Winter 2026: The Rhythm of Footsteps on Vietnamese Football's Training Grounds

Hanoi, December 2026.

At half past five in the morning, the training ground hidden behind a bamboo grove on the city's outskirts was still wrapped in mist. Eighteen players lined up in two rows, their breath rising as white smoke. The leather ball, worn and patched in three places, rolled over a clay pitch softened by the previous night's drizzle. No stands. No television cameras. Not a single advertising board. Only a middle-aged man stood on the touchline, a faded notebook in his hand, recording every step his students took.

I stood about two metres from the touchline — the distance many would call meaningless, for there were no seats, no shelter, nothing but mud and the sound of breathing. But standing long enough at that distance, one begins to hear what the stands never tell: the rhythm of footsteps.

Footsteps on the pitch do not lie — you only have to stand on the touchline long enough.

2026 was the third year of the renovation drive launched at the Sixth Party Congress in late 2026. The country still bore the weight of ration coupons, subsidies and scarcity. Football was no exception. The national championship had been held regularly since 2026, but most pitches were still clay, and a club's budget was often just enough to cover the players' meals.

The national team rarely had the chance to travel abroad. After the political upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, sporting exchanges with Southeast Asia had all but broken down. Every trip away was an event talked about for months. In that void, Vietnamese football grew on its own strength: domestic tournaments, friendlies between units, and early-morning sessions like the one I was watching.

Names such as The Cong, Cang Sai Gon or Song Lam Nghe An were already familiar to fans. But behind each name lay a notebook, a whistle, a few balls and eighteen people.

That session lasted two hours. No gym, no motion-analysis equipment, no nutritionist.

What I wrote in my notebook was not beautiful play. It was rhythm. One midfielder ran eleven laps in the endurance drill, each lap taking exactly 52 seconds in the first half and 55 in the second — the mark of a base built on dykes and slopes rather than machines. A centre-back in the lateral-movement drill always planted his standing foot half a step toward the left flank, a habit a sharp striker could exploit. Those notes appeared in no federation report. They existed only for someone who had stood on the touchline long enough.

In the afternoon the team played a friendly against a neighbouring unit. A few hundred villagers gathered behind the fence. An elderly woman brought a pot of boiled sweet potatoes. A group of young men cheered whenever the home side's left wing pushed forward. No tickets, no turnstiles. Just a community watching its neighbours run on clay.

An empty ground, full hearts — that year I understood why I sat where I did.

I also picked up another habit in those sessions: writing down each player's name the moment I heard it, with its pronunciation and hometown. Three times getting a player's name wrong taught me to read a person before I write. A name is the first thing a person has the right to have written correctly, even when an entire football culture cannot yet boast a complete directory.

Outsiders looking at Vietnamese football in 2026 usually saw a grey picture. Clay pitches, patched balls, no international tournaments, no stars. Many concluded the game was asleep, that isolation had worn it down. That conclusion is convenient, but it misses one thing: under conditions of scarcity, people are forced to reinvent how the game is played.

Without artificial turf, players learned to control the ball on uneven ground — a skill many modern football cultures now spend years teaching their youngsters. Without a gym, they ran the dykes, climbed the slopes, and built endurance. Isolation took away the chance to test themselves, but left something else behind: self-reliance. That is why, when the doors of exchange reopened in the 1990s, Vietnamese football did not step out from zero.

That winter, I left the training ground as the afternoon wore on. The man with the notebook was still there, finishing the last lap of his students. Thirty years from then, when Vietnamese football stands on bigger stages, will anyone still remember the misty mornings when an entire football culture learned to hold its ground on clay?