The Unseen Training Nights: Vietnamese Football and the Symphony of Small Things

1. The Guard and the Flashlight

Five twenty in the morning. A training ground at the end of a red-earth alley on the outskirts of Hanoi. December mist clings to the grass so heavily that if you kneel down, your knee is wet within three seconds. An old guard opens the iron gate. He switches on the floodlights, and a pale yellow light pours down like thin honey. The first group of young players walks in. Nobody speaks. They have arrived nearly half an hour early. Not to take photos. Not to shoot videos. There is no one standing along the touchline to watch them at all.

I first came to Vietnam in the mid-1990s, when I was young and still believed a football nation could be measured by its goals. I remember an old stadium, a cracked concrete row of seats, a stand so empty that I could hear someone cough behind my back. And I remember something strange that has followed me through more than thirty years in this trade: even with the stands empty, even with no one watching, the players still ran. Still fought for the ball. Still fell. Still got up.

The way a person stands up after a fall — that is what I learned here, and to this day I still believe it is what Vietnamese football wants to teach the rest of the world, even if it has perhaps never said so out loud. I write the bulletins, but I tell the destinies. And the destiny of a football nation always begins with a streetlight at five in the morning, not with a gold trophy on a podium.

This essay has no specific scoreline to open with. That is a deliberate choice. After more than half a century watching football — from damp English grandstands to concrete pitches on the Red River delta — I have reached an uncomfortable conclusion: we remember the wrong things. We remember the goals and forget the training sessions. We remember the trophies and forget the people who sweated to keep that football nation standing through winter after winter.

2. Why One Snowy Night Is Still Remembered

If you ask a Vietnamese supporter about the defining moment of their generation, most will tell you about a match played in the snow. Not in Vietnam. In a distant northern city, where the young players in red shirts walked onto the pitch in cutting cold. It is the collective memory of a final at the AFC U23 Championship, where a small Southeast Asian team went further than anyone had predicted.

I remember sitting in front of the screen that night. Not in Hanoi, nor in Saigon, but in a hotel room thousands of kilometres away. I remember jotting down a sentence in my notebook, crossing it out, then writing it again. Because the scoreline no longer mattered. What I saw on the screen was not a defeat. It was the image of a group of young men who, in the harshest conditions this sport can create, refused to fall until the final whistle.

The applause in an empty stadium is the most humane lie football has ever created. I have used that line many times in my analyses, and I still find it true. Because when the stands are empty, when there is no one left to perform for, what remains is the true nature of a football nation. In Vietnam, what remained was a strange resilience, a patience that is not taught by a coach but by history.

That snowy moment, in the end, was not an event. It was a milestone in a journey many decades longer. It was the result of hundreds of unseen training sessions, thousands of meals in dormitories, tens of thousands of times a person had to choose between chasing a vague dream and earning a living in a steadier trade. We remember the moment because it is beautiful. But what truly needs to be told is what happened ten, twenty years before, in silence.

3. The Structure of a Football Nation Absent from the Money Map

The foundation of Vietnamese football rests on a structure you will only understand if you look at it across seasons, not across a week. At the top sits the domestic professional league system, with a top division at its centre. Below are the lower tiers, where small clubs survive by some means or other — through local love, through a local sponsor, through an owner with a heart. And wrapping around it all is the national federation and the league governing bodies, the places you never see on television but that decide whether a club is allowed to survive the winter.

No wall here was built with money. I stress this because, for over a decade, people have watched a wave of enormous capital pour into other Asian leagues, and the question is always asked: can that save or destroy a football nation? The answer I have drawn from my experience on both sides of that equation is this: money cannot save a football nation, but it can give that nation more time to save itself. Vietnam, through the most important years of its development, was given time.

What is remarkable is that this football nation did not rise by buying. It rose by developing. And this is the core difference I want you to remember, because it is the axis of this entire story: football nations mature from academies, not from markets. A market can buy you a season. An academy buys you a generation. Vietnam understood this intuitively, long before anyone wrote it down as a strategy.

