The Uncounted Defeats of Vietnamese Football

Thong Nhat Stadium, an October afternoon. Matchday fifteen of the 2026-2026 V-League season. Ho Chi Minh City FC host a central-Vietnam side. Stand B is nearly half empty. In the seventy-eighth minute, the visitors score to make it 2-0. There is no roar from the stands. Only the referee's whistle, the ball rolling on the grass, and the barely audible sigh of a middle-aged drinks vendor in the corner of the ground. I sit there, in the pale Saigon afternoon, thinking about something I had forgotten across fifteen years in this trade: the defeats nobody counts. In football, people count goals. Scoreboards, league tables, top-scorer lists — all of it belongs to those who score. But every goal, on the other side, is always a conceded goal. And every conceded goal, in the heart of a Vietnamese player, is a life story that has never been told. I remember 2026, at this very Thong Nhat Stadium, when I wrote about Nguyen Van Toan — a stoppage-time goal that could not save HAGL from a 1-2 defeat to Saigon FC. He sat crying in the middle of the pitch for ten minutes after the final whistle. My piece that year was titled "A Goal That Saved No One". That goal did not change the scorer; it changed all the pain into words. Since then I have understood that Vietnamese football is written not only in victories, but in the silences between matchdays. Vietnamese football is in one of its strangest moments. The national team has just lived through a year of sharp swings: failure in the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, then the 2026 AFF Cup title after a 3-2 win over Thailand in the second leg of the final at My Dinh Stadium. Nguyen Xuan Son — the naturalised Brazilian-born striker — scored seven goals in the tournament, including a brace in the final, then broke his leg in the thirtieth minute after a collision. The whole of My Dinh fell silent for a moment, before applause rose for a man who had gone down for another's victory. At the same time, one tier down, the V-League quietly passed through matchdays with ever-thinner crowds. Clubs wrestled with their finances. Sponsors withdrew. Players were paid late. Saigon FC — once an emblem of the country's largest city — dissolved. Vietnamese football had a national team flying high, while its domestic pitches sank into a silence few wanted to hear. I once thought that silence was a symptom of disease. After many years, I understood: silence is not the absence of sound, but the place where sound has not yet arrived. Some stories in Vietnamese football go untold not because they do not exist, but because nobody has held a microphone close enough. I have followed Vietnamese football since before the V-League became a properly professional league in 2026. I remember matches at Hang Day Stadium in the era of Cang Saigon and The Cong, afternoons at Chi Lang when the stands were still packed, the drums of the Hai Phong supporters' group echoing around the grounds. Vietnamese football then was not rich, but it was alive. It lived on the faith of its fans, on players' attachment to the shirt, on stories passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Then Vietnamese football entered the era of big dreams. The V-League professionalised. Clubs were invested in. Players were paid more. But with big dreams came big falls. Clubs borrowed to buy stars and went bankrupt. Million-dollar contracts produced nothing. Foreign coaches came and went, taking their contracts and leaving behind a tangled squad. Between those dreams and those falls lies a class of people never spoken of: young players, substitutes, players past their peak, those whose names never make the advertising boards. They are the uncounted defeats of Vietnamese football. Start with the numbers. In the 2026-2026 season, the V-League has fourteen clubs. According to Vietnam Football Federation figures, the operating cost of a V-League club ranges from thirty to one hundred billion dong per season, while broadcast revenue amounts to only a few tens of billions shared across the whole league. That figure is far below regional peers such as the Thai League or J1 League, where a mid-table club can generate hundreds of billions of dong a year from multiple sources. What does that mean? It means most V-League clubs survive on the goodwill of one or two parent companies. When the company struggles, the club struggles. When the company stops sponsoring, the club can vanish in an afternoon. Saigon FC is the most recent example. Before it, Becamex Binh Duong had to sell its squad, Than Quang Ninh dissolved, Hung Vuong An Giang, Xuan Thanh Cement, Ninh Binh — the list of departed clubs is longer than the list of survivors. Behind each vanished name are uncounted defeats. A thirty-year-old player, his contract not renewed, turning to grassroots coaching back home. A twenty-six-year-old who once wore the U23 shirt, now driving for a ride-hailing app in Saigon. A young goalkeeper, after his club dissolved, sending applications to four clubs and receiving no reply. In football, this is called "free transfer". In reality, these are people left behind by a system with no room for everyone. I once visited a youth academy in the Mekong Delta. Each year, around forty young players graduate. Only about five sign professional contracts. The rest go home with a lower-secondary certificate and a pair of legs used to running on grass. One of them told me: "I don't regret choosing football. I only regret that football didn't choose me." I have kept that line in my notebook for years. It is not a tactical discovery, not a statistic to cite in an analysis. But it reminds me that behind every televised match lies a submerged layer of people the audience has never seen. I looked up the