Vietnamese Football: The National Team's Glory and the Cracks Beneath the V.League Foundation

On the final night of the 2026 ASEAN Championship, I sat in a small coffee shop, watching the television screen blur under the condensation. When the final whistle blew, the whole place erupted, embraces tightening until I could hear the breath of the person next to me. But what I remember most is not the goals, but the silence just before — a young player standing still, hands on hips, eyes fixed on the grass as if trying to recall something very distant. When the lights go out, the match truly begins.

A few weeks later, I returned to my daily work: sitting before the screen, following every round of the V.League. The sense of letdown came faster than I expected. The same people, the same football nation, but at club level everything was fragmented, missing an overarching story. I asked myself: are we celebrating a summit, or covering up a crack at the base of the mountain?

In more than twenty years of following football, I have learned one thing: a football nation is not measured by its nights of glory, but by its quiet Saturday afternoons in the stands. And it is precisely those afternoons that are telling a different story, one far less mentioned than the trophy.

Vietnam won the 2026 ASEAN Championship over two legs against Thailand, taking the tie 5-3 on aggregate. It was the third title in the country's history, after 2026 and 2026. Nguyen Xuan Son, the naturalised striker of Brazilian origin, became the sensation of the tournament with an impressive run of goals, before suffering a serious injury in the second leg on Thai soil. Head coach Kim Sang-sik, a Korean, drew praise for his pragmatism and his ability to turn matches around in the toughest moments.

And what of the V.League? It is where I spend most of my time watching, and also where the problems surface most clearly. A league in which every season sees several clubs grappling with financial questions, where wages, bonuses and even a club's very existence can depend on a few wealthy individuals. Names that were once pillars — Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Song Lam Nghe An, Becamex Binh Duong — each in their own way have had to scramble to stay in the game. The gap between a national team that is invested in and carefully nurtured, and a domestic league left to fend for itself, grows ever clearer.

What is worth noting is that this mismatch is not about talent. Looking at the championship squad, most players came through domestic academies: the Hoang Anh Gia Lai - JMG Academy, the PVF Academy, or the youth centres of major clubs. The raw material is still there. The problem lies in how we use it, and what we use it for.

Based on my experience watching matches across many seasons, I have noticed a repeating pattern: when a young player shines for the national team, his parent club immediately raises his price, keeps him, then lets him wither on the bench because he is not yet able to compete in that position within a system that favours short-term results. That is the paradox of a football nation that always talks about the future yet behaves as if it has only one season left to live.

Look at the U18 level. For years I have watched the physicalisation of youth teams: prioritising build, strength and the ability to duel over technique and the ability to handle the ball in tight spaces. A small, skilful player with intelligent football thinking is often pushed to the margins at 17 or 18, because the coach needs results now to keep his job. By the time these players reach the first team, we complain that we lack midfielders who can set the tempo, players who can create something from a single piece of individual skill. But we ourselves quietly discarded them years earlier.

This is what I call the substitution of objectives. At 18, the goal of youth football must be to develop people, not to win matches. A youth coach who picks his line-up to win the U18 title is consuming the future to buy the present. And when hundreds of coaches do the same, an entire generation is eroded. The physicalisation of the U18 age group does not produce winning players; it produces machines that run out their youth and then stop.

I remember an afternoon at a youth tournament, when a boy playing left wing, not yet a metre sixty tall, was repeatedly told by his coach to "keep it simple". He still tried to dribble, still tried to play passes others would not imagine. By the 70th minute he was substituted, sat down on the bench, head bowed. I do not know where he is now. But I know that in another football nation, he might have become the kind of player people would pay to watch. Between two passes, there is a world the camera never captures.

Turning to the transfer market, the story is even more complicated. The loan-with-obligation-to-buy model, and contracts in which small clubs act as incubators of semi-finished products for the big clubs, have become a familiar part of the V.League. In the short term, it helps small clubs get money and players. In the long term, it turns them into transit stations, where value is created but never retained. When a young player shines in the colours of a mid-table club, people immediately think about where he will go, not where that club will go with him.

The loan-with-obligation-to-buy mechanism sounds fair, but it is in essence a form of mortgaging the future. The small club receives a sum of money, and in return loses control over its own development path. It remains forever in the position of nurturer, never of owner. And when all small clubs nurture for the big clubs, the league loses its internal competitiveness, because everyone knows their place in the food chain. A league in which clubs already know their rank in the value chain also knows in advance that it does not need to try.

