When Tragedy Strays into the Football Section: A System Error Worth Facing

One Monday morning, I opened my feed and saw a name that did not belong there. It sat in the football section. That place should hold only scorelines, lineups, an 88th-minute free kick, and the sorrow of a goalkeeper bowing his head after conceding. But what appeared before me was Zacapu, Michoacán, a figure of roughly 1,600 children's teeth, a state prosecutor's office denying any official record, and a search collective standing up to tell the opposite story. I sat still for a long time. In Da Nang, my balcony looks down on a small pitch where children play every afternoon, noisy enough that I must close the window to read a page. And I asked myself: how did a tragedy about children in western Mexico find its way into my section? Who picked it up? Who stamped the label "football" on it? And what becomes of stories placed in the wrong place, when there is no one left to ask? That is the story I want to tell today. Not about a match, but about the machine behind the matches — a machine that you and I operate together, sometimes without knowing. Before the main part, let me retell the events briefly, because what concerns me today is not judging who is right or wrong in a legal matter. I have no such authority, and it is not the business of a man who has written about football for fifty-one years. By the record: a collective called Buscando Cuerpos en Todo México — meaning "Searching for Bodies Across Mexico" — made a claim about discovering a large number of children's teeth in Zacapu, in the state of Michoacán. The collective's spokesperson was Margarita López. On the official side, the Michoacán Attorney General's Office stated it had no official record of any such discovery, and no corresponding complaint or forensic request. At the federal level, the federal prosecutor's office also appears in the matter. That is all I need, and all I am entitled to say. I bow my head to that pain and leave it to those whose work fits it. A man who writes about a ball should not pretend to understand what belongs to forensics and justice. What made me stop was not the case itself — it belongs to a different section, a different legal system, a different region of memory — but the label. The "football" label stamped on it. In a modern newsroom, such labels are rarely applied by people. They are applied by machines. A system gathers news from thousands of sources, sorts by keywords, by sentence patterns, by the frequency of entities, then pushes each item into a section. Sometimes the system is astonishingly right. Sometimes it is wrong enough to make an old man like me sit down, pour a cup of tea, and think about everything he has believed for decades. So what happened? How could a report about Michoacán wear a football shirt? There are several possibilities, and I want to discuss them slowly, because they are not merely technical. They are a mirror held up to the way we work. The first is keyword misclassification. In any language there are words that mean both a sporting thing and an ordinary one. A verb meaning "to search" can suggest scouting a player. The administrative abbreviations of prosecutor's offices can match the abbreviations of a federation or a club that an algorithm has seen. A classifier that only counts and matches will not understand that no match exists here. It sees a cluster of familiar keywords and nods. The second is a template misfire. News systems keep templates for each kind of story — match reports, transfers, press conferences, disputes. When a source pushes in an article matching no template, the system sometimes shoves it into the nearest one. And the nearest one, for a text structured as "Party A claims — Party B denies — an authority weighs in," may well be a report about a refereeing dispute. Because that dispute structure appears daily in sport. The third is source-feed cross-contamination: two different feeds collide in one queue, and the label of one is pasted onto the body of the other. A purely technical error, with no malice, but far from small in its consequences. All three, in the end, lead to the same outcome: a story that does not belong where it is, placed neatly in the middle of where we live. I want to linger here a moment, because I have watched this industry since 2026, when I joined the sports desk of a television station. Back then, every report passed through at least three hands: a writer, an editor, an approver. Not because they were more talented than us, but because the process forced them to touch every sentence, to read it aloud, to ask "does this story stand?". Today a report can travel from source to reader without a single human hand touching it. The price of speed is the absence of touch. I am not against technology. On the contrary, I am grateful for it. Thanks to it, an old man in Da Nang can know that last night, in a city half a world away, a long shot struck the crossbar in an instant. But I also know that technology cannot tell a tragedy from a game. Only a person can. And if people withdraw from the final stage — the stage of reading, of feeling, of asking "does this story belong to me?" — the machine will keep nodding at everything, including what it should never be allowed to touch. Why do such errors multiply? Because the way the news industry measures success has changed. Once, the measure was accuracy: a correct report had value. Now, the measure is often attention: a widely read report has value. When attention becomes the only measure, checking becomes waste. Checking brings no views. Checking brings no ad revenue. So checking is cut first, and cut deepest. This, I fear, is not the private trouble of one mislabeled article. It is the trouble of a whole current. Over many years in this work, I have realized that sports journalism is among the most easily dismissed forms of journalism, because it deals with what everyone assumes is light. Football is joy, they say. So a small mistake in the football section hardly matters. But precisely because people assume it is light, it is checked the least. And precisely for that reason, a tragedy can slip in, sit there, and be treated like an ordinary sports item — skimmed between two transfer stories, swiped past on a phone screen, forgotten before it is understood. In Vietnam, where I live and write, football fans are among the most devoted and loyal communities I have known. They follow every round, every transfer, every manager's press conference. They trust our football section the way they trust a friend. That trust is a gift, but also a responsibility. For when a friend hands us something misplaced and we do not notice, we quietly erode the very trust itself. I have covered eight Olympiads and eight World Cups, plus many seasons of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. All those years taught me one simple thing: data never speaks for itself. People speak for it. And when no one speaks for it, data speaks in the voice of whoever created it — usually the voice of indifference. Picture it more concretely. An automated tagging system reads a text about Zacapu. It recognizes a familiar structure: one side claims, one side denies, an authority steps in, a witness comes forward. To a machine, this is a "dispute between parties" — and that story type appears most often, of course, in sport, where refereeing disputes, transfer disputes, and