But this is also where the story grows more complex. Because an academy, in itself, is not a solution. It is a collection of choices. And those choices — about technique, about physique, about keeping or selling a young player — are where the fate of a football nation is truly decided.

4. Academies and the Technique That Gets Traded Away

When you dig into the development history of Vietnamese football, you realise that its progress did not come from the big matches. It came from youth training centres — places nobody remembers the names of, places that exist because a local business decided that raising players was a way to repay its hometown.

At these facilities, something very Vietnamese took place. The goal was not to win a U19 tournament. The goal was to produce a player capable of performing at national level. That is a luxury philosophy. Most rising football nations cannot afford it, because they are too busy winning age-group titles to keep their coaches employed.

And here I must say something uncomfortable, something I believe with all the certainty of a man who has spent fifty years observing. Young coaches, chasing short-term results, are neglecting technique. The trend towards physicalisation at under-eighteen level is destroying the very technical soil the game needs to grow. This is not true only in Vietnam. It is true everywhere. But in Vietnam its consequences are clearer, because when a football nation is still laying its foundations, choosing the wrong material does not just ruin a season — it ruins a decade.

I once watched an eleven-a-side training session at youth level. The players were told to run. Then run again. Then do conditioning. The session lasted two hours, and the ball appeared only in the final fifteen minutes. That team won. Of course it won, because it was fitter. But three years later, when you look at those players at professional level, you see people who run a great deal, fight for the ball a great deal, and never manage to create a moment. Because moments are not trained on Tuesday afternoon after lunch. Moments are cultivated in a different kind of technique, slower, duller, that no one films.

In Vietnam, fortunately, part of the system went against this current. A handful of academies chose to invest in the long run, in education, in teaching football as a language. They ran losses for years. They were criticised for not winning immediately. Then, in one summer, a group of players from those academies stepped into the national team, and the whole country remembered what had made them.

That is when I understood this: one generation passes to the next not technique, but the way you stand up after conceding. Technique can be taught. Character cannot. Character can only be passed down by someone who has watched a previous generation stand up. And in Vietnam, that transmission happened almost without anyone naming it.

5. The Transfer Market and the Sigh of Invisible Money

Now let us come to what I consider the biggest blind spot of modern football, and the one Vietnamese football must confront faster than anyone.

Clubs talk about transfer fees as if they were blood. But look at what is not said. In many developing leagues, a large share of transfers are not transfers. They are free-agent signings, with undisclosed signing-on payments that no balance sheet has to explain. Such payments escape the core financial monitoring — because someone decided that a free-agent fee is not a fee. But it is a fee. It always is. You simply cannot see it.

The signing fee for a free agent, in nature and in harm, can be more damaging than a transfer fee. Because it is non-transparent, uncontrolled and untraceable; it normalises a debt structure disguised as a lawful exchange. It evades the very oversight that is supposed to protect football from itself.

In Vietnam, this problem appears in a different form — lighter in numbers, but no lighter in consequence. Many clubs here cannot pay transfer fees. They survive by signing players whose contracts have expired. As a result, the entire market is placed in a state where a player's value is measured not by his ability on the pitch, but by how long remains on his contract.

I once spoke with a man who had spent decades in the game here. He told me a sentence I still remember: "We don't buy players. We wait for them." People call it a market; I call it a garden where lives are sown — and such a garden can feed a community, or be abandoned in a single winter, depending on whether the owner still wants to water it.

The subtlety here is that this fragility is not a weakness. It is a form of adaptation. A football nation with no money to buy must learn to create. And in a world where wealthy football nations are wrestling with increasingly complex financial-fair-play rules, Vietnam having to build from scratch, in scarcity, may turn out to be a long-term advantage. Not because it has less money, but because it has learned to advance without it.

6. Shirts, Sponsors and the Local Community

There is one thing I observed at a small stadium in a provincial town, on a summer afternoon, that I will never forget.

A boy of about ten, wearing the shirt of his local club. On that shirt, a company name was printed. The boy did not know what the company was. He knew only the colour, the crest, and the team's name. But when I looked closely, I noticed something else: the shirt was identical to his father's, and perhaps to his grandfather's. Three generations in one colour. That is something no global sponsorship contract can buy.

