World Hopes Week and the equation of 40 children: what my spreadsheet cannot measure

I was sitting in a café on Lach Tray Street in Hai Phong, staring at a number that had just surfaced on my screen: 2026. It was not an xG figure, not a PPDA coefficient, not a transfer fee. It was a birth year. All 40 athletes competing at the ITTF World Hopes Week & Challenge — 20 boys, 20 girls — must be born in 2026 or later. That means, when the event opens in Sheffield next month, the children walking onto the floor will be at most 12 years old. Taking today's date, a child born in December 2026 would be barely eleven and a half. That child might be hitting a serve whose spin I, at 42, with 26 years of watching table tennis, still have to squint to analyze.

Numbers do not lie, but they know how to make us lie to ourselves.

Because the first thing the number 40 evokes in the mind of a man like me — a transfer market administrator, someone who has staked his reputation on a spreadsheet more than once — is precisely the question that number cannot answer. 40 children. One week of training. One Challenge competition. And a promise that every federation in the world wants to make: these are the seeds of future champions.

But my spreadsheet has no cell in which to enter the word "future."

In the summer of 2026, aged 33, I staked my reputation on a deal my colleagues called worthless. Mohamed Salah joined Liverpool for 42 million euros. I used xG data and accelerations per match to argue he would exceed 25 goals. People laughed. When Salah scored 32 goals in the Premier League, my spreadsheet was right. But what I remember most is not the correct number — it is the night I flew to Anfield, sat in the stands, and realised no Excel cell could reproduce the sound of 50,000 people singing when the boundary broke. Since then I have learned one thing: data is the skeleton, but emotion is the breath. And with twelve-year-old children, breath is what decides whether they go anywhere at all.

That is why I am writing this piece. Not to praise an event. But to say that this event — with all its care — is putting on the scales a question my spreadsheet, this time, does not dare answer straight away.

Context: One week of training, one competition, and an ecosystem being built by hand

The ITTF World Hopes Week & Challenge is a development programme within the International Table Tennis Federation's long-term talent pathway. It is not a WTT event, not a ranking-points event, and not a prize-money event. It is a week of training that ends with a competition called the Challenge. The composition is clearly defined: up to 20 boys and 20 girls born in 2026 or later, selected through national and continental Hopes events. Among them, two English athletes — Sai Prasanna Kumar and Isabella Xiao Xu — earned their places by winning the England Hopes challenge. The rest of the field comes through "rigorous" international qualification.

This year, Sheffield hosts for the second successive year. This is a detail I want to linger on, because it says more than it says. When a national federation is entrusted by the ITTF with hosting an international development event two years running, it is not merely recognition of last year's success. It is an operational signal. It means the infrastructure, the staff, the racket-inspection process, the logistics of transporting child athletes, and the ability to run a week of training for forty children from multiple continents — all of it — has reached a threshold of trust that the ITTF is willing to repeat. In the language of the transfer market I work in every day, this is a contract extension: the host performed well enough that the international sponsor kept the venue.

But I do not want to read this event as a logistics bulletin. What makes it worth analysing lies elsewhere: in the way Table Tennis England, like other national federations, treats U12 athletes as an asset.

I say "asset" deliberately. Because in this programme, a twelve-year-old is not only a trainee. It is an input to an ecosystem. The English federation uses older pathway athletes as sparring partners for the younger ones. This is a small detail with strategic weight: it turns an international event into a domestic laboratory. The child learns basic technique and simultaneously is tested against those who came before within its own system, on home soil. It is not merely sent to compete; it is placed into a machine designed to be reused.

And this, in my view, is the point that a Vietnamese observer of table tennis like me must write into the notebook. Not to compare who is better. But to read a lesson about structure.

Core analysis: What 40 children can and cannot tell us

When I open my spreadsheet to analyse this event, I hit a problem I have never hit analysing Salah or the German national team: there is almost no data.

No rankings. No points. No prize money. No international win rate. No serve statistics, no point-winning statistics, no head-to-head records. With forty U12 athletes, every advanced metric I usually use — xG in football, PPDA, heatmaps, pressing indices — does not exist in the table tennis world, and even table-tennis-specific metrics such as point-win rate, direct serve-winning rate, or rally-phase point rate are not published. I am forced to write in the "Notes" cell: insufficient information, cannot assess.

This is not the event's fault. This is the event's nature.

A development event does not sell data. It sells a pathway.

And that pathway, as Table Tennis England presents it, is anchored to three names: Truls Moregard, Hana Goda and Adriana Diaz. These are former Hopes participants. Moregard, according to the information provided, won the Men's Singles silver medal at Paris 2026. This is the strongest evidence a youth development programme can produce. It is not a vague promise; it is an established result.

But numbers do not lie, and they also know how to make us lie to ourselves. If I sit down and calculate coldly, I must ask: what percentage do these three names represent out of the thousands of children who have passed through the Hopes programme since its inception? The answer is not in the document. And the absence of the answer is itself the data.

