The Empty Seats of V.League: Vietnamese Football Between the Spotlight and the Silence

1. The man who left the pitch before the match was over

On the night of 5 January 2026, at the Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Nguyen Xuan Son sat down on the grass before the first half of the second leg of the ASEAN Championship final had finished. Three days earlier, in Viet Tri, he had been the man who opened the scoring in the first leg. The whole country believed the matter was settled. Then, in the return leg, his leg could no longer hold. A stretcher came on. Vietnam still won, still took the 2026 ASEAN Championship with a 5-3 aggregate score across two legs, but in the celebration frames on television, amid the arms of his teammates, there remained a gap that no one could fill. Before anyone could call him a hero, he had become a name lying on a stretcher.

I sat in front of a screen in Manchester that night, six time zones from Bangkok. Outside the window was the rain of a northern English January, the kind that falls so long and so cold that nobody bothers to open an umbrella. In my head, memory rewound automatically to another evening in Moscow, in 2026, when Croatia scored in the 109th minute and I learned that the final whistle is only a rest. Seven years later, in another stadium, in another city, I again sat still before a new rest. But this time, what kept me from leaving my seat was not the trophy. What kept me still was the question that came after.

Three weeks later, when the floodlights at My Dinh had gone dark and the flags had been folded away, the V.League returned. The stands opened. At some grounds, you could count the spectators with two eyes, and without counting you could see the thing that mattered more: the distance between a nation's joy and the vitality of its domestic league had never been greater.

2. The map few people want to draw

To understand Vietnamese football, you have to draw a map that most spectators have never seen. That map has two levels, and the two levels almost never speak the same language.

The first level is the national team — where the festivals happen. From 2026, when Park Hang-seo arrived, Vietnamese football entered a cycle it had never had before. In 2026, the U-23 side reached the final of the AFC U-23 Championship in Changzhou, and the senior team won the AFF Cup after a ten-year wait. In 2026, the team reached the Asian Cup quarter-finals and then won SEA Games gold. In 2026, SEA Games gold again. In 2026, for the first time, the team reached the third round of World Cup qualifying. That level lives on collective emotion, on flags, on nights when the whole country stays awake together.

The second level is the domestic competition — the V.League. There, fourteen clubs play each other across nearly a year, on pitches sometimes watched by only a few thousand people, with money that mostly comes from a handful of conglomerates standing behind them. That level lives on invoices. And invoices do not know how to sing a national anthem.

Between those two levels there is a rest. That rest is the subject of this piece. Vietnamese football does not lack moments; what it lacks is a structure durable enough that those moments do not dissolve with the whistle.

To see this clearly, look at the coaching cycle. Park Hang-seo left in January 2026 with a legacy that was almost beyond argument. Philippe Troussier arrived carrying a completely different philosophy, and departed in March 2026 after a 0-3 defeat to Indonesia in World Cup qualifying — a match in which the possession numbers looked far better than the result. Kim Sang-sik arrived in May 2026, and only seven months later he had the ASEAN Championship. Three philosophies, three temperaments, three different languages, within barely two years. A national team can change philosophy that quickly only because the groundwork beneath it — the domestic league — does not force it to hold on to anything for very long. No playing school is set deeply enough into the system that changing the manager means changing an entire ecosystem. That is why changing managers becomes easy, and also why it becomes more meaningless than we think.

In Europe, when Manchester City changes philosophy, their youth academies have to change with it. When Ajax declines, people talk about an entire footballing culture, not just a manager. In Vietnam, when the national team changes manager, the academies barely have to change anything at all. They still produce players who look almost identical in profile: decent technique, average physicality, tactical thinking taught in short training camps. That is why every managerial generation has to rebuild from scratch, and no generation leaves a framework for the next.

3. The economics of a league that runs on belief

To understand why the V.League stands are empty, you have to understand where the money goes. And to understand the money, you have to understand who pays the players' wages.

Look at the ownership structure of V.League clubs. Behind Thep Xanh Nam Dinh stands a steel and energy group. Hanoi FC is tied to a media and real-estate group. Hoang Anh Gia Lai was once tied to real estate and agriculture, then to an automobile group. Viettel is a defence telecommunications enterprise. Cong An Ha Noi is tied to a state body. Thanh Hoa, Binh Duong, Hai Phong — each club is tied to a conglomerate or a locality. Almost no V.League club can survive on the pure football revenue it generates itself.

What does that mean? It means most of the money in the league is not money from the football market, but money from other businesses, flowing into football as a spending item for image or for relationships. That is a very strong source of funding when the conglomerates behind it are doing well, and a very fragile one when they run into difficulty. It also means that club decisions are often not made for football reasons, but for other calculations. A chairman may appoint a coach because he is an acquaintance; a young player may not be sold to a foreign club because people want to keep him as a provincial media symbol; a foreign-player slot may be filled because of a relationship with an agent. Vietnamese football does not lack money; it lacks a mechanism that forces money to answer to results.

