Praised but not re-signed: the paradox of technical staff in Vietnamese football

In the final training session of a V.League academy before the break, I counted eleven coaches still under contract and four whose deals had expired at the start of the month. Exactly one of those eleven received written notice about his future. The rest learned the news through internal group chats, after the transfer feeds had already circulated several competing versions. I sat at that training ground for three sessions in the last week of the season, logging the time the board's car left the gate and the time the dressing-room lights went out. A story that ends with light fading, not with a scoreline.

Data is the surface layer; I always dig three layers deeper. Eleven coaches, four expired deals, one formal notice — that alone says little. Layer two is contract type: how many were season deals, how many were tied to multi-year academy projects. Layer three is who had a voice with the ownership, and who only had a voice in the press room. The fourth layer is the one worth stating: clubs here rarely announce the end of a development cycle; they announce the end of a results cycle, and the two never coincide. When an academy closes, there is no match to report, no score to quote. Only contracts expiring in silence.

That is why I do not excavate stars — I excavate context. Across twenty-four years of watching football, most of the partings I have witnessed were not player partings. They were the departures of technical staff — the people who design curricula, monitor training load, and keep a generation of players from being burned by its own system. That figure never appears on a ticket-selling poster, nor in the wage bill a sponsor wants to see.

The context here has a historical layer that must be read carefully. Vietnamese football over the past decade has seen at least three major waves of staff turnover at club level. The first was tied to clubs in financial difficulty, forced to slim their operations to protect cash flow. The second was tied to ownership changes, when new owners brought their own teams and treated the old staff as leftovers of the previous regime. The third, least discussed, is tied to youth-development policy: an academy project ends when its graduating stream thins out, and at that exact moment the dual-role coaching staff is reclassified as a fixed cost to be cut.

In all three waves, the pattern is identical. A group of people is praised as they leave, but not re-signed while they still have value. Praise and contract travel on different roads. I once watched a fitness coach leave a club after seven seasons with a two-paragraph thank-you on the club website, yet not a single extension clause had been drafted three weeks earlier. He found new work within ten days. His analysis assistant did not. The difference is that the market has demand for one kind of skill and almost none for the other.

This is where the first layer of numbers must be read more carefully. If you only look at how many coaches leave each season, you would conclude that Vietnamese football's labour market is dynamic. But that is the wrong read of the terrain. A data map can point you the wrong way if you do not read the terrain. I split the group by three criteria: specialised skill (data analysis, fitness, video breakdown), re-employment within six months, and attachment to a specific academy. The result is fairly clear. The high-specialisation group has short re-employment odds. The group with long attachment to one academy — people who know every cohort of players — tends to take much longer to find a new home, because the market assesses them through collective results rather than individual record.

The third group is the real concern. They work at the edge of every report but sit at the centre of every development cycle. When a club shuts an academy project, this group loses both the job and its frame of reference: their skills are tied to one team, not to an open market. In the data I collected, the average time for someone in this group to land a new contract is roughly seven to nine months, double that of the fitness coaches. For young families with small children, that span is not a statistic. It is a season without income.

The limits of the data must be stated before going further. My sample is incomplete: many clubs do not publish lower-tier staff, and part of the information comes from direct interviews and therefore cannot be independently verified. I am not building a technical-staff league table just to have a table. What I have is a pattern repeated often enough to be credible, not a law. And a repeated pattern, in my line of work, is already a strong enough signal to ask questions.

In recent years I have noticed a new motif. When leaving a project, some head coaches or technical directors publicly ask other clubs to consider their assistants. That is a transparent, real, and verifiable act — not a rumour. Yet in most cases I followed, there is no reported outcome on whether those people were actually signed. The appeal is made publicly; the hiring result stays silent. The gap between the two is precisely the gap Vietnamese football's staffing data has not closed.

Asking questions here means returning to the concept I have used for years: the conditions of success. With a young player, I do not ask whether he is good; I ask which layer of ground he is standing on. With a technical coach, the question is the same: what kind of contract, what kind of cycle, what kind of owner stands beneath him. A judgement about a person must start from the conditions that raised that person, not from one transfer feed line.