This is the point where I want to use my own story. In 2026, I used the PPDA pressing metric to rank Germany as average, despite them being reigning World Cup champions. I published "Die Mannschaft is walking the tightrope" with data showing their midfield allowed opponents an average of 12.3 passes before pressing. I received countless criticisms. When Germany were beaten 0-2 by South Korea and exited at the group stage, my article was shared more than 50,000 times. Germany left the World Cup with a round zero — chaos, too, has its chart. But what I took from it was not "I was right." It was this: in sport, we too easily confuse a correlation with a cause.

World Hopes Week sits in the same logical trap.

When we say Moregard, Goda and Diaz attended Hopes and later became international stars, we implicitly make a causal claim: the Hopes programme made them. But there is another possibility that deserves equal weight: the Hopes programme selected them because they were already outstanding. If the second claim is true, then the event's value is not producing talent, but discovering talent that already exists, gathering it together, and accelerating it.

This may sound like wordplay. But it has very large practical consequences for any federation trying to build a youth programme.

If Hopes produces talent, then every country should replicate its model. If Hopes selects talent, then the country with the best selection mechanism and the most children playing table tennis at grassroots level has the biggest advantage. These two conclusions lead to two completely different strategies: one invests in events and training, the other invests in scouting, measuring and discovery.

I do not have enough data to conclude. And I will not pretend I do. But I can say this: any federation that only imports a model while ignoring the selection mechanism is building a house from the second floor. No week of training turns a twelve-year-old into a professional player unless that child already possesses qualities no coach can implant.

Emotion is noise data — but noise, above a certain level, becomes signal. And the real signal in this story is not who succeeded. It is who was never selected.

From Sheffield to the wider structure: the problem of rising table tennis nations

There is one thing I observe as a Korean living in Vietnam and working in the sports market. Strong table tennis nations do not only invest in players. They invest in the machine that selects players.

The Hopes programme is such a machine. The national-continental-world structure allows a child in any country, provided they are good enough, to go down and then up through the tiers. The child wins the domestic Hopes event, then enters continental qualification, then, if successful, earns a place in Sheffield. Throughout, the federation has data on it: which national event it won, whom it lost to, whether it could compete against older athletes.

But here too there is a blind spot. The age limit — born 2026 or later — plus the 20-boy and 20-girl quota creates a rigid structure. Forty places. Out of every 100,000 children playing table tennis worldwide, perhaps one reaches Sheffield. That means the probability of any child — Vietnamese, Korean or otherwise — reaching this event is extremely low. That is not bad. That is how a talent system works. But it raises the question of the funnel.

If the funnel is too narrow from the start, one wrong selection can lose a whole generation.

This is where I want to talk about the nature of assessing a twelve-year-old. In table tennis, some metrics are easy to observe at twelve: reaction speed, eye-hand coordination, height, reach. But the metrics that decide success at twenty-two are often invisible at twelve: tolerance of failure, ability to learn new technique, the pace of physical development after puberty, and above all what I call "the stubbornness in front of a ball flying at your face."

Truls Moregard stood out at twelve for creativity and speed. But to succeed at Paris 2026, he needed consistency. That was not in his Hopes file. It came later.

The same with Hana Goda and Adriana Diaz. These are athletes who changed enormously from their own U12 versions. If a federation stops at U12 criteria, it will miss late developers. And table tennis history, like football history, is full of late developers who became legends.

Emotion is noise data. But here, the noise is a twelve-year-old panting after a multi-ball drill, not yet knowing whether they are among the forty.

Contrarian angle: When a development event becomes reverse evidence

This is the part I must handle most carefully, because it easily turns into gratuitous criticism.

A development event like World Hopes Week has a clear benefit: it gathers the best children of a certain age, gives them a week of high-quality training, gives them a competition, and gives them a reason to continue. Those children go home believing the world is watching them. That has motivational value that cannot be measured in points.

But there is a second consequence few mention. When a national federation hosts an event like this, and when two of its athletes enter directly by winning the domestic event, an invisible pressure is placed on those children. They represent not only themselves. They represent the entire system that chose them. If they win, the programme is praised. If they lose, the programme may be questioned — by the very people who wrote it.

I have no evidence this happened to Sai Prasanna Kumar or Isabella Xiao Xu. There is no information on their results, form, or reaction to the event. But I know that feeling. I staked my reputation on a deal and lived with the pressure for months. I was 33, with a career and a rational mind. A twelve-year-old does not have those things.

This is the contrarian point I want to make: what is praised as a "golden opportunity" is sometimes an early burden. And an early burden, in elite sport, is one of the most common reasons young talent disappears.

Look at football. In the summer of 2026, I remember one name very clearly. Salah crossed the line and every spreadsheet of mine fell apart. But I also remember other names — players labelled "prodigies" at eighteen, placed at big clubs, then vanishing from the map after two seasons. Not because they were bad. Because the machine placed a weight on their shoulders they had not prepared for.

