Under the Lights of My Dinh: When Vietnamese Football Is No Longer Just About Us

Under the Lights of My Dinh: When Vietnamese Football Is No Longer Just About Us

That night, as the final whistle blew, I did not hear the roar of the stands. I heard the collective sigh of thousands who had held their breath for 90 minutes. It was not a final, not a knockout match. Just a group-stage game. But for those who have lived with Vietnamese football for decades, it felt heavier than any final. When the whole press room fell silent, I knew I had touched a raw nerve.

Context: The Trophy Drought and the Invisible Pressure

When we speak of Vietnamese football, we recall the exploits at the SEA Games, the AFF Cup, or the miracle run at the 2026 Asian Cup. But on the flip side, we also speak of the steps backward, the stumbles at the continental level, and a painful reality: Vietnamese football has not won a truly meaningful regional title for many years. At the 2026 AFF Cup, we stopped in the semifinals. At the 32nd SEA Games, coach Troussier's side disappointed with only a bronze medal. And at the 2026 Asian Cup, the national team was eliminated in the group stage with a single point.

Fans are not harsh. They simply cannot understand why a developing football nation, with a generation of players who once reached the 2026 U23 Asian Cup final, could struggle so much against opponents they used to beat convincingly. The silence on forums, on social media, and even in familiar coffee shops around My Dinh Stadium is a more dangerous signal than open criticism. It is fatigue. It is creeping doubt.

But football never operates on emotion alone. It operates on data, on tactics, on numbers and moments. And when I look at the data, I realize that the story of Vietnamese football is not just about results on the pitch. It is a story about the transformation of an entire ecosystem. An ecosystem where the role of youth academies, transfer strategies, and our very view of sustainable development are being tested by big questions.

Core Insight: Big Academies, Few Stars?

I have spent nearly 50 years observing football, and one thing that troubles me most is how quickly we take pride in our youth academies. When we talk about Vietnamese youth football, we name the NutiFood Academy, the HAGL Academy, or the training centers at PVF, Viettel, SLNA, and Hanoi. We boast about the number of young players, about national youth titles, about clubs spending hundreds of billions of dong on training infrastructure.

But the truth is that the percentage of young players who actually break into the first team when they grow up is extremely small, under 10% of those who have been systematically trained. Most academies, regardless of how modern their facilities or how skilled their coaches, are just producing players and then abandoning them on the road to maturity. There is almost no playing ground for players aged 18 to 21. The National First Division is not attractive enough; clubs fear using young players because of performance pressure; and the result is that promising talents, carefully nurtured for ten years, suddenly have to compete with expensive foreign imports and established veterans.

Data from recent V.League seasons shows a sad reality: the average playing time of under-21 players in the V.League accounts for less than 10% of total minutes. Meanwhile, in Thailand or Japan, that figure is consistently above 15%. Add to that the fact that the Vietnam Football Federation has not enforced strong policies to encourage clubs to use young players—such as a minimum number of U21 players in the squad or a required number of minutes—and you see that we are burning money on training academies without getting a proportional output.

I have seen many talented young players from famous academies silently quit football after years of drifting in lower-tier clubs. They are not inferior in technique, but they lack an environment to develop, a long-term strategy from the very clubs they have been with since childhood. The national team cannot rely forever on the generation of Quang Hai, Cong Phuong, or Van Hau. Those names are products of a special period, when big academies truly invested systematically and players received extraordinary attention from the media. But their story should not be an exception; it must become the standard.

Contrarian Angle: Don't Just Blame the Coach

When the national team fails, people point fingers at the head coach. Troussier absorbed all the criticism after the 2026 Asian Cup failure. Before him, Park Hang-seo was questioned about his defensive counter-attacking style. That is normal in modern football. But if we stop at blaming an individual, we will never find the core problem.

The question few dare to ask: Did the success of Vietnamese football under Park Hang-seo truly reflect the internal strength of the game, or was it just a golden generation shining together with a strategy suited to the context? Looking at what is happening at youth levels, looking at the quality of the next generation, I have reason to believe it was a combination of both, but the decisive factor was strategy rather than raw player quality.