attendance figures for the 2026-2026 V-League. The average crowd is only three to four thousand per match, far below Vietnamese football's golden age in the 2000s, when grounds like Hang Day and Chi Lang were regularly packed. A Thai League match can draw ten to twenty thousand. A J1 League match can draw thirty thousand. The V-League's number, set beside those, is a sigh. Tactically, the 2026-2026 V-League exposes a paradox too. Clubs tend to choose pragmatism: a low block, quick counter-attacks, a priority on physicality. The consequence is that the average goals per match in the V-League is markedly lower than in the Thai League or K-League. Meanwhile, the national team under coach Kim Sang-sik plays a high press, ball control, and structured attacking build-up. The gap between the national team's style and the clubs' style is one reason Vietnamese players struggle when they step up: they must change their entire tactical system within a few days of gathering. Look at specific numbers. At the 2026 AFF Cup, Vietnam under Kim Sang-sik scored fourteen goals in eight matches, the best chance-conversion rate in the tournament. But in the V-League, most clubs score under one and a half goals per match. In other words, Vietnamese attacking players must learn to attack with the national team after spending the whole season defending with their clubs. The ball spins slower, and only then do I see how many lives it carries. Every misplaced pass in the V-League, every missed chance, every home defeat — all of it can be read as a sign of an incomplete system. But it can also be read as a story of people trying to do the right thing under the wrong conditions. I remember a March night, going to Hang Day for a late match. Hanoi had turned windy. Only a few dozen people remained in the stands. After the final whistle, a young home player sat down on the pitch, took off his boots, and looked up at the empty stand. He sat there a long time. I did not dare approach. I only stood at a distance and wrote the moment in my notebook: "A young player, an empty stadium, a Hanoi evening." It is one of the images I have carried through my career, and it reminds me that Vietnamese football is not only great matches, but quiet evenings like that. What is worth saying is that this silence does not come only from the stands. It comes from meeting rooms, where decisions on sponsorship, scheduling and youth policy are made without much voice from the players themselves. It comes from newsrooms, where a foreign player's goal is reported more loudly than a club's dissolution. It comes from empty stands, where fans choose to watch European football at home instead of watching their hometown club at the ground. There is another way of seeing things, one I consider necessary if we are to understand Vietnamese football honestly. People often say Vietnamese football lacks squad depth. People often say clubs lack professionalism. People often say fans lack loyalty. But few say this: perhaps the way we count is itself the problem. We count goals, titles, table positions. We count the trophies a club has won, the goals a player has scored, the years a coach has lasted. But we do not count the defeats a young player must endure to stand firm in a professional match. We do not count the nights a player lies at home staring at the ceiling, asking himself whether to continue. We do not count the times a club nearly dissolved but survived on one person's goodwill. What I mean is not that Vietnamese football deserves pity. That would be a mistake. What I mean is that Vietnamese football needs a different way of counting. A way that includes what does not appear on the scoreboard. A way that treats silence not as a sign of failure, but as a sign of stories not yet told. I once read a study of Asian football in which the author pointed out that successful football nations — Japan, South Korea, Iran — share one thing: they build bottom-up, and they are patient with results that have not yet arrived. Vietnamese football, by contrast, tends to build top-down: national-team results first, club foundations later. The result is that the national team can win the AFF Cup while the V-League still grapples with the most basic problems. That is the blind spot of collective memory. We remember the moments of victory but forget the conditions that produced them — or failed to. We remember Nguyen Xuan Son scoring seven at the AFF Cup, but few remember how long he had to wait for Vietnamese citizenship, and what price he paid to become a hero of a country that is not where he was born. We remember the trophy lift, but few remember the months the national team trained away from home, the long flights, the sessions in the central Vietnamese heat. If we learned to count differently, perhaps we would understand that Vietnamese football is not poor in stories. It is only poor in storytellers. And the storyteller, in this case, can be us — the journalists, the fans, those in the stands applauding a club even after it has just lost. Thong Nhat Stadium has switched off its lights now. The drinks vendor has packed up. The visitors have boarded the bus back to central Vietnam. The match has closed with a defeat nobody counted. I sit a few minutes longer, looking at the grass gone dark under the streetlights. And I think: perhaps, in ten years, when the V-League finds its own path, people will read what we wrote today and understand that Vietnamese football was never silent — we had simply not learned how to listen. The goal of a loser, in the end, is still a goal. And every defeat, if told properly, can become a story worth listening to. The question I leave for myself, and for anyone who still cares about Vietnamese football: what are we counting — and what are we forgetting?