Kim Sang Sik Returns to South Korea After His Father's Death: A One-Week Void Before the ASEAN Cup Kicks Off

At the Vietnam Youth Football Training Centre, that morning's session still began on time. The ball still rolled, the whistle still blew, the three-man combination drills were still split evenly across both halves of the pitch, the sound of studs biting into the grass dry and tidy as on any other day. Only one empty space remained unfilled: the plastic chair in the corner of the pitch, where a Korean man would stand for ninety minutes every session, board in hand, eyes fixed on every run his players made. That man was absent. The head coach of Vietnam's national team, Kim Sang Sik, had boarded a flight back to South Korea after his father passed away. His father was 84 years old and had been seriously ill for a long time. Kim is expected to spend about a week at home for the funeral rites before returning to Vietnam. The Vietnam Football Federation issued a short statement, its tone so measured it is hard to fault. The Federation President sent deep condolences to coach Kim Sang Sik and his family, encouraged him to return home to handle the funeral, and expressed the hope that he and his loved ones would soon overcome this immense loss. Not one sentence mentioned results. Not one word mentioned the tournament. That is how a football nation behaves when it knows how to tell the difference between the business of the game and the business of being human. The context is familiar to everyone. On September 24, 2026, the ASEAN Cup kicks off and runs until October 5, 2026. Vietnam sits in Group A alongside Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan. In a tournament where teams are still split into two tiers of quality, Vietnam belongs to the group competing for a place in the knockout stage, behind Thailand and Indonesia, ahead of the Philippines and Pakistan. A one-week absence at this moment is no small thing, but it is not earth-shattering either. It lands squarely in the grey zone that forces people to weigh, to measure, to ask themselves whether they are worrying about the team or worrying about their own feelings. Kim Sang Sik took the head coach role of Vietnam's national team in May 2026. He has worked across both the U23 and senior sides, delivered strong results in regional and continental competitions, and has lived almost permanently inside training camps. People grew used to the image of him hunched over an analysis screen, used to his accented Vietnamese at post-match press conferences, used to his presence at every session even when Saigon's sun was hot enough to make the grass smell of melting asphalt. When a man like that is absent, the void is not confined to the corner of the pitch. Based on my experience following matches, a week without the head coach during the pre-tournament phase bites in three very different ways. The first is technical: tactical sessions get compressed, set-piece routines get trimmed, the plans for countering Thailand go untested. The second is psychological: Vietnamese players grew up in a football culture where the teacher is the centre of everything, and when that centre is gone there is a sinking feeling that is hard to name. The third is structural: the coaching staff must run itself, and that is the real test of the assistant structure the Federation has spent years building. On the technical side, I think the damage is smaller than it looks. Vietnam's national team camps operate on compressed timelines, and a week at this stage is usually spent stabilising fitness, adjusting the distances between lines and packaging the set-piece routines. Those tasks do not strictly require the man at the top to hold the whistle. The real concern lies elsewhere: the pre-match tactical meetings. That is where a specific idea is planted in players' heads about how the opponent will play, where the bleeding will start, at which minute the flank needs to be broken. A week's absence at exactly that moment can send a team into its opening match with a brain half a beat slow. On the psychological side, I think the opposite. Vietnamese players are not children who need an adult to hold their hand. They are men who have been through many big matches, who have heard enough farewell speeches to managers, who are used to the idea that a teacher can walk away right after the final whistle. If the coaching staff holds its rhythm, the team holds its rhythm. The pitch does not know how to lie. Only the people in the stands fool themselves every weekend. Whether the team trains well or badly will show in every touch three days later, with no announcement needed. On the structural side, this is the most important part and the one least discussed. A week without the head coach is a week the assistant machine must stand on its own. In mature football nations, that is as ordinary as eating rice. In football nations where everything revolves around one individual, it is a test. If the assistants hold the intensity, hold the discipline of the schedule, hold the quality of the sessions, then Vietnam's national team will gain a new layer of capability it never knew it had. If everything drifts, we will learn that this team depends on one man more than it should. I once sat in a commentary cabin in Kazan and wept. The tears in the France–Argentina cabin taught me that this trade was never a trade, it was a life. People often think sports journalists cry over a beautiful goal. They do not. They cry because they suddenly see, in a nineteen-year-old running without need of commentary, the very thing they lost at that age. A week of funeral rites for a father in Vietnamese football is the same. It reminds all of us that behind the tactics board, behind the press conferences, behind the contract negotiations, there are still human beings with mothers, with fathers, with mornings when the phone rings and nobody wants to answer. Looking across Group A, the tactical story is far clearer. Thailand is the opponent that decides who tops the group. The Philippines and Pakistan are two matches Vietnam must win, and the matches you must win are usually the hardest, because the opponent will park the bus in front of goal and wait for a set piece. Dealing with that kind of opponent requires sessions that repeat set-piece combinations until they become boring. That is precisely the kind of work most easily broken when the man with the whistle is absent. The timing of his return also deserves close attention. If he returns within the week, the team has about ten days before its first match. Ten days is enough to repackage everything, but not enough to fix a major mistake. If he returns later, the story shifts from technical to administrative, and then the Federation will have to say more than it wants to. There is a blind spot in how Vietnamese fans read this news, and I want to name it. We tend to assume that the leader's absence is always a loss, that the team weakens whenever the man in charge is not there. Collective memory draws a straight line: with the teacher, strong; without the teacher, weak. But football does not run in straight lines. A week without a head coach sometimes forces assistants to speak with their own voices, forces senior players to call their own meetings, forces a collective that leaned on authority to learn to stand on its own legs. Some teams grow up in exactly one such week. The real danger is not the week of absence. It is the day he comes back. A man who has just lost his father, who has just flown for over ten hours, who has just stepped from the airport into a Saigon training ground, cannot be himself in the first few days. There is nothing shameful in that, and it should not be hidden. The question is whether anyone in the team has the courage to recognise it and lighten his load. A good coaching staff must know how to protect the man at the top from his own dedication. Saigon watches football on small screens, but its heart still hangs in the stands. We are used to loving the national team in a state of anxiety. Every time strange news arrives, the first reflex is to worry about results, worry about the tournament, worry about the team's place in the race for a knockout spot. That reflex is useful for a football nation on the rise, but it also makes us forget that the man who just boarded that flight is on his way home to mourn. We grow old between generations of players, but we never grow old between matches. What lingers after a tournament is not the ranking, but the way a collective treats one of its own when that person faces something huge. On September 24, 2026, when the ball starts rolling, whether Kim Sang Sik stands in the technical area or sits in the stands, no one can yet be sure. But if Vietnam's national team walks into its first match with a back line that talks to itself, a midfield that covers for itself, and an empty chair in the corner of the pitch filled by the responsibility of the group, then this week of mourning will be one of the most valuable weeks Vietnamese football has ever lived through.