Counting the Empty Chairs of the V.League: Vietnamese Football After the ASEAN Cup Floodlight

On the night of January 5, 2026, at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Nguyen Xuan Son scored Vietnam's second goal in the second leg of the ASEAN Cup final, and then he fell. He lay on the grass, both arms wrapped around his right calf, while the roar of more than seventy thousand Thai spectators had not yet faded. I sat in a small flat in Manchester, eleven time zones away, watching on a live stream running three seconds behind. Those three seconds were enough for me to hear two things at once: the erupting cheer of the Vietnamese and the sudden silence of the Thais.

Vietnam still won. The aggregate score was 5-3 over two legs. But what I remember is not the trophy. It is the moment the medical team carried Xuan Son off the pitch, and in the stands, a corner of red shirts fell silent as if an entire nation had just held its breath. A naturalized centre-forward, 27 years old, with a fractured tibia and fibula, carried off on a stretcher in the very match that defined his career.

Eighteen months later, when I look back at that picture, I understand that the Bangkok night told more than the story of a championship. It told the story of a football nation learning to stand on its own two feet — while those feet remain too dependent on individuals placed in the right spot.

Vietnamese football entered the 2020s with a legacy so beautiful it could easily become a burden. The golden generation of Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Doan Van Hau, Nguyen Tien Linh, and Luong Xuan Truong was raised at the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Academy and the PVF centre, and then shaped by coach Park Hang-seo into a compact unit in a flexible back-three system. Asian U23 runners-up in 2026, AFF Cup champions in 2026, Asian Cup quarter-finalists in 2026, and qualifiers for the third round of the 2026 World Cup campaign — that was a run of results any Southeast Asian nation would dream of.

But when Park Hang-seo left his post in January 2026, Vietnamese football faced a familiar void. Philippe Troussier was appointed with ambitions to modernize the playing style toward possession, but he failed and was replaced after barely more than a year, when the team lost to Indonesia in the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying. In May 2026, Kim Sang-sik — a former midfielder who won the K.League with Jeonbuk — was invited into the hot seat. He arrived with a different style: pragmatic, un-dogmatic, and skilled at letting matches decide their own fate.

In hindsight, the Bangkok night was the product of a political decision — in the broadest sense of the word. Naturalizing Rafaelson, a Brazilian-born striker, as Nguyen Xuan Son gave Vietnam something this football nation had lacked for a decade: a centre-forward who could score in big matches. Son scored 7 goals at the 2026 ASEAN Cup, winning both the Golden Boot and the Best Player award.

Yet only six months later, the biggest question in Vietnamese football is not how to win another title. It is: what happens when the stage lights go out, and we must face what remains behind — the V.League, the clubs, and the empty stands?

This is where I want to pause, because Vietnamese football has a troubling habit: it only knows how to measure itself through the results of the national team. Every AFF Cup, every Asian Cup, every SEA Games, we see a country hold its breath and erupt. But when the tournament ends, when the trophy is placed in the cabinet, Hang Day Stadium returns to its rows of empty seats.

To fully understand the problem, one must read the numbers. And read them in silence.

V.League 1 — the top national division — has 14 teams. The largest stadiums: in this division, only Quang Ninh and Hai Phong draw over 15,000 spectators per match. Many V.League matches regularly draw fewer than 5,000 fans, meaning less than a quarter of capacity. For comparison: an average J.League 1 match in Japan recently draws around 20,000, while K.League 1 draws around 10,000. Vietnam, a country of nearly 100 million people where football is the most popular sport, still has clubs playing in front of crowds smaller than a school match.

But do not confuse empty stands with empty value. What is more worrying lies in the money flow.

The budget of an average V.League 1 club typically ranges from 40 to 100 billion dong per season, roughly 1.6 to 4 million US dollars. That figure is only a fraction of a mid-table Thai League 1 side, where budgets commonly run from 4 to 8 million dollars, to say nothing of larger leagues. Most V.League budgets come from parent corporations — groups like Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Nam Dinh, Viettel, Hanoi — rather than from broadcasting or commercial revenue. V.League television rights, once valued at several tens of billions of dong per season, split among 14 clubs, leave only a few billion dong per team — a figure barely enough to pay one star's wages.

That fragile financial base is the deep reason the V.League cannot produce a sustainable cycle of competition. Whenever a club wants to invest heavily to win, it must burn money for two or three seasons, then withdraw when the parent business tires. That is the circle that Binh Duong, Thanh Hoa, Hanoi, and most recently Nam Dinh have all passed through.