This story holds a counter-intuitive paradox, and that paradox is usually buried by sentimental storytelling. When an academy project ends, the press frames it as a tribute to those who gave their service. But in the data, praise and renewal are almost entirely decoupled. A coaching staff can receive the highest recognition from peers, from analysts, from the very players who grew up under them — and still go months without a new contract. Professional recognition is a social variable; re-employability is a structural variable. The two correlate weakly in the Vietnamese market.

It took me three years to understand that data too needs compensatory growth. In this case, compensatory growth is the social value of the years a person gave to one academy — something that appears in no recruitment file. The football market measures years of experience, qualifications, seasons led. It does not measure the stability of a dressing room, or the trust a cohort of players holds for the man who trained alongside them since they were fifteen. Compensatory growth is the most beautiful thing the league table cannot measure. And when it is not measured, it is usually not paid for.

I write this because the phenomenon is systemic, larger than any single case. If being praised but not re-signed happened once, we could call it a single bad decision. But when the pattern repeats across clubs, seasons, and academy projects, we are looking at a structural feature of the system, not an execution error. That structure has a reason to exist: technical staff struggle to produce an index that attracts sponsors. A striker scoring fifteen goals sells tickets more easily than an analyst who helps the whole team cut three percent of goals conceded from set pieces.

A local correction is needed here. I was trained to European academy standards, where a fitness coach has a competency file dozens of pages long and is usually kept across two or three head-coach changes. Applying that standard wholesale to the V.League would be wrong, because the financial structure and staff scale are entirely different. But one minimal principle transfers without importing the whole model: record technical staff contributions before they leave. In Europe, this has been happening for over a decade. In Vietnam, a few clubs have begun logging their coaching structure as part of the asset file. That is a correct first step, but very small against the scale of the problem.

I must criticise myself too. For years, I judged a coaching staff through the results of the cohort they led. I assessed their ability by wins, by league position, without asking when their contracts were renewed. That was a methodological mistake. A winning team can win because of its players, and the technical coach is still the surplus line in the wage bill afterwards. I have written about victories whose foundations were laid by someone who left the club six months earlier. A goal only means something when you know what the scorer had just been through — and with technical staff, you must add a layer: you must know who prepared him.

When a player is injured, I always log the biomedical context, and I learned that from a specific mistake. Years ago, I underrated a sixteen-year-old midfielder named Nguyen Duc Nam because his physical markers were below standard, ignoring that he had just returned from a ligament injury and was in a compensatory-growth phase. Three months later, Nam debuted for the first team and recorded four assists in five matches. The lesson went beyond being wrong about him. My data table was missing a column. For technical staff, Vietnamese football's data table is missing a similar column. That column is: the real cost of losing someone who spent ten years building a programme.

Another example shows the value of historical data. In 2026, after the V.League resumed, an eighteen-year-old striker I had reviewed — Tran Van Cong — scored six goals, despite previously suffering frequent cramps and rarely getting minutes. What I did was not look at total minutes, but reconstruct performance per ninety and load tolerance. The same logic applies to technical staff: you cannot assess an analyst by the seasons he spent on the bench, but by his impact in each cycle where he was actually given authority.

So what is my judgement about the future? This is where I always attach conditions. If, over the next two seasons, at least a third of V.League clubs begin fully logging their coaching structure and tie renewal clauses to development cycles rather than to seasons, the probability of high-quality technical staff leaving the system will fall substantially. If that condition is not met, the current trend will reinforce itself: the good ones move to jobs outside football, those who stay accept season contracts, and youth-development quality will keep depending on individuals rather than on the system. Both scenarios are possible, and the available data is not yet enough for me to pick one with certainty.

What I can say for certain is this. A football nation cannot build its future on people it cannot see. When an academy closes, most of the story lies with those who never appeared on a scoreline. I do not excavate stars; I excavate context. And Vietnamese football's context is missing a sedimentary layer: the layer of the builders, the leavers, and the ones who — if we dig three layers deep — would recount exactly what happened behind the scenes of every season. Next season, will we record their names before they leave, or only write a thank-you after they are gone?