The same can happen in table tennis. A twelve-year-old wins a national event, is sent to Sheffield, becomes the "hope" of an entire sport. Within a week they must face the best children of Europe and Asia. If they lose every match, the loss is not in points. It is in belief.

And the belief of a twelve-year-old is one of the most fragile assets in sport.

This does not mean the event should be scrapped. It means we need a more honest way of evaluating it. Do not only measure it by the medal count of those who left. Measure it by the number of children who stay with table tennis after they go home.

What the transfer market taught me about twelve-year-olds

I work as a transfer market administrator. Every day I look at young players, contracts and valuation numbers. My job is to predict a player's future value from current data. I have been wrong many times. But every time I was wrong, I learned something about the limits of prediction.

Salah's 42 million euro figure was not a predicted number. It was a market number. It reflected what the market believed about his value at that moment. And the market, in that case, was right — partially. But nobody predicted 32 goals. Nobody predicted his growth in a Liverpool shirt, under Klopp, inside a specific tactical system.

That is what I want to apply to World Hopes Week. When you look at a twelve-year-old, you are looking at a market number. You see what the present allows you to see. You do not see the coach the child will meet at fifteen, the injury they will overcome at seventeen, the decision to leave table tennis for university at eighteen.

Table tennis, like football, has no absolute randomness. Only rules not yet decoded.

And the biggest rule I have learned in 26 years of watching the industry is this: young talent does not become great talent along a straight line. It becomes great talent along a zigzag, and in most cases it becomes nothing at all.

That sounds pessimistic. But it is realistic. And realism is the foundation for building a good development programme. If you think forty children in Sheffield will become forty stars, you will be disappointed. If you think the goal is for two or three of them to become international players within ten years, you are thinking correctly.

The conversion rate is the metric any development programme should measure. But it is not published. And its absence is the biggest gap I see in how we evaluate programmes like this.

Behind the number 40: what is written and what is left blank

I want to return to what the source article provides and what it does not, because in my work the gaps are often more important than the content.

Provided: event structure (one week of training, one Challenge competition), age limit (born 2026 or later), quota (20 boys, 20 girls), two specific English athletes, three exemplary alumni, and the context of Sheffield hosting two years running.

Left blank: the full list of forty athletes, their countries, match results, technical statistics, the programme's conversion rate over the years, the precise criteria of "rigorous international qualification", and — most importantly — any mechanism to assess whether a child attending the event progresses faster than one who does not.

The last gap is a methodological one. To answer that question you need a control group. You need to compare selected children with unselected children of equivalent standard. No such study is mentioned. That does not mean the event is useless. But it means any claim about the programme's "effectiveness" remains unproven by data.

In the transfer market this is the error we call "looking back at the past to justify the present." If I buy a player and he succeeds, I praise my decision. If he fails, I blame injury. But in both cases I am telling a retrospective story. Nothing stops me imagining the opposite story.

That is the greatest temptation I must guard against when reading about World Hopes Week. Three names — Moregard, Goda, Diaz — are a retrospective story. We know they succeeded, so we look back at the Hopes programme and say: ah, that is why. But if the successful ones had been different people, we would look back at the Hopes programme and say the same thing.

What I want to see in ten years

I am not writing this to be sceptical of an event. I am writing to say I want it evaluated seriously.

Specifically, I want to see a few things. I want to see the programme's conversion rate — what percentage of Hopes participants, after ten years, still compete internationally. I want to see long-term tracking data, not only the successful names but the ones that left. I want to see a control study, however small, comparing children who attended with children of equivalent standard at twelve who did not.

And I want to see one more thing. I want to see the programme tell children who were not selected that they still have a chance. Because in sport, talent does not appear on schedule. It arrives late. It arrives unexpectedly. It arrives from places selection systems do not look.

If you run a development programme and measure only those who pass through it, you are missing half the story. The other half lies with those who never walk through the door.

Ending: From Sheffield to any floor, the signal lies in the next round

I sit in Hai Phong, more than ten thousand kilometres from Sheffield. I have no ticket to the arena, no access to internal data, and I will not pretend to know which of those forty children will become a champion. I do not believe in miracles. I believe in the probability of wearing the shirt.

But I believe in one other thing. I believe the true value of an event like World Hopes Week lies not in the children it puts on stage. It lies in the children it makes stay home and train harder, knowing that in twelve months there will be another selection round.

The next round. That is the signal I want to follow.

Not who wins in Sheffield. But who comes back next year, at another event, with another motivation. And in ten years, when a new name rises from a country we never thought of, I will reopen my spreadsheet and check whether that name was once in Sheffield.

If so, I will write another piece. If not, I will also write another piece. Because in both cases the question is the same: what truly produces an elite player, and are we looking in the right place for the answer.

The answer, perhaps, is not in a week of training. It is in a decade of patience. And in sport, patience is the metric my spreadsheet still does not know how to measure.