Eleven People in the Stands: Vietnamese Football and the War Against Being Forgotten

On a Saturday afternoon, I sat in the third row of a stand that held eleven people. Not eleven thousand. Eleven.

An old man had cycled over at three in the afternoon, leaned his battered bicycle against the trunk of a tree, and then sat motionless like a milestone. A group of students brought four cans of soft drink and finished two of them before the referee blew the kickoff whistle. Two children ran in circles at the foot of the flagpole. And a woman selling banh mi sat right at the entrance, not having sold a single one, her hand still waving a worn paper fan.

On the pitch, the home team warmed up. The ball rolled across the grass, and the sound of each bounce was so clear I could count them one by one. No loudspeaker bellowing player names. No drums. No one shouting "Vietnam oi". Only the sound of studs sinking into the turf, the sound of breathing, and the voice of an assistant coach telling a young player: "Keep the ball, don't rush."

In the seventeenth minute, a player wearing number 8 received the ball at the edge of the box, shielded it with his back, turned, and shot. The ball went just wide of the post. No goal. The eleven people in the stand clapped. The applause sounded like rain on a corrugated roof, scattered, then gone.

I took out my notebook and wrote: "Number 8, minute 17, shot just wide." Then I realised I had just recorded a moment no one would preserve. No highlight. No newspaper would print it. No data page would update it. The scoreboard on the pitch did not even bother to show his name.

Two tiers, one silence

Professional Vietnamese football has two tiers: V.League 1 and the National First Division, commonly shortened to V.League 2. Above them sits the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF), the national governing body, and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF), which organises and operates the professional leagues. Below them lie hundreds of amateur clubs, thousands of young players, and a network of academies that has been quietly reshaping the game for nearly two decades.

The media usually talks about V.League 1 through big names: Hanoi FC, Cong An Ha Noi, Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, LPBank Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Song Lam Nghe An, Becamex Binh Duong, SHB Da Nang, Hai Phong, Dong A Thanh Hoa, Hong Linh Ha Tinh. People talk about the stars: Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Do Hung Dung, Nguyen Tien Linh, Nguyen Hoang Duc, Nguyen Van Toan, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Vu Van Thanh, Phan Van Duc, Luong Xuan Truong. People talk about the moves abroad: Quang Hai to Pau FC in France, Cong Phuong to Mito Hollyhock in Japan, Tuan Anh to Yokohama FC, Van Toan to Seoul E-Land in Korea, and then a later wave of younger players finding their way to J.League, K.League, and even Europe.

But there is another tier of Vietnamese football that the media barely touches. It is the tier of matches in empty stadiums. Of twenty-one-year-olds waiting for a substitute slot in the first team. Of academies in Pleiku, in Hung Yen, in Ham Rong, where children are taught to play football by being made to run on sand before they are allowed to touch the ball. That is where I want to sit, and that is where the real story of Vietnamese football is unfolding, quietly, every weekend.

The patron model

To understand why a stand holds only eleven people, you have to understand how Vietnamese clubs make a living.

Most clubs in both tiers operate on what I call the patron model. They do not live on television rights, because that figure in Vietnam remains very small by regional standards. They do not live on ticket sales, because even the best-attended matches do not cover a month's wages. They do not live on shirt merchandising or image rights. They live on the money of an individual or a corporation behind them: a construction firm, a bank, a property company, an agricultural group, a state entity.

That corporation pays the wages, pays the bonuses, builds the training ground, buys the foreign players, pays the hotel bills on long away trips. While the corporation is enthusiastic, the club lives. When the corporation tires, the club vanishes, or changes its name, or relocates, or dissolves in silence, leaving a handful of players who do not know where they will train on Monday.

That model produces a very steep wage structure. At the top are a few players earning several hundred million dong a month, plus match bonuses, achievement bonuses, and advertising contracts. At the bottom are young players earning a few million dong, enough for rent and food, and they know that a knee injury can end everything before their twenty-fifth birthday.

A contract not yet signed has already told the whole story of a life. Between those two tiers, a new contract can shatter the entire order. When a club signs a famous player, those who remain immediately look at their own envelopes. Nobody says it out loud. But the dressing room knows. And that knowledge seeps into every pass, every duel, every early-morning training session.

