The Memory of Empty Seats: Football, Absence, and the Waltz That Never Ends

On June 17, 2026, the Etihad Stadium in Manchester had a capacity of 55,000 seats, and that night not one of them was occupied. I sat in front of a screen at three in the morning Chengdu time, hearing the ball strike the grass ring out like fingers tapping the lid of an empty wooden box. Manchester City beat Arsenal 3-0, in the first Premier League match after exactly 100 days of suspension due to the pandemic. I rewatched that game three times, and I still cannot recall a single goal. The only thing that remains is the silence — the sound of a 55,000-seat stand with no one in it. After that night I locked my phone, stayed alone in my rented room, and answered no one's messages. I wrote the piece "The Memory of Empty Seats," about missing the crowd as part of football's very identity. It was shared more than 50,000 times. But the number is not what I want to say. What I want to say lies in a question I still have not fully answered: when no one is watching, what remains?

To understand why an empty stand could devastate me that much, we must go back two years earlier, to Moscow. On July 11, 2026, I was eighteen, a first-year journalism student, sitting in a small cafe in Chengdu watching the World Cup semi-final between Croatia and England. Croatia won 2-1 after extra time, the decisive goal by Mario Mandzukic in the 109th minute. Croatia controlled only about 35 percent of possession, took 14 shots to England's 19, and still advanced. But what haunted me was not the scoreline. It was Luka Modric — once a refugee boy herding goats in the Zadar region, raised amid the years of war — fighting to the last minute like a soldier dancing on a minefield. When Modric turned, Moscow stopped breathing to hear the rhythm of a waltz. I wrote a blog titled "Modric's Waltz," and it reached 20,000 reads overnight. From that moment, I knew I would write about football the way one writes about human fate.

Four years later, at twenty-three, I had just become a sports reporter at a newsroom in Chengdu when I was sent to Doha to cover the 2026 World Cup. Thanks to the empty-stadium series from 2026, I was given the big-tournament beat. On December 10, 2026, at Al Thumama Stadium, I watched Morocco beat Portugal 1-0 — the goal by Youssef En-Nesyri in the 42nd minute — to become the first African national team to reach a World Cup semi-final. Before the semi-final, across five matches, they had conceded exactly one goal — and that goal was an own goal. Their low block ran like a poem about patience. I wrote the series "Fortress of Sand," and it won me a Young Sports Journalism award.

Those three events — Moscow 2026, Etihad 2026, Al Thumama 2026 — are scattered across my career, but they tell one story. It is the story of what football hides behind the scoreline.

I learned something from Modric that I have carried into every piece since: tactics are the language of loss. When a team presses high, that is not merely a technical choice — it is a form of denial. Denial that time is passing, that opponents can organize, that football has changed and your legs are no longer as quick as before. When a team drops into a deep block, that is acceptance: acceptance that you will live on the memory of counter-attacks rather than the present of passing moves. And when a team crowds the midfield, that is fear — fear of space, fear that if you leave a single square metre of open grass, someone will step in and take everything.

Morocco at Qatar 2026 is the most beautiful example of this. They did not defend because they were weak. They defended because they understood exactly who they were. Walid Regragui, who took over the team only three months before the tournament, did not try to turn Morocco into a different team. He kept the deep structure, placed Sofyan Amrabat and Azzedine Ounahi as two shields in front of the back line, and let Hakim Ziyech and Achraf Hakimi be the counter-attacking arrows. It was not a glamorous diagram. But within that simplicity was a truth: each of their passes was a whisper that only those standing in the right place could hear.

I remember the round-of-16 match against Spain, when the game went to a penalty shootout. Goalkeeper Yassine Bounou saved again and again, and then Achraf Hakimi stepped up to take a Panenka — a soft, audacious, almost taunting ball straight down the middle while the goalkeeper had already dived to one side. That was not a shot of safety. It was a shot of belief. In that instant, a Moroccan full-back stood before one of the most revered national teams in the world and chose to play as if he owned the match. Football is sometimes decided by those who dare to do what others deem disrespectful.

What I saw in Morocco was not a purely sporting phenomenon. It was a metaphor for how a people preserve their identity in the desert. Morocco did not build a fortress of stone; they built it from the faith of an entire nation. Their defence was not a wall, but a stretch of sand — soft when you push into it, yet always flowing toward the hollows. Portugal fired off dozens of shots in the quarter-final, dominated possession, but most of it died at the edge of the box. That was not luck. It was the result of a collective that understood defence is not cowardice but a way of organizing memory: you remember every ball that ever hurt you, and you stand in its path before it can happen again.

