Vietnamese Women's Football After the 2026 World Cup: The Spotlight Arrived Before the Foundation

On the night of January 5, 2026, Viet Tri Stadium was full to the last seat. Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 in the second leg, 5-3 on aggregate, and lifted the ASEAN Cup. Nguyen Xuan Son scored twice and then went down in the 32nd minute with a broken leg, and for a few seconds the whole stand went silent. That night, millions of Vietnamese people shouted on the same beat.

I stayed in the studio after we went off air, and only one other afternoon kept coming back to me. July 22, 2026, Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand. The Vietnam women's national team lining up for the anthem against the United States. The same red flag with a yellow star. The same national anthem. The same players in red shirts.

But if you counted the Vietnamese reporters in that stand, you would not need both hands.

It was the first match Vietnam's women had ever played at a World Cup finals. For a great many fans back home, it was also the first time they had to check a map to work out which time zone their team was playing in.

After more than thirty years behind a microphone, this is what I have learned: sport is not only the scoreline.

A TICKET THAT DID NOT COME FROM LUCK

In February 2026, at the inter-confederation play-off tournament held in New Zealand, coach Mai Duc Chung's side beat Thailand 2-0 and Chinese Taipei 2-1. Three teams, one place, and Vietnam took all six points. There was no lucky draw here. Just two matches in a handful of days, away from home, with a squad whose average age had already passed twenty-nine.

That was the peak of a generation. Huynh Nhu, Chuong Thi Kieu, Nguyen Thi Tuyet Dung, Tran Thi Thuy Trang, goalkeeper Tran Thi Kim Thanh — most of them born between 2026 and 2026. They had gone through several SEA Games, several Asian qualifiers, a few coaching changes, and a few moments when they nearly quit because football did not pay enough to live on.

In July 2026 they were in New Zealand. Three group matches: a 3-0 defeat to the United States, a 2-0 defeat to Portugal, a defeat to the Netherlands, and not a single goal scored.

That is a fact that needs no decorating. It also needs no shame.

WHAT THE 2026 WORLD CUP ACTUALLY SAID

If you only look at the scoreboard, you will conclude that Vietnam's women were comprehensively outclassed. If you look at how the team actually played, the picture is far more complicated.

Against the United States, Portugal and the Netherlands, the coaching staff chose a deep defensive block, usually five at the back, with the two midfield lines compressed into a horizontal band in front of the penalty area. The idea was clear: cede territory, shut the central corridor, force the opponent wide, then wait to counter into tight space.

That was a rational choice given the visible gap in physicality and speed of ball circulation. But it only works when a team can hold the ball long enough to breathe. At World Cup level, every time you win the ball back, the opponent is on you within two or three seconds. Vietnam's midfield had no time to switch from defence to attack, and the ball was usually cleared long and lost immediately.

What interested me most was not the number of goals conceded. It was the number of times the team managed to string together three consecutive passes. The gap between Vietnamese women's football and the world's top twenty is the ability to keep the ball under pressure, not the spirit.

One detail rarely mentioned: in all three matches, Vietnam's defence faced a far higher volume of shots than in any match at continental level. Goalkeeper Tran Thi Kim Thanh and the back line did exactly what was asked of them. The problem was not them. The problem was that a defence can only absorb so much, and that limit drops very fast when the lines ahead cannot keep the ball.

Going the other way, when they did win possession, there was essentially one attacking option: find Huynh Nhu up front and hope she could hold the ball long enough for teammates to join. With a striker of her calibre, that is not a bad option. But it also means that once Huynh Nhu is cut off from midfield, the team has almost no other route forward. Dependence on one individual is not that individual's fault. It is the fault of a system that has not produced a replacement.

And it needs to be said plainly: spirit is something we have in surplus. What is missing is high-quality training time, enough top-level matches each year, a strength and conditioning room, a nutritionist, and a data analysis unit working all year round.

In more than forty years of watching football, I have learned that class gaps are rarely created on matchday. They are created in training sessions nobody films.

SEVEN TEAMS, ONE LOOP

Let us talk about the stage Vietnamese women's players actually live on every week.

The Vietnamese women's national championship has hovered for years between seven and eight teams: Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Than Khoang San Vietnam, Phong Phu Ha Nam, Thai Nguyen T&T, Son La, plus a few youth sides. A full season has fewer matches than half a men's V.League 1 campaign. Match density is low, breaks are long, and very few games fill a stand.

What matters is that most players in these teams are not professionals in the full sense. They train three or four sessions a week, sometimes after work. A men's V.League 1 player, by contrast, trains twice a day, with his own doctor and his own recovery specialist. That gap is not a gap between genders. It is a gap in investment.