Thep Xanh Nam Dinh winning the 2026-25 V.League 1 title is a notable story. The team from the southern city returned to the summit after years of fluctuation, under coach Vu Hong Viet and the backing of the Thep Xanh group. But looking at that championship squad, we see a familiar truth: it was built from players over 30, short-term contracts, and a tight defensive system rather than a development philosophy. Nam Dinh won, but Nam Dinh produced no significant next generation.

This is the point I want to stress: club-level success in Vietnam is often discounted success — we borrow from the future to pay for the present.

Look at the academies. PVF, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, and more recently the Hanoi FC and Viettel centres, have produced many good generations of players. But the rate at which academy players reach the first team and stay in V.League 1 for five consecutive seasons is very low — most young talents, after two or three seasons of limited minutes, drop to lower divisions, retire early, or move into other work.

In the industry, we still call it the age-23 trap. At 23, a Vietnamese player has exhausted his U23 eligibility. If he has not yet secured a first-team place, he will struggle to get a second chance. Clubs would rather buy a cheap 28-year-old foreigner than be patient with a 21-year-old.

If we shift our gaze from the domestic league to the continental stage, the picture becomes clearer. In the AFC Champions League Two — Asia's second tier, where Vietnamese clubs usually appear — our teams typically exit in the group stage or the round of 16. Thai clubs such as Buriram United and BG Pathum have for years played in the AFC Champions League Elite, facing sides from Japan, Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the most recent Vietnamese club to go deep in an Asian competition was Hoang Anh Gia Lai in the 2026 AFC Champions League, when they advanced from the group in a centralized pandemic format — an exception rather than a norm.

This leads to an interesting paradox. Vietnamese football is strong at national-team level but weak at club level, and that strength and weakness are not contradictory — they complement each other in a system where the national team is the facade and the clubs are the cracked foundation.

So why does the national team succeed? Because the national team does not depend on the V.League to exist in the same way. The national team is where the best players converge, wherever they play. It has a long international window to assemble, the backing of the Vietnam Football Federation and sponsors, and a spiritual advantage few nations can match: the fervour of its fans.

But here is where sobriety is needed. A strong national team is not proof of a healthy football nation. It is only proof of a well-managed golden cycle.

And I want to push this argument further. The more successful the national team, the more Vietnamese football tends to postpone structural reform — because victory creates the illusion that the system already works.

This is counter-intuitive. When the national team wins the ASEAN Cup, no one wants to talk about V.League television rights, academies, facilities, or youth wages. People want to talk about what happened on the pitch. And that is an understandable instinct — who wants to spoil a party?

But the price of not talking about those things is a football nation built on exceptional individuals rather than a system. The price of only savouring the glory is failing to see the empty chairs multiplying.

Look at another reality: naturalization. Nguyen Xuan Son was not Vietnam's first naturalized player, but he is the most successful. He scores in big matches, and fans quickly embraced him as Vietnamese — exactly as he deserves. But I ask myself: if Vietnam had no Xuan Son, would we have won the 2026 ASEAN Cup?

The honest answer is no, or at least with great difficulty. And that answer is what deserves reflection. A football nation that must rely on a naturalized striker to solve its scoring problem is admitting to a gap it has not filled itself.

This does not mean naturalization is wrong. It only means we must look at it squarely: a 27-year-old broke his leg in the final, and the whole country worried that the national team's future depends on whether he recovers. That is a dependency no system should be proud of.

His recovery period is also a period to answer a question: who is next? Who will carry the scoring burden when Xuan Son is 30? Is there a 20-year-old striker in the V.League scoring 15 goals a season? If not, Vietnamese football's answer to that question will be another naturalized player — and the circle continues.

In the current V.League, the domestic forward line is severely depleted. If you remove foreign and naturalized players from the top-scorer chart, the number of domestic players reaching double-digit goals per season can be counted on one hand. This is a sign of the collapse of the striker development chain — from academy to professional pitch.

For a country that once had centre-forwards like Le Huynh Duc, Nguyen Hong Son, Van Quyen, and later Nguyen Tien Linh, the absence of an heir generation of strikers is an alarming regression.

So what must be done? The answer is not a single solution. It lies in the transformation of the club model.