But here I must tell a more uncomfortable truth about Morocco's run. The 2026 World Cup was held in November and December, in the middle of the club season — the first time in history. That meant players entered the biggest tournament of their lives with legs already worn down after three months of continuous play, and then had to return to their clubs immediately afterwards, in midwinter, when the calendar was compressed to make up for lost time. Morocco reached the semi-final with a thin squad, and that was no coincidence. They paid with their bodies. I believe fixture density is the single greatest culprit behind injuries; no medical staff can save a player who must play two matches a week all winter. And when a smaller team must play more matches than a bigger one just to go as far as they did, then in the end their limit is not talent — it is the calendar.

But if Morocco taught me about patience, then the Etihad taught me about emptiness. An empty stadium is a diary written in dust. You turn each page and see only the footprints of those who came and went. In that Manchester City - Arsenal match, everything technical remained intact: the passes were still accurate, the movements still calculated, the goals still scored. And yet football had vanished. It vanished at the exact moment we realized the roar was gone. I sat there and understood something eighteen years of watching football had never taught me: football is not a game that has spectators; football is a game created by spectators, and those on the pitch are merely the performers of a ritual we have agreed to believe in.

That moment changed how I write. Before, I wrote about what happened on the pitch. After the Etihad night, I began to write about what did not happen. About the player who sat on the bench all tournament and came on only in the 89th minute. About the retired legend whose shadow still hangs over the squad. About failed transfers — those who arrived for tens of millions of euros and vanished from collective memory within a single season. Absence became the protagonist of my writing, because I understood that in football, what does not happen is often more important than what does.

Look at Modric himself. What made him an icon was not his passes — it was the spaces he refused to leave. At thirty-seven in Qatar 2026, he ran less, but stood in the right place more. He no longer chased the ball; he waited for it to arrive. It is a lesson in deliberate retreat, in accepting that the body has changed and turning that change into a weapon. When Modric turned, Moscow stopped breathing to hear the rhythm of a waltz — and four years later in Doha, he still turned, only a beat slower, enough for people to notice that time had passed.

And there I found the thread linking the three events. Football moves in circles, not in straight lines. What we today call the future of football — high pressing, absolute possession, the digitization of every run — was once somebody's past. Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff were mocked for Total Football; people called it madness, football that could not win. Then it became scripture. Pep Guardiola was doubted in England; now his principles are taught in academies from Hanoi to Chengdu. And the fear that modern football is losing its poetry — I heard it from older men in cafes, and I suddenly realized it was identical to the laments of the 1960s, when people said football had died because of money. Every generation believes it is witnessing the end. No generation has been right.

That circularity is why I keep a private notebook, jotting down the life-cycles of generations. In it, I place side by side: an eighteen-year-old just breaking through, a thirty-three-year-old playing his final season, and a legend who retired twenty years ago. I draw their career arcs overlapping, and always see the same shape: rise, peak, fall, and — if lucky — a little remaining legacy. Seen that way, every match is an encounter between generations at different points on the same curve. A team is never just a team; it is a slice of time.

That is also why I distrust analyses built only on numbers. Expected goals, touches, pass-completion rates — all true, and all incomplete. They measure what happened, but ignore what was refused. A pass not made can matter more than a pass completed. A run no one saw can be the reason a goal exists. Football is written in struck-out sentences. And a good writer is one who can read those struck-out sentences.

But here I must face what I myself have been avoiding. The romantic story I tell — of Modric, of Morocco, of empty seats — sounds beautiful. And precisely because it is beautiful, it may be concealing a more uncomfortable truth. When the Etihad was empty, I thought I was mourning the crowd. But perhaps what I truly realized was the opposite: that I had loved football for the noise, not for the game. That all those years, I came to the pitch not to watch a pass, but to dissolve into a crowd and feel I belonged to something larger than myself. When the crowd disappeared, I was forced to face the bare game — and I did not like it. What does that say about me, and about all of us?

There is a blind spot in the collective memory of fans: we believe we love football. But it is quite possible we love the feeling of belonging. That is why legends are remembered more than matches, icons more than formations, and moments more than entire tournaments. The Etihad in 2026 was an experiment no one wanted: it separated football from the crowd, and showed that both can live without the other — but only one of them is real. We call football the king of sports. But perhaps the true king is the crowd, and the match is merely its loyal servant.

I am not writing this piece to conclude. I am writing to record a silence — because after everything, it is the one thing football has never taught me how to end. Thirty years from now, when some boy in Hanoi or Chengdu watches a match in a packed stadium, and hears the roar pouring down from the stands, I want him to know that sound is not a given. It is a gift whose value only those who have heard the silence can understand. And if one day the seats are empty again, I hope he will not be afraid — because in that silence, he will find the question I have spent my whole life trying to answer.