Vietnamese Football at a New Threshold: From the Pitch to the Memories That Must Be Preserved

I have lived with football for nearly seven decades, and one thing I have learned: every match is not just a match. It is a broken jewel, where people find both joy and pain in the same moment. Today, looking back at Vietnamese football, I find myself standing at a new threshold — not a threshold of achievement, but a threshold of memory. I remember the early years of the V.League, when Vietnamese pitches were still rough and the cheers still pure. Back then, football was an oral story, passed from one generation to the next. Now, as the league has become an industry with numbers and contracts, I wonder: what have we lost along the way? One afternoon in Nagoya, I listened to old recordings of Vietnam national team matches. The commentator's voice rang out like a poem, and I realized that Vietnamese football has always had its own poetic quality — the poetry of those who learned to overcome adversity with their own feet and hearts. But that poetry is being diluted by statistics. I do not oppose data — I have used it throughout my career. But I believe every move on the pitch has a heart beating, and that heart cannot be measured by metrics. When a player runs 12 km in a match, that number does not tell you why he ran — for the team, for his family, or for a promise he made to himself. I keep those fourteen seconds as a broken jewel. Fourteen seconds of the match between Japan and Belgium at the 2026 World Cup, when a nation's dream shattered in a single counterattack. I did not read the score. I only spoke of cherry blossoms blooming amid falling snow. And I realized that, in Vietnamese football, there are moments like that — moments when people don't need to remember the score, only the feeling of standing up after a fall. What I want to say here is this: Vietnamese football stands before a great opportunity. Not an opportunity to win a championship, but an opportunity to redefine how we remember it. We can choose to record numbers, or we can choose to record stories. And I believe that, if we learn to preserve those stories, Vietnamese football will become a living archive — where every match is a page of history, every player a character, and every spectator a reader. I once read 14 letters continuously for 3 hours, spending an entire pandemic season listening to individual voices from empty stands. And I learned that, in football, no story is too small. Every letter sent to an empty stand is a piece of memory that needs to be preserved. Football reads every line. So, when I look toward the future of Vietnamese football, I do not look at the standings. I look at what we will leave for the next generation. Will they remember these matches as a list of results, or as an oral epic? I believe the answer lies in how we tell stories today. The pitch does not need a poet, but the poet needs the pitch. And I, a poet of the pitch, believe Vietnamese football needs storytellers — people who know that every move has a heart beating, and every heart has a story worth hearing. That is how we will preserve memory, not through numbers, but through voices rising from the stands. Nagoya still echoes every time I touch the old microphone. And I believe that, in Vietnam, there are old microphones waiting to be touched — so that the stories of Vietnamese pitches can be told in their own voices. That is what I wish for, not for myself, but for the generations that will come after.