Vietnamese Football: When Safety Is Worshipped as a Triumph

In the 67th minute at Thien Truong Stadium, I wrote a single line in my notebook: “The home side still has the ball, but has stopped looking for a goal.” The score was 2-1. The coach pulled off his last remaining centre-forward, sent on a holding midfielder, stretched the back line into a five-man block and dropped the defensive line to the edge of the box. Over the next twenty-three minutes, the two teams produced exactly one shot on target. When the referee blew the final whistle, the stands applauded. In the V.League, that is called character. I call it something else.

The whole world praises good defending; I only see a team hiding behind its fear.

In Vietnam that fear has its own mantra, short and passed down from the technical meeting room to the terraces: “not losing is better.” Four words, and an entire football nation runs on them.

Over 52 years in this trade I have sat in press boxes from Belgrade to Luzhniki, from Saitama to My Dinh. I was once thrown out of a press conference for asking a head coach directly whether he understood he was dismantling twenty years of attacking football. I did not bring that habit to Vietnam to repeat it. I brought it here to test how far those four words actually hold.

To judge this properly, you have to place two periods side by side. From 2026 to 2026, Vietnam under Park Hang-seo produced the densest decade of results in the country’s history: runners-up at the 2026 AFC U23 Championship in Changzhou, the 2026 AFF Cup title, two SEA Games gold medals, and a first-ever place in the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying — where Vietnam took four points, drawing 1-1 with Japan and beating China 3-1 at My Dinh.

Then came the second period. In March 2026, Vietnam lost 0-1 to Indonesia in Jakarta and 0-3 in Hanoi. Philippe Troussier’s contract was terminated. In June 2026, Vietnam were eliminated in the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, finishing behind Iraq and Indonesia in their group. Kim Sang-sik was appointed in May 2026 and, by January 2026, had led the team to the ASEAN Championship title with a 5-3 aggregate win over Thailand.

Those are the events. Here is what the league table does not say.

Vietnam’s problem is not the quality of its players; it is an incentive structure in which avoiding defeat is always more profitable than chasing victory.

Start with the domestic league, where everything is decided by contracts rather than philosophy. In the V.League, the financial gap between champions and sixth place is not large enough to create ambition. The gap between survival and relegation, however, is the gap between life and death: a lost place, lost sponsorship, lost contracts, sometimes a lost club. In that structure, a coach is sacked after five straight defeats, but almost never after three 0-0 draws. The result is a species of manager who optimises career risk rather than football quality. People do not choose safety because they believe in it. They choose safety because it is cheap.

The tactical consequence is obvious if you sit long enough in a V.League stand. A low block, four or five defenders dropping deep from the fifteenth minute. Long balls aimed at foreign strikers, because foreign strikers are the only ones licensed to make mistakes. Central midfielders signed for their shielding rather than their forward passing. Full-backs discouraged from advancing, because every advance is a moment in which an individual puts his coach’s reputation on the scales. Add all of those choices together and you get a league in which keeping the ball is treated as a dangerous act.

Football is the only thing I know where people worship safety as if it were a triumph.

The second problem runs deeper, in the pipeline. The generation that delivered Changzhou 2026 and the AFF Cup was the product of a specific investment cycle: academies run to foreign standards, with schedules, nutrition and coaching plans unlike the rest of the system. But that output was never followed by a competitive environment harsh enough to develop it. Players aged nineteen to twenty-one sit on V.League benches, because no coach will stake a relegation place on a teenager. By twenty-three, they have been labelled as having no potential left. This is slow-motion failure: there is no single event to photograph, only ten years worn away.

Then there is naturalisation. Nguyen Xuan Son, the Brazilian-born striker who took Vietnamese citizenship, scored throughout the ASEAN Championship and broke his leg in the second leg of the final. He is a good player, and I have nothing against a good player. But having to buy a finished centre-forward at twenty-seven is a confession. It admits that fifteen years of academies have not produced a number nine of the required level, and that the quick fix is preferred to the root fix. I have seen this version elsewhere. It always begins with a glamorous signature and ends in an identity crisis.

At governance level, positive changes have arrived without noise. VAR was introduced to the V.League from the 2026-24 season and, for all the arguments about added time, it has removed a meaningful share of unverifiable decisions. But technology cannot repair incentives. A referee backed by twelve cameras still works in a league where visiting teams come for a single point.

On club finance, the stratification is stark. A small group of clubs operates on budgets far beyond the rest, signing internationals and paying above market wages. Everyone else survives on local sponsorship, player sales and contract-by-contract negotiation. Several clubs that once played in the top flight have vanished entirely — the dissolution of Sai Gon FC in 2026 is the most recent example anyone following the league remembers. When budgets are unstable, tactics become a consequence rather than a choice. You cannot ask a coach to play attacking football when his contract has six months left and his chairman calls every week.

The 2026 season was erased, but I kept my bet on a second-tier club.

I tell that story because it connects directly to Vietnam. In 2026, when global football stopped, I stayed in Osaka for four months and staked my reputation on Cerezo Osaka — a club nobody bothered to mention in the predictions. I did not watch any matches, because there were none to watch. I simply observed the process: how the training plan changed, how GPS data from smart vests was used, at what intensity players trained online. When the league restarted, that team won six matches in a row. The lesson was not the result. The lesson was that a process can be assessed even without a scoreboard — and in Vietnam, process is the most neglected thing of all.

For more than a year now I have sat through morning sessions, noting every shape, every transition. Based on my experience covering matches, what worries me is not that Vietnamese teams defend badly. What worries me is that they defend without an accompanying counter-attacking plan — a defensive block with no pre-designed escape route. Safety here is not a system. It is a habit.

And this is where I could be wrong. I have to say that clearly, because it took me twenty years to learn that a contrarian view without data is just noise.

If you look at resources, pragmatism may genuinely be the optimum rather than cowardice. Vietnam face football nations with larger football populations, bigger budgets and more players abroad. In a single match, dragging the game towards chaos is a rational strategy for the weaker side. Carlos Alberto Parreira once told me in a hotel corridor that football does not reward the team that plays most beautifully, it rewards the team that errs least. Vietnam won the 2026 ASEAN Championship with exactly that formula, and that title was real, not a gift.

What I object to is not pragmatism in a given match. What I object to is turning it into a permanent identity — because an identity cannot be argued with. A tactic can be revised after a defeat. An identity cannot.

A word on data limits. Expected goals and passes allowed per defensive action are not published openly in the V.League. Much of what I have written rests on direct observation and some data imported from international providers. If somebody with more detailed data can show that the leading V.League clubs are generating far more dangerous chances than I describe, I will amend this piece, and I will say plainly that I was wrong.

What I want to leave behind is not a conclusion but a test. Over the next eighteen months, count two things. First, the number of players under 21 who start at least ten V.League matches. Second, the number of matches a Vietnamese club wins in continental competition by holding more possession than its opponent. If both numbers rise together, I am wrong and this football nation is moving in a way I cannot see. If both stay flat, then the four words “not losing is better” are still sitting in the coach’s chair, and they will sit there for another decade.

When I was thrown out of the press conference in Tokyo, my question stayed on the table.

In Hanoi I have not been thrown out yet. But I have already put the question on the table, and it is simple: if a football nation teaches its players that not losing is better, when will it teach anyone how to win?

People ask why, at 68, I still write as if the apocalypse is due. I just smile.