Vietnamese football does not lack young players. It lacks a system to turn those young players into true professionals. V.League clubs remain too dependent on foreign players, on patch-up signings, rather than finding and developing talent from their own academies. They chase immediate results, spending money on tall foreign centre-backs and expensive Brazilian strikers, while forgetting that the stability of a club comes from its own internal strength, not from ready-made signings.

I have written extensively about Vietnamese football's wasted young talents, and many have called me a pessimist. But look at this reality: of the players trained at the HAGL Academy since 2026, very few have become genuine pillars of the national team. Names like Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Van Toan, Tuan Anh... they are naturally gifted, but they also benefited from a special environment with a clear training strategy during a specific historical period. And even so, many of them could not reach their full potential abroad. If even the most successful among them still hesitated, what about the less gifted ones?

Why Can't We Just Be Happy with Wins Over Laos, Cambodia?

Whenever Vietnam faces weaker Southeast Asian teams like Laos, Cambodia, or Timor-Leste, fans demand a thrashing. That is understandable. But I think we are setting the wrong expectation. The issue is not how many goals we score against a weak side, but what we learn from those matches, and whether our staff can carry out tactical experiments that mark a turning point. If we only chase goals, we will never have a long-term plan.

Look at Thailand. Though they have just gone through a rough spell, they still maintain a system of strong clubs, a broad youth training foundation, and a domestic league that is the best in the region. Thai players go to Japan, to Europe, not just a handful but dozens. Meanwhile, Vietnamese football still counts on the fingers of one hand the players who have truly succeeded abroad. Cong Phuong went to Japan and returned after a season on the bench. Van Duc went to Japan but has not yet made his mark. Xuan Truong, same story. The real situation is that we have not produced a generation of players who are truly ready and mentally strong enough to compete in harsher environments.

And then we wonder why the national team cannot overcome stronger opponents at the continental level? We blame the coach, the pitch, the weather. But we never admit that we are falling behind in the training and development of players.

Digging Deeper: V.League and the Youth Problem

Let me give you a concrete number to illustrate what I have analyzed. In the 2026 season, the total minutes played by U23 players in the V.League was only about 11.7% of the league's total minutes, according to statistics from football data platforms like VPF and VangBong.vn. This is lower than the average of other Southeast Asian leagues. In the Thai League, that rate reaches 18.9%; in Malaysia, 16.5%. Moreover, in the list of the 20 players with the most minutes in V.League 2026, there was only one under-23 player.

This demonstrates a clear instability in the supply of young players. Vietnamese clubs depend too much on contracts, while the youth training system does not produce enough output. We have many academies, but we have no clear transition process to bring players from youth football to the first team. Young players are often loaned out, sent down to lower-division teams for years, without a well-structured pathway. They do not regularly play with top-level players, do not train in an environment with real pressure, and this stunts their growth.

Another issue is the quality of young coaches. Most V.League clubs prefer foreign coaches or veteran tacticians. That is not wrong, but it means young coaches—those who understand Vietnamese football culture and have close ties with young players—do not get a chance. They are left stranded in a system where new elements are always met with skepticism.

My Story: When I Realized Youth Football Is Not Just About the Golden Generation

In 2026, when the U23 team made history in Changzhou, I had a chance to re-watch the matches they had played since their teenage years. I remembered an afternoon in 2026, standing on the stands of Ham Rong Stadium, watching a match between U17 SLNA and U17 HAGL in the national U17 tournament. On the pitch that day were players like Le Van Xuan, Nguyen Hoang Duc, Nguyen Thanh Binh. They did not say it, but all of them had a fierce desire: to wear the national jersey. Seven years later, Hoang Duc became one of the best midfielders in Vietnamese football, while Van Xuan and Thanh Binh also played regular roles for the national team.

But their story does not make me happy. It makes me worry, because I know there are thousands of other young players with the same desire and the same talent, but they will never get a chance. They come from poor villages, outside the system of big academies. They play for provincial clubs, in little-known tournaments, and then silently give up their dreams. When our country has only a few short-lived miracles, while reality produces failures year after year, then I believe Vietnamese football needs a true revolution in how we view and develop young talent.