This is where memory becomes a tactical layer. Vietnamese fans remember the national team's triumphs very clearly: 2026, 2026, and now 2026. They remember the goals, the celebrations, the names. But they remember less that behind each triumph was a generation of players created by decisions at club level that no one saw. Our collective memory is selective: it keeps the glory, it erases the process. Victory is what gets printed in the papers. Collapse is what gets carved into the heart.

And it is precisely that selectivity which creates a blind spot. When the national team wins, we conclude that the football nation is on the right track. But a national team can win thanks to a few outstanding individuals, thanks to a coach who can turn things around, thanks to a naturalised striker who scores at the right moment. A national team can win while the entire system beneath it slowly rots. That is the paradox I want to point to: the national team's success is sometimes not proof of the strength of the football nation, but a curtain hiding its weakness.

Look at how we celebrate. After every victory, the media is flooded with praise, with beautiful statistics, with forecasts of a glorious future. Then a few months later, when the V.League kicks off, the stands are empty again, the clubs worry about money again, and the old story repeats itself. The fever passes, leaving behind a foundation still not reinforced. This is a cycle I have witnessed at least three times in my career.

The sad thing is that the solutions are already known. We know we need to invest in youth development sustainably. We know we need a youth competition system that does not place heavy emphasis on results. We know we need financial transparency so clubs do not depend on a single individual. We know we need a fair transfer market, where small clubs are not turned into transit stations. But knowing and doing are two different things, and in football we usually choose the easy before the right.

I do not write about goals. I write about the silence before the roar. That silence, in Vietnamese football, is precisely the period between two World Cups, between two triumphs, when no one looks at the youth academy standings, when loan contracts are signed in silence, when an 18-year-old is dropped from the squad for being a few centimetres shorter than his opponent. That is where the match is truly decided, even without an audience.

A player can change his shirt number, but he cannot change the memory he carries on his back. Nguyen Xuan Son wore the national shirt, scored, became the hero of a single night. But behind him is an entire generation of domestic players waiting for a chance, stuck between a system that lacks the patience to develop them. Naturalising a good striker can solve the immediate problem, but it does not answer the bigger question: are we building a football nation to win regional tournaments, or to nurture a generation capable of competing at continental level?

In Asia, the football nations ahead of us have answered that question in different ways. Japan built a vast youth development system, tightly linked to schools and clubs, patient over decades. South Korea relied on discipline and a continuous stream of players going abroad. Neither took shortcuts. Vietnam has the advantage of young human resources and the passion of its fans, but lacks systemic patience. We want results now, while elite football is a game of decades.

I often think about the matches I have watched, not to remember the score, but to remember the feeling. The feeling when the stands erupt not because of a goal, but because of a passage of play that the whole stadium understood to be something special. Those moments do not come from a youth system that emphasises results. They come from players who are allowed to dream, allowed to err, allowed to grow up without being measured by points.

So what needs to change first? In my view, it is the way we assess success at youth level. A U18 coach should not be judged by a championship, but by how many players he delivers to the first team over the next five years. A club should not be judged by its position in the table, but by the quality of the people it produces. This is a change of philosophy, not of budget. And it can begin even without money.

Alongside that, the transfer market needs a legal framework to protect small clubs. Loan-with-obligation-to-buy contracts need to be more tightly regulated, so they do not become a tool for big clubs to hoover up talent at low cost. A healthy league is one in which small clubs can keep their good players, at least long enough to build a story of their own. Otherwise, we will forever have matches whose outcome is predetermined by structure.

I know none of this is new. It has been said many times, by many people, over many years. But what makes me write it again is not novelty, but repetition. There are problems we know clearly yet leave untouched, because solving them demands patience, and patience does not produce attractive headlines. Football, in one sense, is a mirror reflecting how a society treats its own future.

When the lights of Viet Tri stadium went out and the last fans left the stands, I stayed alone in the coffee shop, listening to the steady hum of the air conditioner. On the screen, the sports bulletins were still replaying the goals. But in my head there was only one question: that 18-year-old who was substituted at the youth tournament, where is he now? If we cannot find answers to questions like that, then every trophy is just a beautiful moment recorded in a film whose ending we have forgotten.

And perhaps that is what I want to keep after every match: not the score, not the names, but the feeling that somewhere, a young player is still quietly trying, still believing that his technique matters, still waiting for a chance not traded away for results. Vietnamese football has proven it can create nights of glory. What it has not yet proven is whether it can create a foundation solid enough that those nights are no longer the exception. The answer lies in the quiet Saturday afternoons, in the youth tournaments no one watches, in the silences the camera never turns toward. And there, the real match of Vietnamese football is still being played, day by day, without an audience, but never short of players.