The bond between a club and its local community is being destroyed by shirt advertising — at least when global sponsors care only about exposure metrics and nothing about whether a ten-year-old in a provincial town still sees his father in that shirt. This is not a problem unique to Vietnam; it is a general consequence of contemporary capitalist football. But in a country where football remains tightly bound to local identity, where a team's colours partly define a community, this loss takes a more concrete and visible shape.

I do not write this to oppose money. Money is necessary. Without money there is no professional football. But I write to record that other things are also necessary, and we are forgetting them. The boy who ran on a tightrope in the sky back then is now the guide for new dreams — not because he was paid more, but because he remembers who paid the price for him to run on that rope.

In Vietnam, this bond is still alive. You see it when a national star returns to his hometown to open a children's class. You see it in stands filled by neighbours rather than tourists. You see it in the way a relegated club keeps its supporters, season after season. That is something you cannot print on a shirt, but it is something printed deep into a generation's memory.

7. The Contrarian Angle: Collective Memory and Its Blind Spot

Here I want to return to an assumption we all carry, and turn it over.

The collective memory of Vietnamese football is built on victories. A regional title. A medal at a major multi-sport event. A match in the snow. These are beautiful, and we should remember them. But if we remember only them, we have missed the most important thing.

The blind spot of this collective memory is that it makes us believe progress comes from big moments. It does not. It comes from things no one wants to watch: a meeting between a technical director and a youth coach, an argument over whether to keep a seventeen-year-old in the youth team for another year or promote him, a decision to keep an academy running despite its losses.

I once wrote about a defeat in a major tournament, and I received countless replies from readers asking why we did not analyse the tactical errors, why we did not point out who played badly. And I understand why they asked. We are raised to believe that failure is a problem to be fixed, an error to be pointed out. But some defeats are not errors. Some defeats are a slow piece of music, and our task is to sit and listen to it in full, not to stand up and go looking for someone to blame.

This is where I must confess something about myself. My instinct — the instinct of a man who has spent a lifetime healing through stories — is to close every wound with a beautiful message. But true healing is not making the wound disappear. It is helping people sit with the wound without rushing to stitch it up. And if I wrote that every Vietnamese defeat is beautiful, I would have betrayed the very players I write about. Because there are nights they do not sleep, and there are mornings they wake up and do not want to go to the pitch. That truth is also part of the story, and it deserves to be told.

8. What Remains After the Storm

When I began this piece, I intended to open with a scoreline. Then I realised that doing so would contradict the very thing I believe.

Over more than thirty years looking at this football nation, from broken concrete stands to stands filled with people in red shirts, I have learned a lesson I have still not fully written out: the football nation that knows how to invest in the nights no one sees will win. Not win a match. Win a generation.

Vietnam is at exactly that crossroads. On one side is a market opening to bigger money, more complex contracts, the temptations of short-term results. On the other side is the academy system, the local communities, the five a.m. training sessions. The road ahead is not to choose one. The road ahead is to keep this side while stepping onto the other. That is the hardest thing a football nation can ever do. And I believe in Vietnam, because I have seen them do harder things, in worse conditions, with fewer spectators.

The million-pound whirlwind is only a passing gust; what remains are the quiet training nights. Those nights are not broadcast. No one reports them. No scoreboard records them. But they are where the fate of a football nation is truly forged.

I will return to Vietnam one day. Perhaps in winter, when mist gathers on the grass. I will go to an outlying training ground, stand outside the fence, and watch. Not to write about the stars. But to write about the people who arrive half an hour early, just to touch the ball before the lights come on. They do not know I am there. And perhaps that is exactly why their story is the real story.

As for my readers, those of you reading this on a small screen at midnight, I have one question. When the next generation steps onto the pitch, what will you remember about them? A goal, or a training session? A trophy, or a moment of getting up? Because, in the end, a football nation is not remembered for what it won. It is remembered for how it taught the next generation to stand up.