From the Perspective of a Woman Who Has Lived with Football for 49 Years

People may wonder how a 65-year-old woman can understand football so deeply. I have spent my whole youth observing, learning, and above all, believing in numbers and tactical analysis. Through generations of coaches and waves of renewal, I have realized that real change only comes when we dare to face our problems honestly. And one of the biggest problems of Vietnamese football right now is its excessive reliance on a generation of players past their peak.

We talk about rejuvenating the team, but we still call up experienced players whose form has declined. We worry about the future of our football, but we still have no systematic strategy to develop young players. We can shout about tactical revolutions, but we do not bother to build true academies like advanced countries. When the team loses, we demand the coach's head. When a young player makes a mistake, we drop him from the squad. Pressure from results, from the media, from the fans themselves is killing the seeds of the future.

I am 65, and I still stay up until 3 a.m. to watch a match nobody cares about. I do it not out of personal pleasure, but because I believe that only by watching directly, by feeling the rhythm of the match, can one understand the essence of the problem. And from those sleepless nights, I realize that Vietnamese football does not lack talent. It lacks a system to nurture talent.

What Future for Vietnamese Football? A Bold Proposal

I do not have the authority to make decisions, but I can offer proposals based on nearly 50 years of observation. One of the most fundamental solutions is to reduce the number of clubs in the V.League and raise their quality, instead of maintaining a formal competition where weak clubs cannot compete and cannot train youth. Reducing to 12 or 10 teams, increasing the number of young players in matchday squads, and applying stricter standards in youth training would be a step in the right direction.

Look at successful examples around the world. Belgium once dominated world football thanks to a generation of players systematically trained at academies like Anderlecht and Standard Liege. Croatia, a country of only 4 million people, keeps reaching deep into World Cups thanks to the youth system at clubs like Dinamo Zagreb. In Asia, Japan built a solid youth football foundation over three decades, and they have been reaping the rewards since 2026.

Vietnam is behind, but that is no reason to despair. However, we must boldly abandon short-term temptations. We cannot keep buying cheap foreign players, cannot keep playing negative defensive football, cannot keep relying on a few outstanding individuals. We need to build a system, and that system starts with investing in people. Investing in young coaches, in facilities for academies, in youth tournaments, and more importantly, changing the mindset of managers.

I still remember a recent forum on youth training where a VPF leader said they were trying to improve the playing environment for young players. But words alone are not enough. We need concrete actions. We need binding rules on the number of young players in each match squad, as the Thai league has done. We need to send youth teams to more international tournaments so they can gain experience and mature. We need to create a healthy competitive environment among academies, so that clubs do not see youth training as an obligatory burden but as a strategic investment.

Ending: It's Never Too Late

There is a saying I love: "As long as you live, you have a chance to write new pages of history." Vietnamese football has had glorious pages in the past, from SEA Games exploits to the 2026 Asian Cup miracle. But if we do not look further, if we do not look at the foundational factors, then those successes will forever remain in the past.

I want to recount a very ordinary incident that made me think a lot. During a U23 Asian Cup qualifier in 2026, when our team was under pressure in the second half, I noticed a young player on the opposing side whose speed and physical foundation were completely superior to our players. That player was not Japanese, not Korean, but a Yemeni. And I suddenly realized that even small football nations like Yemen are rising with promising young players. So why is Vietnamese football, with its potential and conditions, hesitating to truly rejuvenate in a systematic and thorough way?

At 65, I still stay up until 3 a.m. to watch a match nobody cares about, not because I have nothing better to do. I do it because I believe every match, no matter how ordinary, is an important lesson. People hate me because I speak first, then they remember me because I am right. I once bet on Germany's elimination at the 2026 World Cup and was mocked, but a week later they shut up. Now, I bet that Vietnamese football will not significantly improve within the next 5 years if we do not completely change our approach to youth development. And that does not require a miracle. It only requires the courage to face the truth. Do we have that courage?