Vietnamese Football After the 2026 ASEAN Title: Victory and the Cracks That Have Not Healed

Nguyễn Xuân Son lay on the stretcher, both hands clutching his right ankle. The second leg of the 2026 ASEAN Championship final at Rajamangala Stadium, Bangkok, on the evening of 5 January 2026, had not yet passed half of the first half. Minutes earlier, the 27-year-old naturalised striker had just completed his seventh goal of the tournament, and tens of thousands of Vietnamese fans in the stands had dreamed of a perfect night. Then the scream came, and the match changed colour. I was sitting about forty metres from the touchline and managed to write one short line in my notebook: “The pitch does not give anyone a complete ending.” Vietnam still won 3-2, won 5-3 on aggregate and lifted the trophy. But in the post-match press room, no one truly smiled. That is the image I keep most when I look back at Vietnamese football in the current cycle. The national team had just won Southeast Asia's title for the third time in its history, after 2026 and 2026, yet that journey unfolded amid a turbulent coaching transition. Philippe Troussier left in 2026 after a run of disappointing results; Kim Sang-sik took over and rebuilt the team from both a physical and a psychological foundation. Behind the trophy is a V.League 1 of fourteen clubs, modest transfer spending compared with Thailand or Indonesia, and a youth system producing names worth waiting for. The trophy hides the cracks; the writer's job is to count them. Start with tactics. Kim Sang-sik did not bring a revolution; he brought an admission. He accepted that Vietnam are not yet good enough to impose themselves on peers at continental level, so the team sits deep, compresses space and lives on transitions. A back three with two wing-backs as the pivot helps Vietnam keep width while still having enough bodies in the box when attacking. The final anchor is always a striker who can hold the ball up and finish — a role Xuân Son performs so well that the whole system depends on him. Look at the V.League and I see another worry. Wingers are increasingly coached to drift inside, becoming auxiliary forwards rather than men who hold the flank. The traditional winger, the one who lives to dribble down the touchline and cross, is being wrongly erased. That homogenisation strips Vietnamese football of its contrast, and against well-organised Asian defences the team lacks a genuine way to open up the flanks. “The pitch is a page, and every run is an unfinished poem” — but if every poem follows the same metre, the page turns flat. On finance and transfers, the reality is harsh. Most V.League clubs live on funding from their parent companies and modest broadcasting money; a few, such as Thép Xanh Nam Định or Công An Hà Nội, have slightly larger budgets than the rest. The trend of naturalising foreign players, with Xuân Son as its symbol, solves the immediate problem of squad quality but raises a long-term question about developing domestic strikers. “The transfer market does not sell players; it sells framed dreams” — and in the V.League those dreams are usually framed by budgets. The Southeast Asian title pushes fan expectations very high. Pressure falls on Kim Sang-sik and the key players at every following tournament, while the gap between the V.League and Asia's leading domestic leagues remains wide. Good results sometimes mask the process: many Vietnam wins come from moments of individual brilliance rather than from a durable tactical structure. On rules, VAR appeared in the V.League from 2026 and immediately became a flashpoint. I still hold my old view: VAR does not reduce controversy; it merely moves controversy from the pitch into the review room and the grey areas of the law. An offside decision that takes three minutes to confirm does not calm the stands; it only puts belief under strain for longer. For a league still young in refereeing infrastructure, this is an unsolved problem. In the dressing room, Kim Sang-sik is credited with his ability to heal. He arrived after a period when the team had lost belief, and restoring places to veterans who had been pushed aside was a notable management decision. A team plays on collective emotion, and that emotion is not on the tactics board. The biggest risk lies in dependency. When Xuân Son was injured, Vietnam's attack revealed a gap no one could fill in the short term. Add to that a packed calendar across the V.League, the national team and continental cups that leaves key players exhausted, while the young generation is not given enough chances to step up. The game's transmission chain also needs to be faced squarely. Academies such as Hoàng Anh Gia Lai - JMG, PVF and Viettel have produced many internationals, but the outlet in the V.League is not wide enough to keep talent. The flow from academy to first team is blocked, and that is why many young players choose to go abroad or retire early. “Generation after generation, yet the ball keeps rolling like a bottomless longing” — except that in Vietnam, that longing sometimes rolls across a gap that has not been filled. This is where I want to speak against the majority. People celebrate the title as a milestone, but I see it as a mirror more than a door. Vietnamese football is good at winning specific matches and not yet good at building a playing identity that can repeat across generations. Counter-attacking pragmatism brings trophies, but without a philosophy that runs through the coaching pipeline, every coaching cycle is another demolition and rebuild. What is lost is not points but the collective memory of how we play. “A scar is not ugly; it is a map of the matches already played” — and this football nation carries quite a few scars that have not yet been read as a map. The trophy stays in the cabinet, but the question stays in the mind. When Xuân Son recovers and returns, will Vietnam dare to build a game that no longer depends on one pair of feet? I write these lines not to deny the victory, but to keep it from being forgotten by its own joy.