Vietnamese Table Tennis Data: Seven Columns Never Recorded

My scorekeeping sheet at the Vietnamese national table tennis championship final had fourteen columns. The first four were basic: player name, playing hand, backhand rubber, forehand rubber. The other ten I carried over from my football data work: points won on serve, points won on receive, average rally length, third-ball attack rate, unforced errors, points lost in the back half of each set, serve-direction changes after losing two points in a row, and three defensive columns.

After two days of play, seven of those columns were still blank.

The players were not standing still. They did plenty. The problem was that I had no way to record it systematically: the electronic scoreboard exported no file, there was no multi-angle footage, no second person beside me to cross-check. One man, one notebook, and four tables running at the same time in the same hall.

That night I reopened the script I use to process match data. The first line returned an empty result.

Three months later, I am still trying to answer a question that sounds simple: where does Vietnamese table tennis stand, and how much of it do we actually know through numbers rather than memory?

A SPORT WITH MEDALS, AND AN EMPTY DATA STORE

I grew up in Japan, where table tennis has an almost complete recording system. The Japan Table Tennis Association publishes match-by-match results from domestic events. High schools log metrics at the national championships. Television replays run slowly enough to count every rally. When I moved to Vietnam to live and work, I brought that habit with me, and it collided immediately with a different reality.

Vietnamese table tennis has tradition, depth, and results. At recent SEA Games, the Vietnamese team has reached knockout rounds and won medals in several events. The names fans remember include Nguyen Anh Tu and Dinh Quang Linh in the men's events, and Mai Hoang My Trang and Nguyen Khoa Dieu Khanh in the women's events. These are real players with real results and real medals.

But when I tried to build a dataset for a single domestic season, I had no raw material. No serve-points-won rate per player. No rally-length distribution. No head-to-head records by pairing. No figure showing who wins what percentage of points at nine-all.

Meanwhile, the sport itself has changed enormously. In 2026, the International Table Tennis Federation moved from 21-point games to 11-point games, raising the density of high-stakes points in every match. In 2026, the rule banning hidden serves took effect, reducing the server's advantage. In 2026, celluloid balls were replaced by 40+ plastic balls, cutting spin and lengthening rallies. Add those three changes together, and modern table tennis becomes a sport in which the first two balls of each rally decide most of the outcome.

A sport that hinges on the first two balls of a rally is a sport that cannot be analysed by feel.

THE GAP IS NOT IN THE WRIST

At events on the WTT circuit, organisers log every point, every error, every rally. The data exists because the system requires it to exist. A player who wants ranking points must enter the right events, and to be seeded into the right events their record must be thick enough. In Vietnam's domestic events, results exist as scorelines, and everything else lives in the spectators' memory.

I used to think the problem was technical. Early on, I sat and watched and felt that Vietnamese players handled the third ball more slowly than players from Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. But I could not prove it, because I had no numbers. Without numbers, every conclusion is a guess wearing professional clothing.

This is where an old lesson returned. My first V.League dataset had hundreds of errors, but it taught me more cleanliness than any course could. I mistyped player names, miscalculated minutes, and double-counted one match. But precisely because I logged it by hand, I knew exactly where my data was weak. With Vietnamese table tennis, I do not even have a sheet to get wrong.

There are two technical traits of Vietnamese table tennis that I can observe, and both could be verified if the data existed. The first is a close-to-the-table style built around the backhand, which suits players with strong reflexes. The second is that in the women's events, the number of players using pimpled rubber is relatively high, producing low-spin balls that break the rhythm of opponents used to heavy spin.

Both are rational choices under current conditions. The problem is that on the international stage, such a choice only holds value if it is measured and adjusted. Pimpled rubber wins matches against opponents who have never faced you before. In the second meeting, that edge usually disappears, and nobody knows how fast it disappears because there is no head-to-head data.

If I had four metrics — serve-points-won rate, receive-points-won rate, rally-length distribution, and win rate at points from nine upward — I could build a tactical portrait of every player in a season. Those four metrics need one person logging at each table. That is a far smaller investment than one overseas training camp.