The night buses

A First Division club may have to travel seven hundred kilometres to play a single match. They go by coach. They leave the city at eleven the night before, sleep on the bus, arrive at six in the morning, eat breakfast at a roadside stall, and then play at four in the afternoon. After the match, they get back on the bus, and reach home at two the following morning.

During those eighteen hours, nobody films anything. No journalist travels with them. No data page records that player number 8 sat on a bus for eighteen hours, slept four, and still ran twenty metres in the eighty-eighth minute.

I once travelled with a team like that. I sat in the back row, listening to players snore, listening to the coach whisper with his assistant about the lineup, listening to a young player call home and lie that he was fine. I wrote it all in my notebook. But I knew that one man's notebook cannot replace a system.

Academies, the deepest tier

The deepest tier of Vietnamese football is the academies, and this is where the story becomes more interesting than any league table.

The Hoang Anh Gia Lai football academy, usually known as the JMG Academy, opened in 2026 in Pleiku, and was the first generation built on a formal French-style training model. It produced a cohort whose names the whole country knows: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan, Vu Van Thanh, Phan Van Duc, Tran Minh Vuong. Then came PVF, the PVF Youth Football Training Centre in Hung Yen, then Viettel, then Nutifood, then dozens of smaller centres in the provinces, in places you have to cross three dykes to reach.

The stated goal of the academies is to produce players for the national team. But there is a second goal, less often spoken of: to create a pipeline of players who can be sold. Sold to domestic clubs, sold to Japan, sold to Korea, sold to whichever league will pay.

And this is the point I want to linger on longest.

The training mechanism and the data hole

FIFA has a rule called the solidarity mechanism. When a player is transferred internationally, a share of the transfer fee is distributed to the clubs that trained him between the ages of twelve and twenty-three, in proportion to the number of years he spent at each club. This is a small but important stream of money for Vietnamese academies, where budgets are tight and every income stream matters.

The problem is this: to claim that money, you must prove how many years the player was with you, from which date to which date, at what age. You need records. You need documents. You need data.

Most Vietnamese clubs and academies do not have data systems good enough to do this. They keep papers in a cupboard. They take notes in a notebook. They lose track of a player once he leaves, not because they do not care, but because they have no staff, no software, no process. The result is that money which should belong to them stays inside the system, or is simply never claimed.

Vietnamese football does not lack talent. Vietnamese football lacks systematic memory. This is the sentence I want painted on the wall of every meeting room at the VFF and the VPF.

Memories nobody counts

Try a small exercise. Try to find the complete statistics table for the National First Division season of 2026. Try to find the full list of players who took the field in a match in Pleiku in 2026. Try to find the minutes played by the twenty-third man in a squad in a match in the winter of 2026.

You will find a few lines in old newspapers, a few blurry photographs, and a great many gaps. Not because those matches did not exist. But because nobody was tasked with recording them.

Meanwhile, in Japan, where I live and work, fans can look up every minute played by a player in J3 League from fifteen years ago. They can look up the temperature, the rainfall, the attendance of a match in a small town. They can look up which high school that player transferred from, with whom, and on what date. This is not a difference of money. This is a difference of archival awareness.

People do not remember the score; they remember how a pair of boots left its mark on the grass. But to remember how a pair of boots left its mark, someone must first have recorded that those boots were there at all.

The blind spot of the media

Vietnamese football media has a very clear blind spot, and I say this as someone who has worked in the trade for twenty-nine years.

The blind spot is this: only what is broadcast is remembered. Only what has a highlight exists. A goal in V.League 1 is replayed ten times, cut into vertical clips, posted on every platform, commented on, argued over. A similar moment in V.League 2 disappears from the internet within forty-eight hours, because nobody filmed it, or someone filmed it but nobody posted it, or someone posted it but nobody watched.

The result is a football nation with two memories: the memory of the famous, and the oblivion of everyone else. A player who scores thirty goals in the First Division may never be called up to the national team, and three years later nobody remembers he existed. Meanwhile, a player who scores three goals in V.League 1 in a single season may be mentioned on talk shows for years.

