing "robbery" is easy. Writing "three judges were not trained on the same criteria set" is hard, and nobody clicks it. I have followed combat sports in Vietnam long enough to recognise a recurring pattern: whenever a controversial decision lands, the first reaction is to find someone to blame, and the last reaction is to reread the rules. That order should be reversed, and it can only be reversed once scoring data becomes public property. One detail is easily missed: the cost of publishing that data is close to zero. A spreadsheet, a PDF of the regulations with a version number, a timeline stating the effective date — collectively less than a day of an administrative staffer's work. In return, every future argument gains an anchor. Fans do not need to be persuaded that a decision was correct. They only need to be shown where it came from. If I could propose a single change to Vietnam's professional combat sports promotions, it would not involve replacing judges. It would be publishing detailed round-by-round scorecards within thirty minutes of the fight ending, accompanied by a written scoring regulation carrying a version number and an effective date. The value is enormous, because it moves the argument from "who stole it" to "which criterion was applied" — and only the second kind of argument can end with an answer. An empty arena still keeps the rules; people simply see them more clearly without the noise. A night of combat sports in Vietnam, once the crowd has gone home and the lights are off, leaves one question no promoter wants to answer: if the scorecards had been public from the start, would we still be arguing about people — or would we finally be arguing about the rules?