result disputes occur daily. So it stamps the label. No malice at all. Only blindness to context. But blindness to context is not the machine's fault. It is the fault of those who taught the machine. We taught it that anything shaped like "A says, B denies" can be filed into a pigeonhole. We forgot to teach it that there are pigeonholes we must never fill by mistake, because inside them are real people, with real pain, with real children. A label, in the end, is a promise. When we file a story under football, we implicitly promise the reader: this is a story about football. When that promise is false, we have not merely made a small error. We are lying systematically, and lying in a way no one notices in time. I once had an afternoon at Hoa Xuan stadium that I will always remember. I went to watch a U19 match, got lost and sat in the wrong stand, and had meant to leave at half-time because the game was dull. But then, at a minute I no longer recall exactly, a young player touched the ball with the outside of his right foot and sent it curling like the letter S before it struck the post. I did not know who he was. I only knew my heart beat fast, as if I had heard a strange poem. After the match I scoured the squad lists, watched the footage at twelve-times slow motion, and wrote a piece. It was read, and the boy, Dang Van Toi, was called up to the U19 national squad. I tell this not to boast. I tell it to say: had I treated that boy as a data row, I would have lost him. A rough gem needs no polishing, only a gaze patient enough to love it — and no machine owns such a gaze. Likewise, if we treat a child in Zacapu as a stray data row, we lose him too, in a different way. The lost, in the end, are always the same: those with no voice to defend themselves. I remember a winter night when I watched a match on television and noticed a small detail: a defender, having committed a foul, bent down, picked up the ball, and handed it to an opposing player. No report mentioned it the next day. But I remember it. I remember it because football — like journalism — is made of small details only a real person sees. A machine can count fouls. It cannot understand the meaning of picking up the ball. This is why I, a man who has spent a lifetime writing only about the ball, feel I must speak about a system error. Not to expand my territory, but to protect my own. For a football section that accepts the tragedy of others has lost its respect for both joy and sorrow. To be called poetic on air is something I am proud of — the ball is poetry. But poetry, by my definition, is precision to the very end of feeling. A lying poem is no longer a poem. A section that files a tragedy where a match belongs is no longer journalism — it is only a shelf of words, packed with things that do not belong together. Now let me speak of consequences. When a story is misplaced, three losses occur at once. The first loss is the reader's. Someone looking for news of their club suddenly reads a line about Zacapu, and a false association quietly forms in their mind. Perhaps they do not notice; perhaps they scroll past. But a trace remains. From now on, in their subconscious, the name Michoacán is stuck to a sporting context. It is a silent insult, unseen, but real. The second loss is the Zacapu story's own. A matter that deserved careful reporting — precise legal language and sensitivity to victims — was pushed into a section people read for entertainment. It was treated more lightly than it deserved. Grief was devalued. The third, and perhaps gravest, loss is sport's own. Every time we let through something that is not ours, we lower our own standard. Next time it will be easier. The time after, easier still. Until one day the football section becomes a bin for everything, and no one believes a word found there anymore. Trust, once lost, is harder to recover than a place in a European cup. I know someone will say: old man, you are exaggerating. It is only a small machine error; fix it and move on. I understand that reaction. I, too, once wanted to believe in the harmlessness of small errors. But I have lived long enough to know that within a system, no error is truly small. There are only errors that have not yet grown. A misclassification today, if not faced, becomes a procedure tomorrow, and a standard the year after. And once an error becomes the standard, no one can remember what was right. But I want to say something against myself, because I believe an honest writer must argue against himself before others do. It would be easy to blame the machine — to say machines lack feeling, algorithms are cold, technology is wrecking the trade. But the machine did not arise from nothing. It was taught by people who decided that speed matters more than accuracy, that readership matters more than correctness, that a section with more stories is better. The machine is only the shape of those choices. When we curse the machine, we are really cursing ourselves — but cursing loudly, to sound noble, so as not to say plainly that the culprit stands right behind it. The blind spot of collective memory lies here: we always remember the great matches, the golden goals, the glittering names. We rarely remember the small errors, the misplaced things, the times the system nodded wrongly. Those errors do not reach the front page. They lie quietly, and because they are silent, we think all is well — while everything slips away, bit by bit, in mistakes no one counts. At 67, I still believe in magic, because I have seen a gem find itself in the mud. But I do not believe in miracle enough to think every error fixes itself. When we put a tragedy where a match belongs, we do not wound anyone with one sudden blow, but we wear away the most precious thing in this trade: the belief that the words we write are meant to be trusted. And here is the hardest thing to say: readers, too, are part of the machine. Every time we skim a line we do not understand and nod, every time we share something we have not read, every time we assume that whatever sits in a section belongs to it, we too apply a label. Our label is not invisible. It is complicit silence. So what should be done? I have no grand answer. All my life I have known only how to write about the ball, and I will not pretend to solve a problem of an entire information industry. But I have a small suggestion, and perhaps it suits an old man. Put one human hand at the end of the pipe. Not to replace the machine, but so the machine has someone able to say "wait." One name in the newsroom, one person willing to read slowly, to ask "does this story belong to us?", and if the answer is no, to lift it out quietly and place it where it needs to go. Just one person. But one person willing to stop can save an entire section from losing itself. And to my readers — those who open their feed each morning with the simple faith that they will read something true — I want to send one word: sometimes we too are the labelers. The only question is whether we notice when the label is wrong. And if we notice, do we have the patience — and the courage — to lift it out, put it back, and correct it with an action, not an empty apology? Hoa Xuan stadium was so quiet I could hear the ball sigh. That night, in my feed, a story that did not belong to the pitch sighed the same way. All I hope is that someone — a real person — hears that sigh, and lifts it out of where it never belonged.