Hugo Sánchez, 'Pentapichichi', and the Subtraction No Spreadsheet Can Show

In the personal data file I have kept for seven years, there is a section titled 'numbers that cannot be converted'. It began with a reader's email in 2026, and today, re-reading the interview Hugo Sánchez gave to Prime Video Sport México, I open it again.

On the night of July 8, 2026, at the age of 56, the man who won the Pichichi trophy five times picked up the phone. His son, Hugo Sánchez Portugal, aged 30, had passed away in an apartment in Polanco, a district of Mexico City. Media at the time spoke of 'gas intoxication'. In the original record, the cause was written with two words — 'carbon dioxide' — a detail I will return to at the end of this piece, because it is a perfect example of how we habitually misread data about human beings.

Hugo Sánchez is a name no one watching La Liga in the 1980s could ignore. Five times the Spanish top-flight's leading scorer. Four of those with Real Madrid. A bicycle-kick volley — 'la chilena' — became his personal trademark. He managed the Mexico national team, sat on coaching benches in several countries. At 67 today, he works as an ESPN commentator — a job that still brings him back every week to spreadsheets, charts and screens.

But the name 'Pentapichichi' — the man who won the top-scorer award five times — is a label. It speaks of achievement, not of the person. And that is precisely the problem for those of us who work with data: we are good at labelling, poor at understanding.

The recent interview recounts a sequence of events I read slowly, three times. He received the news while away. He had to travel a long distance — roughly three hours — to return. He described the utter desperation of not being able to arrive in time. And the line the press picked as its headline — 'I should have gone before him' — is the line any editor would choose, because it is the most painful of all painful lines.

I sat with that sentence for a long while.

As a data analyst, I have a habit of turning everything into a number. Minutes played. Goals scored. Conversion rate. Key passes. I once wrote a piece about Mesut Özil's 17 key passes and was told 'what does a girl know about football'. I did not delete the piece; I added three more charts. I learned that data can be a defensive weapon.

But there are kinds of data no tool can encode. There are numbers that never appear on a spreadsheet; they live between two touches of the ball. And there are gaps even larger than that: the gap between a phone call and a three-hour journey. The gap between 'Dad is coming home' and 'Dad did not make it in time'.

Read only the headline and one would think this is a purely family story. It is. But to an analyst like me, it opens three layers of problem, and all three sit below the waterline of the iceberg.

The first layer is the problem of the Pichichi number. Five. In La Liga history, only a very small group of strikers have reached that figure. Hugo Sánchez did it in the 1980s, when Real Madrid ran an attacking machine with him at its head. His goals were not the goals of a simple poacher. He moved inside the box like a hunter reading the movement of opposing centre-backs. Many of those goals came from phases in which the ball was not yet where he stood — but he was already there first.

In a corridor, if you only look toward the light, you will miss what stands in the dark. That is also what I try to remind myself of when analysing a player. People measure top speed, touches, xG. They rarely measure the ability to be in the right place before the ball arrives. Hugo Sánchez was excellent at that. And the death of his son is a reminder that some things are even harder to measure: a father's ability to be in the right place when his child needs him.

The second layer is the media story. This interview appeared on a streaming platform — Prime Video Sport México — not in a print newspaper. That changes the logic of the news. A platform needs content to hold viewers longer. An emotional family story about a football legend is extremely good retention content: it has a famous name, it has emotion, and it does not require viewers to understand tactics.

I do not say this to diminish the pain. I say it to note that behind a heartbreaking headline, a commercial structure is always operating. A father telling of losing his son. A platform needing retention data. The two do not contradict each other, but we should see both.

The third layer is the problem of human data — and this is the part I want to spend the most time on.

In 2026, when global football paused for the pandemic, the club where I was interning as a data analyst was dissolved. I lost the job and, with it, my faith in the profession. During that time, I volunteered to analyse performance for a national women's U19 team. They had only 12 matches all year. Not enough to generate big data. But I found their goalkeeper had a penalty save rate of 43%, far above the average at major tournaments — and the reason was not reflexes. She read the ball's direction from the shooter's final step, from the angle of the planted foot, from the rhythm of breathing.

The coach said something to me that I have remembered ever since: 'You see what men do not see.'

Today, reading Hugo Sánchez's story, I think of that line. The most important things are usually not in the exported data file. I heard a goalkeeper talk about how she reads the shooter's stomach, something that never appears in an export file. From another angle, I read a father talking about three hours on the road that no tracking file recorded. There is no xG for grief. There is no PPDA for regret.

That is where I want to pause longest, because it is a warning to my own profession. The sports-data industry is booming. Every match now generates millions of data points: player positions, speed, distance, shot angles, physiological variables. Clubs hire entire analysis departments to optimise every pass. But sports data, in the end, is just a set of encodable events. It cannot capture what is not an event — such as a father's presence in a hospital corridor, or his absence from it.

Clubs dissolve, football stops. But data never stops telling stories. The question is what data tells, and who chooses which story is told.

Now I return to the detail I promised at the top. Many reports of the death of Hugo Sánchez Portugal stated the cause as 'gas intoxication'. The original text the analysis recorded uses the two words 'carbon dioxide'. In medico-legal practice, deaths from inhaling combustion gas are conventionally attributed to carbon monoxide — colourless, odourless, produced by incomplete combustion. Carbon dioxide is something else. This is very likely a translation or reporting error, not a medical fact.

Why does such a small detail matter to me? Because it is living proof of what I always say: a number in the wrong place can live in collective memory for decades. In football we see this every week. A goal credited to one man when another was the author. An assist recorded for the last passer, while the real credit belongs to the man who opened the space two beats earlier. Such errors do not correct themselves. They repeat until they become 'fact'.

This is also why I am very cautious with narratives built on strong emotion. Not because emotion is wrong. But because strong emotion tends to make people verify less. The more painful a story, the fewer people want to question the details. And once no one questions, both wrong data and right data drift along the current of the media.

But I do not want to stop there. There is one more point I consider more important still. All nine analytical dimensions in a professional report I read about this article concluded 'not applicable' — no tactics, no transfers, no club finance, no governance. In other words, this is an article with almost zero industry value, but very high human value.

That is a paradox our sports industry often does not want to face. We build an entire analytics ecosystem to measure what can be measured, then tend to treat what cannot be measured as unimportant. But football does not exist because of xG. Football exists because of people. If we forget that, we are optimising something that has already lost its reason to exist.

So what is the lesson of this story for data people like me?

Perhaps this. Every time I sit before a data file and prepare to conclude something about a player, I should ask myself: what am I seeing, and what am I missing? The numbers on the screen are part of the story. But most of the story lies in the gaps between the numbers — where three hours on the road, a missed call, and a father who did not make it back in time are still standing, waiting to be seen.