HIERARCHY, POINTS, AND THE PROBLEM OF CHOOSING EVENTS

At regional level the structure is fairly clear. The SEA Games is the short-term target, where Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam compete directly, with Malaysia and the Philippines in the chasing group. Singapore has long relied on naturalised players and holds the regional top spot. Thailand has a stable development system and a deep roster. Vietnam sits in between: strong enough to reach semifinals in many events, not yet stable enough to convert semifinals into gold.

Internationally, the hierarchy is sharper. China has held the dominant position since table tennis joined the Olympic programme in 2026. The chasing group includes Japan, South Korea and Germany, with France and Sweden recently joining through young players. Southeast Asia sits outside that group, and within that outer band, the gap between a player with enough points to enter a main draw and a player with none is enormous.

This is where the ranking system becomes a strategic matter rather than an administrative one. ITTF ranking points expire, and standings are calculated from a player's best results within a defined window. To hold a ranking, a player must compete regularly, choose the right events, and work out which tournaments are worth the trip and which only cost money. For a table tennis programme on a limited budget, that is an optimisation problem.

And here is what I want to state plainly: most decisions in Vietnamese table tennis are currently made with no model behind them. Which points need defending, which events deserve resources, which player needs rest to avoid injury, which doubles pairing should be trialled. All of it is calculable. Nobody calculates it, because nobody has the data.

THE DEVELOPMENT LAYER AND A CONVERSION RATE NOBODY MEASURES

Vietnamese table tennis has a youth competition system and training centres in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong and Da Nang. But the conversion rate from a player with national-level results at fifteen to a player with international ranking points at twenty-two is very low, and nobody can measure that rate, because nobody tracks a player with the same set of metrics across seven years.

I read a football team through thirty variables before I listen to a commentator. In table tennis, I cannot yet assemble five clean ones.

That leads to a specific consequence. When a young player stalls at nineteen, nobody knows whether the cause is injury, loss of motivation, a coach changing direction, or simply that the player is not good enough. Those four causes require four different responses. Without data, all four collapse into a single sentence: no progress.

Coaches in Vietnam, from what I observe, work with very few support tools. They rely on their eyes and their experience, and in many cases their eyes are excellent. But the human eye cannot count percentages across a season, and the human eye cannot recall how many times one player has lost to another at ten-all.

THE COUNTERARGUMENT: PLAYING MORE DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MAKE YOU BETTER

There is a widespread assumption in Vietnamese table tennis that I think deserves re-examination: to improve, you must play more international events. It sounds reasonable. But where data exists, it is not always true.

Playing more tournaments does not automatically produce improvement. It produces cost, fatigue, and points-defence pressure. A player who enters eight events in a year with a heavy flight schedule may end up with fewer points than a player who enters four well-chosen ones. In football I saw the same pattern with home advantage: when the Bundesliga played in empty stadiums, I realised home advantage was merely a variable waiting to be erased. In table tennis, the number of international matches is that kind of variable.

Second, correlation is not causation. A Vietnamese player losing to a Japanese player in qualifying does not prove that Vietnam's development system is weaker. It proves only that on that day, at that moment, the Japanese player won. To claim a weaker system, I would need hundreds of matches, the same metric set, the same recording method. I do not have them. And if I do not have them, the weaker-system claim is one I am not yet permitted to make.

That is why this piece does not conclude anything about the standard of Vietnamese table tennis. It says that nobody yet has enough data to conclude anything.

The 2026 World Cup taught me one thing: the model did not collapse, I was the one who believed it absolutely. That lesson cuts both ways. Whoever trusts a model absolutely will be wrong. Whoever rejects a model without having a model to reject is wrong in a different way.

Data does not need me to believe in it. Data needs me to check it.

SIGNALS FOR THE NEXT CYCLE

If within the next two years a Vietnamese national table tennis championship publishes point-level data by player — even if it only covers serve-points-won rate and receive-points-won rate — that will be a bigger turning point than a SEA Games medal, because it unlocks every analysis that follows.

If it does not, we will keep watching good matches, remembering the beautiful rallies correctly, and forgetting the fourteen columns of paper.

I kept that sheet. Seven columns are still blank. They are waiting for someone in Vietnam to fill them in.