Part of the problem is the ownership model. V.League clubs are mostly owned by a single corporation. This is a common model in East Asia — in China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, chaebols and large groups often own clubs. But in Japan and Korea, the model has evolved into an ecosystem with community shareholders, local funds, and diversified commercial revenue. In Vietnam, most clubs still depend on a single funding source, leaving them vulnerable when the owner changes business strategy.

The question of legal identity is also worth discussing. Some V.League clubs still operate semi-professionally, with a management structure that is almost a department of the parent company. This means they lack independence in finance, in strategy, and sometimes in professional decisions.

But if I only criticize the ownership model, I would oversimplify. In reality, no model is perfect. What matters is whether the system can adapt.

And this is where I want to return to the idea of empty chairs.

In 2026, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed stadiums around the world, I spent forty days interviewing the quiet workers around football grounds in Manchester. I spoke with Paul, a 58-year-old cleaner who had worked at Old Trafford for twenty years. He told me that at night, when there was no match, he could still hear shouts echoing back from the empty rows.

I think of the V.League when I hear that story. I think of Vietnamese stadiums at night, when the empty seats and the lights are still on. But in Vietnam, the problem is not the echo of the past. The problem is the absence of the present.

A football nation cannot exist only on the festival nights of its national team.

It needs a domestic league that fans want to watch every week. It needs clubs that can sustain themselves. It needs a youth development system that produces not just a few exceptional individuals but a continuous stream. And it needs loyal supporters — people who come to the ground not because the national team is winning, but because they love a specific club.

This last problem is cultural, not tactical. In England, people go to football from childhood, following their father to the ground, bound to a club for life. In Vietnam, fans often support the national team more than a local club. This is not wrong — but it means that when the national team does not play, nothing replaces it.

This is the root of boom and bust. A country that only knows how to love its national team will have silent gaps between tournaments, and those gaps last for years.

So where is the bright spot? Yes, there are positive signs.

Academies like PVF and HAGL have produced many generations of quality players. Clubs like Hanoi FC invest in facilities and more organized youth systems. Recently, some clubs have begun to take an interest in data analysis and sports science — a significant change from a decade ago.

The growth of women's football is also a good sign. The Vietnam women's team reached the 2026 Women's World Cup for the first time, and though it did not advance from the group, it was an important milestone for the sport's development in the country.

But one thing is notable: the growth of women's football has largely occurred at national-team level, not at club level. The national women's league still lacks attention, investment, and audiences.

And here the cross-discipline comparison becomes useful. Vietnamese women's football and Vietnamese men's football share a structural problem: a focus on the top of the pyramid while neglecting the base.

In nineteen years of following the sports industry, I have learned one thing about sports systems — whether football, athletics, or swimming. A system that invests only in what is visible on the final results sheet will soon exhaust its resources from within.

Vietnamese athletics has outstanding athletes like Bui Thi Thu Thao or Nguyen Thi Huyen, but to have a successor generation, it needs a system of schools, clubs, and grassroots competitions — things that do not appear on a medal table. Football is the same. The heroes of the Bangkok night were built from thousands of training sessions no one watched, on pitches no one photographed.

That is why I always return to the idea of empty chairs. An empty chair still seats a person — we simply no longer hear their applause.

And if I recall eighteen months ago, when Xuan Son lay on the grass in Bangkok, what I remember most is how the whole stadium fell silent. In that moment, tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Thais held their breath together. A moment of complete empathy.

That is football. Not the trophy. Not the victory. But the moment when we realize the opponent is also human — and that joy only has meaning when it comes with respect.

But when the match ends, when the final whistle sounds, we must again face what remains. And what remains — for Vietnamese football — is a domestic league that needs more love, a development system that needs more investment, and a generation of young players waiting for a chance.

There is one thing I know for sure after following eight Olympic Games and eight World Cups: strong sporting nations are not built in a single tournament. They are built in the silent gaps between tournaments — through hard decisions no one wants to make while intoxicated by victory.

As Vietnamese football prepares for 2026 World Cup qualifying and the tournaments beyond, the question is not who will score in the final. The question is whether we dare to ask hard questions in the very moment of triumph.

If the answer is yes, then the empty chairs of the V.League may gradually fill. And if they fill, everything behind them — the national team, the World Cup dream, the festival nights — becomes more sustainable.

If the answer is no, we will have more beautiful Bangkok nights — and the silent years that follow.

I do not know how far the Vietnamese national team will go. But I know one thing: a good match is never fully told — it only waits for someone silent enough to listen. And sometimes, the quietest person in a football nation is an empty chair in a V.League stand on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for someone to come and sit.