Compare revenues. In the Premier League, broadcasting is the backbone: each club receives tens of millions of pounds per season from the broadcast deal alone. In the V.League, broadcasting is a small item, and how to divide it has caused controversy for years. Tickets are cheap, but attendance is still low, so ticket revenue is small. Shirts sell, but not enough to sustain a club. The result is that each club depends on a few main sponsors, and when the main sponsor withdraws, the club can disappear within months.

I once sat with a communications officer at a V.League club during a trip back to Vietnam. He said something I wrote down verbatim in my notebook: "Here we don't sell tickets, we sell hope. And hope can only be sold once a season, in the first match." He laughed. I did not.

That sentence is more accurate than it sounds. A league that sells hope instead of product will always have a cycle: excitement at the start of the season, disappointment in the middle, silence at the end. Vietnamese spectators are not lazy at all. They are one of the most fervent markets in Asia. But their fervour is for the flag, and the flag only appears a few times a year. For the rest of the year, they are invited to a product that has not been packaged well enough to persuade them to come back every week.

What I have observed across many seasons is this: the V.League did not fail because the fans left, but because it never gave the fans a reason heavy enough to stay. A reason heavy enough is not a beautiful match, but a story people want to belong to. The Premier League sells stories. The V.League sells fixtures.

4. Academies and the road to the sea

If money is one problem, the supply of players is another — and here Vietnamese football genuinely has a record.

The Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy, with the JMG model, produced a generation the whole country knows by name: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan, Nguyen Van Thanh, Nguyen Hong Duy. The PVF centre, then the Viettel academies with their military character, the Nutifood academies, and a few local centres have also contributed names to the youth national teams. Against the Southeast Asian baseline, this is a youth development system worth respecting. Vietnamese youth teams regularly reach the semi-finals and finals of Asian U-19 and U-23 tournaments.

But there is a problem at the end of the pipeline: what happens when a young player grows up?

Look at the moves abroad. In 2026, Doan Van Hau went to SC Heerenveen in the Netherlands on loan. The same year, Nguyen Cong Phuong went to Mito Hollyhock in Japan, then in 2026 to Incheon United in South Korea. In 2026, Nguyen Quang Hai went to Pau FC in France's Ligue 2. Three of the best players of a generation, three journeys, and the common thread is that all were short, none left a large mark, and all ended with a return home.

To be fair: Van Hau was only twenty at the time and suffered an injury; Cong Phuong in Japan faced language barriers and competition; Quang Hai at Pau struggled with the tempo and the harshness of European professional football. This is not the personal fault of any of them. This is the fault of a structure: when the domestic league is neither strong enough to sell players at a high price nor strong enough to keep them for further development, every move abroad becomes an individual gamble rather than a system step. A player who goes to Europe without being prepared by a corresponding base of physical conditioning, language and tactical thinking will almost certainly fail, and that failure gets counted against the individual.

Deeper still, there is a paradox. Asian clubs such as those in the J.League and K.League have long noticed Vietnamese players, but mostly in low-cost trial arrangements. Meanwhile, V.League clubs themselves often do not want to sell their young players, because they need those names to sell tickets and image. The result is that players are held at home until they pass their best developmental years, then leave late, then come back. That circle repeats with every generation.

On a recent work trip to Vietnam, I had the chance to watch a youth team train. A coach told me: "My players are better than I think, but no one has prepared their future." After the session, I stood at the corner of the pitch, watching seventeen-year-olds run laps around the touchline to cool down. Before becoming a name, everyone is only a running figure. And I realised that the most frightening thing is not that they will not become famous, but that when they do, they will have nowhere to go next.

5. The age curve of a generation and the myth trap

There is a truth about age that Vietnamese football is facing, and it is far simpler than the tactical arguments online.

The generation called the "golden generation" — Quang Hai, Van Hau, Cong Phuong, Van Toan, Tien Linh, Hoang Duc, Hung Dung — were mostly born between the mid and late 1990s. Taking 2026 as the reference point, that core group is now between 27 and 31. That is the best age, but also the last age of the peak. After that comes the slope. There is nothing wrong with a slope — every generation must go down one — but the question is: who is waiting at the bottom?

And this is where a very telling detail appears. When Vietnam needed a centre-forward to settle the 2026 final, the man chosen was a naturalised player, Nguyen Xuan Son, a Brazilian-born striker who had made his name in the V.League. He played well, and he deserves every compliment. But the fact that he became the "answer" for a nation's striker position says something about the system behind him. If the striker-development layer in the V.League were good enough, a national team would not need a naturalisation slot to solve its goalscoring problem. I mention this not to criticise any individual, but to point out a gap in the production line: Vietnam can produce many decent midfielders and defenders, but it almost cannot produce a centre-forward of genuine international level, and that is a sign of development quality, not of luck.

