Vietnamese Football: The Glory in the Stands and the Void on the Bench

On the night of January 5, 2026, I sat alone in a small coffee shop in Incheon, eyes fixed on my phone as Vietnam played the second leg of the AFF Cup final against Thailand at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok. Vietnam won 3-2, taking the tie 5-3 on aggregate, and the whole cafe clapped along to an applause that travelled across the internet. But the image that stayed with me was not a goal. It was a substitute leaping off the bench when a teammate scored, throwing both arms into the air, shouting something no one could hear, then sitting back down. No camera turned toward him. He did not touch the ball once during the entire tournament. And yet he was part of that championship.

I have been making football documentaries for twenty years. My job is to find people like him — the ones who never appear on the scoreboard. And I have come to see that Vietnamese football, while celebrating, is forgetting that very layer of people.

A football nation that celebrates the summit but forgets to measure the mountain's base

For seven years, from 2026 to 2026, Vietnam's national team under coach Park Hang-seo changed how people saw the game here. Runners-up at the 2026 AFC U23 Championship in China. AFF Cup champions in 2026. A first-ever place in the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying. Then in January 2026, under coach Kim Sang-sik, Vietnam won the AFF Cup again, beating Thailand in the final I just described. Those summits were written into the collective memory, printed on shirts, sung in the stands.

But a football nation does not live on summits. It lives on the base — on the domestic league, on the youth academies, on the players who sit on the bench today and start tomorrow. And that is exactly where the void appears.

V.League 1 has fourteen clubs. The number itself says little, but the financial structure behind it says a lot. Most Vietnamese clubs depend on one or two sponsors, or on a single owner. When that owner grows tired, or when the money from a parent corporation stops, the whole club wobbles. This is the model that has caused many clubs to dissolve, merge, or relocate over the past fifteen years.

The real worry is not the defeat to Indonesia, but that we have no Plan B for the striker position

In 2026, Vietnam stopped in the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, finishing behind Iraq and Indonesia in their group. That failure came after a run of matches in which the attack stalled. Looking back, the problem was not one player performing badly. The problem was that an entire generation of domestic strikers had not been produced in sufficient numbers to compete.

Many V.League clubs choose a short-term fix: buy a foreign striker. A foreign striker who scores twenty goals a season is cheaper and more certain than patiently raising a domestic striker over five years. But when the national team needs a centre-forward, the rules allow only Vietnamese players. That is when Vietnamese football has to import the very thing it should have grown itself.

Nguyễn Xuân Son, a naturalized striker of Brazilian origin, scored in both legs of the 2026 AFF Cup final before suffering a serious injury in the second leg. Đặng Văn Lâm, a goalkeeper born in Russia, guards the national goal. Filip Nguyễn, another goalkeeper of Czech origin. These men contribute genuinely, and I do not for a moment diminish them. But when a football nation has to rely on naturalization to fill the striker and goalkeeper positions, it is a sign of an academy system bleeding at precisely its most important spots.

I once sat in a stadium in Vietnam on a Saturday afternoon, counting the people in the stands. Perhaps four thousand. The home side played the visitors, neither had anything to lose, and the match ended 0-0. But what I remember is the sound: plastic seats knocking together, a child calling out a player's name, and the referee's whistle ringing too clearly because there were too few people. An empty stadium, yet crowded with memory. A league that lives on the applause of four thousand people like that finds it very hard to sustain a deep bench.

On the continental stage, Vietnamese clubs usually exit early. They play in the AFC Champions League or AFC Cup with thin squads, travel long distances, and see the fixture list pile on top of the domestic league. The result is not only defeat but erosion: key players injured, rotations that cannot keep up, and supporters' faith slowly draining. A league that wants to last needs broadcast and commercial revenue large enough for clubs to survive without a single owner. In Vietnam, most teams still live on direct sponsorship money, and when the sponsor pulls out, they pull out too.

PVF, HAGL - JMG, Viettel and a few other centres have done something admirable: they have trained young players properly for nearly two decades. Nguyễn Công Phượng, Nguyễn Quang Hải, Đỗ Hùng Dũng and Nguyễn Tiến Linh are names that grew out of that current. But training is not enough. A young player needs to start, to make mistakes, to be corrected. If the club instead buys a foreign striker to chase short-term results, that young player will sit on the bench until he is twenty-five and no longer a young talent. This is the loop Vietnamese football has not yet broken.

An empty stadium, yet crowded with memory.

The truth is that Vietnamese fans love the national team more than they love the domestic league. You can see it every AFF Cup: the whole country pours into the streets, millions take to the roads, and for a few weeks football becomes a civil religion. Then the tournament ends, the stars return to their clubs, and the stands empty again. That love is seasonal, like a tropical rain — fierce and brief.

Here I want to say something that may displease many people: the 2026 AFF Cup title does not prove that Vietnamese football is progressing. It proves that Vietnam is still a force in Southeast Asia — something we have long known. The regional stage and the continental stage are two different tests, and Vietnam has just failed the second. People celebrate the trophy, and rightly so. But they forget that a regional cup opens no doors in Asia.

Applause no one hears is still applause.

Look at the bench. A strong team is measured by its twelfth to twentieth men, not by eleven starting names. In Vietnam, the gap between the starting eleven and the bench is too wide. Substitutes rarely get minutes in the V.League, so when they reach the national team they arrive as people who have never carried pressure. Coaches are forced to rotate through a dense fixture list, but the alternatives are thin. This is a structural problem, not the problem of one coach.

Based on my years of watching these matches, I believe Vietnam's golden generation — those born from the early to mid-1990s — has passed the age of twenty-eight. The question in 2026 is no longer "who is the next golden generation," but "has the next golden generation arrived yet." And the answer, if I am honest, is not clear.

I once filmed a substitute goalkeeper at an international tournament. He stood for the national anthem for ninety minutes across four matches, never entering the pitch. When his team was eliminated, he wept. I asked him why he was crying, when he had not played. He said: "Because I am part of the team, and I could not help." From then on, I understood that football is not written only by the scorers. It is written by those who sit outside, wait, and are never called by name.

Substitute goalkeepers — poets who are never published.

After a shoot about a club in South Korea, I was emotionally spent and had to step away from the camera for two weeks. I lay in my room, replaying ambient recordings of a stadium — wind, footsteps, someone singing. I learned that silence is not an absence. It is a character. And in Vietnamese football, the most silent character is the bench.

Vietnamese football stands at a fork. One path is the familiar one: celebrate regional cups, naturalize a few stars, and leave the old structure intact. The other is harder: invest in the domestic league so it can feed itself, build a youth system deep enough that the bench is no longer a place of forgetting, and accept that real progress will not arrive in a single AFF Cup. The second path has no fireworks. It has only afternoons of training on empty pitches, with players no one films.

They never touch the ball, but they hold the whole world.

When I wrapped my most recent documentary, I realized I too am on the bench of this very story — a Vietnamese abroad, writing about a football nation from three thousand kilometres away, unable to touch the grass, unable to smell the pitch. But perhaps that distance lets me see what those inside cannot: that the glory in the stands and the void on the bench are two halves of the same picture. If we look only at the bright half, we will keep being surprised whenever the dark half appears. Vietnamese football does not need another trophy to prove anything. It needs an answer to the simplest question: who will start on the day today's heroes leave the pitch?