A football nation that remembers only what was broadcast will forever be judging only half of itself. This is not merely a question of fairness. It is a question of quality. You cannot know whether a twenty-two-year-old has potential if you have no data on him from the age of fifteen. You cannot compare a First Division striker with a V.League 1 striker if you do not have the same measurement system for both.

What I learned from a boy one metre fifty-eight tall

In 2026, while I was writing for a J.League documentary series, I happened to watch a match in Kanazawa. A nineteen-year-old striker, one metre fifty-eight tall, had scored twelve goals in eighteen matches but was overlooked because of his modest frame. In the eighty-eighth minute, with his ankle heavily strapped, the boy burst into the box and scored the winning goal. I dropped my old script and followed him for three months.

One metre fifty-eight cannot reach the crossbar, but it is enough to touch the heart of an entire city. From that, I learned one thing: every player has a crack, and light can only pass through that crack. The right question is not how tall he is, but what makes him larger than his own statistics.

I brought that question back to Vietnam. And I realised that here, we do not even have the statistics to surpass yet.

Where memory queues up

In July 2026, I was in Rostov, making a documentary about the Japanese national team's World Cup journey. The round-of-sixteen match against Belgium was a nightmare: Japan led two-nil for fifty-two minutes, then lost two-three because of three quick concessions. But I did not film the score. I filmed the players bowing their heads to pick up biscuit wrappers, wiping the washbasins, leaving a small note written in Russian: "Spasibo".

The contrast between the anguish on the pitch and the dignity in the dressing room kept me awake for three nights. I made a twenty-eight-minute short film called The Silent Room. It won an award at the Milan Sport Film Festival. But what I brought home was not the award. What I brought home was a belief: the silence after a defeat tells more than any goal.

In 2026, the pandemic shut down every pitch. I, a man who lives on noise, fell into crisis and deleted nine drafts of J.League films in frustration. Then one April night, I opened the sound archive from Rostov and heard a ball bouncing in an empty stadium. I began wandering Tokyo, recording fifty passages of a ball rolling through deserted streets, the creak of advertising flags in the wind, and interviewing twenty-seven residents around the Olympic Stadium about missing football. My forty-minute documentary Absence was streamed free and drew one point eight million views.

I realised that absence, too, has its own melody. And Vietnamese football, in its lower tier, is playing that melody every weekend with nobody recording it.

An empty stadium, yet memory queues long along the stands. The problem is that the queue is waiting for someone to come and open the door.

What I would propose

If I could send one proposal to the VFF and the VPF, it would not be to increase the budget, not to sign more foreign players, not to change the competition format.

It would be this: hire a team of people to sit and record every match in both tiers. Every minute. Every player. Every name. Every date of birth. Every club that player has passed through. Do it for ten years, continuously, without interruption, and open that data to the public.

The cost of this is smaller than the cost of an average foreign-player contract. But its value is far greater, because it creates the one thing money cannot buy: a memory. And memory is the foundation of everything else, of scouting, of coaching, of selling players abroad, of claiming training compensation under FIFA's mechanism, and above all, of allowing a twelve-year-old in a coastal district to see the road ahead of him.

I do not believe Vietnamese football needs more money to progress. I believe it needs more people accountable for remembering.

This afternoon, in the eleven-person stand

Back to that Saturday afternoon.

In the eighty-eighth minute, the score was still nil-nil. Number 8 received the ball in midfield, ran twenty metres, and was shoved to the ground by a defender. The referee did not blow. He got up, brushed the grass off his shorts, and ran back. The eleven-person stand was silent. The old man under the tree still sat like a milestone. The banh mi seller still waved her fan.

I wrote in my notebook: "Number 8, minute 88, fouled, referee did not blow." Then I wrote one more line: "Need to find the name."

After the match, I went out to the gate and asked a staff member. He told me number 8's name. I wrote it in my notebook, along with his date of birth, his home province, his former club. The staff member looked at me as though I were a stranger. Here, nobody asks the name of a First Division player.

But I think that if one more person asks each weekend, then after ten years there will be five hundred and twenty people who know the name. And if one of them works at the VFF, then Vietnamese football can begin to remember itself.

In an arena where a thousand voices go hoarse, I hear the sound of typing as clearly as a heartbeat. This afternoon, in the eleven-person stand, I heard the ball roll, and I thought that perhaps this is the truest sound of Vietnamese football.