There is a technical explanation for this gap. Vietnamese youth football is still often organised with short-term results as the priority. Youth teams play to win youth championships, not to develop individuals. As a result, youth coaches tend to pick players who develop physically early — boys bigger than their peers — and rarely pick players who need time. In the striker position, that distortion is worst, because a striker is the position where decision-making within half a second is the decisive factor, not strength. When sports education treats strength as priority number one, it produces good centre-backs and midfielders, and strikers who are not sharp enough. Then at national-team level, people have to look elsewhere.

6. The empty seats

It is time to return to the opening image.

An empty seat still has someone sitting in it — we have simply stopped hearing their applause. In my documentary career, I spent forty days in Manchester interviewing the quiet workers around empty stadiums during the pandemic. There was a man who had cleaned at Old Trafford for more than twenty years. He told me that at night, when there was no match, he still heard shouting echoing from the empty rows. I did not believe him at first. But then I understood: what he heard was not sound, but the memory of something that used to be crowded.

Vietnamese football has many such empty seats, but in a different sense. They are not seats emptied by a pandemic, but seats emptied because people once sat there and then stopped coming back. For years, I have asked one question of many Vietnamese fans I meet: "When was the last time you went to a stadium to watch a V.League match?" The answer is usually a specific season in the past, five, seven, ten years ago. Very few say "last season".

What does that mean? It means the V.League did not lose its audience because they switched to another product. It lost them because they left and no one called them back. And they left not because of a defeat, but because of repetition.

This is where I want to say the thing most contrary to the popular intuition about Vietnamese football.

The popular intuition says: Vietnamese football needs more money. More sponsors, more investment, more quality foreign players, more broadcasting rights.

I think that is not the right diagnosis. Not because money does not matter — money matters a great deal — but because money is not what is missing at the top level. The conglomerates behind V.League clubs are rich enough to pour in more if they wanted to. They do not pour in more, not because they lack money, but because they do not believe the money will come back. The V.League's problem is not poverty, but a lack of belief — belief that this league is a place worth long-term investment, rather than a cost to be paid to maintain image.

And that belief can only be built by one thing: meaning. Fans must believe that the domestic league is a destination, not a waiting room. They must believe that a match between two mid-table teams on a Tuesday evening in a provincial town carries emotional weight equal to a national-team final. That is a very hard belief to build, and it cannot be built by winning. It can only be built by storytelling, by letting fans see specific people in club shirts, with specific stories, in a specific place.

This is why the concentration of Vietnamese media on the national team, however understandable, has a cost. Every time the national team wins, the whole country talks about the national team. No one talks about the groundskeeper at Thien Truong, the ticket seller at Lach Tray, the substitute who sat on the bench all season and still came to train every morning. Those people are not in the national story. And when a football culture tells its story only through winners, it will never have enough stories to fill a ten-month season.

One more contrarian angle: many say the V.League needs more teams, an expanded calendar, more competition. I do not think that is priority number one. Adding teams to a league with no audience only dilutes quality and increases the financial burden on owners. The right priority is to increase the emotional depth of each existing match: to give it an identity, a story, a reason to be watched. The Danish league has twelve teams and is still a valuable product. The fixation on the number of teams is hiding the real problem: the quality of the experience, not the quantity of matches.

7. The one who is no longer called by name

On the track, records are measured in hundredths of a second; outside it, life is measured in breaths. In my years working in England, I learned that professional sport does not run on records. It runs on the people who come to the ground every week because they believe their seat means something. When a seat loses meaning, the stadium is still standing, but it has become a building.

What I find worth saying about Vietnamese football is not that it is weak. It is in a position many Southeast Asian football nations would want: a national team with character, a youth development system with a product, a generation of players known across Asia, and an economy large enough to sustain a professional league. Those conditions rarely appear at the same time. The problem is that they are being used for a short-term purpose — festivals a few times a year — while their real potential is something far longer-term.

If I were writing a script for the next ten years of Vietnamese football, I would not begin with a final. I would begin with a Wednesday evening in a province, in a stadium with four thousand people, three thousand of whom have been coming here for ten years and will still be coming in ten more. Because a mature football culture is not measured by its peaks, but by the depth of those who stay.

As for Xuan Son, the man carried off on a stretcher in Bangkok: he proved what he came to prove. But I still think about that moment differently. A football culture is only truly great when it does not need anyone to strain to the point of breaking a leg to prove something. An empty seat still has someone sitting in it. The problem of Vietnamese football is not how to fill that seat — but how to make the person sitting there, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, mid-season, feel that they are in the right place.