Most women's players in the domestic league earn a few million dong a month, plus irregular support from their parent institution. Many hold second jobs: coaching children, selling online, working at sports centres. Some have had to borrow from teammates to cover a family member's hospital bills.

One week before facing the United States at Eden Park, they were ordinary workers in the football economy. One week later, they were national symbols.

I have sat through enough dressing-room interviews to understand that the distance between those two states is not closed by a round of applause.

WHEN ONE TEAM WINS ALMOST EVERYTHING

For many seasons the women's national title has effectively been decided before a ball was kicked. Ho Chi Minh City hold most of the national team squad plus a few foreign players, and usually finish the season with a large points margin. The rest of the league is a race between youth sides and teams that treat sport as a revenue source.

That concentration has an upside: it produces a team strong enough to represent Vietnam on the continental stage, and it gives internationals a more stable training environment than the rest have. But it also produces a familiar problem: when one team wins nearly everything, most matches lose their competitive edge, and young players at weaker clubs never get to test themselves against peers of their own level.

A league is only healthy when at least four teams can beat each other in any given round. Vietnamese women's football does not have that yet.

THE GOLDEN GENERATION AND THE SUCCESSION GAP

In August 2026, Huynh Nhu left Vietnam for Portugal to join Lank FC, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to play professionally in Europe. Her first goals in the Portuguese league did not make the front page of a single major sports newspaper at home.

That milestone is far bigger than the coverage it received. A striker from Tra Vinh, at twenty-eight, moved to a country she did not know, learned a new language, ate new food, and played in a league with far higher speed and tactical discipline than the one at home.

But an individual milestone does not automatically become a systemic one. Weighed against women's football nations in the region, Vietnam still lacks a sufficiently deep next generation to replace the core group born between 2026 and 2026. A few young faces have appeared: Thanh Nha with her speed and movement, Vu Thi Hoa with her physicality, and a handful of new names in defence. But filling the space left by Huynh Nhu, Chuong Thi Kieu or Tuyet Dung takes more than a few isolated individuals.

It takes a youth development system with a regular fixture calendar. It takes big academies devoting real capacity to women's football, not a line item in an annual report. It takes sports scholarships so that parents do not have to choose between letting their daughter play and letting their daughter study.

ON A MEN'S FOOTBALL FESTIVAL, I QUIETLY SLIP WOMEN'S RECORDS INTO EVERY BULLETIN

There is a habit I have kept for years, even when it got me scolded.

In live coverage of major men's tournaments, I always look for a small gap to slip in one line about women's football. A record, a qualifying win, a player who has just signed abroad, a youth tournament that has just finished. Not long. A few seconds. But enough for ordinary viewers, people who would never turn on a women's sports channel, to register by accident that women's football is still happening.

In 2026, while commentating on World Cup group-stage matches in Russia, I put on air a note about a heavy qualifying win by the Vietnam women's team, a match almost no viewer knew about. I received a wave of criticism saying I was diluting the programme. I ran a quick poll straight afterwards. Most respondents said they wanted more women's sport content, as long as it was told properly.

When the old wave recedes, I step onto the new platform — the voice is still my own.

A CONTRARIAN VIEW: COMMERCIAL VALUE DOES NOT MOVE WITH COMPETITIVE VALUE

This is where I want to say something many people in the industry do not like hearing.

After the 2026 World Cup, Vietnamese women's football received an unprecedented amount of attention. More sponsors called. More articles were written. But that attention mostly flowed into image, into emotion, into stories of overcoming hardship — not into the structure underneath: player wages, number of matches, pitch quality, the number of licensed coaches.

There is a quiet belief that once you are on television often enough, women's football will improve on its own. I do not believe it. Television can create one brilliant week. It cannot create a decade of development.

A second belief deserves a question mark: that being present at a World Cup means being at the same level as the world. It does not. Qualifying and competing are two different things, and the distance between them is the entire remaining workload.

A third belief, and the most dangerous: that women's football should copy the men's model. Vietnamese men's football has problems of its own — contracts too expensive for the quality delivered, investment chasing brand image. Copying that model wholesale into women's football is not progress. It is simply replicating a mistake in a game that has not yet made it.

What Vietnamese women's football needs is not a copy. It needs a foundation: a dense enough fixture calendar, wages you can live on, patient youth development, and a supporter base built slowly.

WHAT IS CHANGING

Vietnamese women's football is not standing still. Asian qualifiers are being streamed more often. A few young players have gone abroad. School football sessions for girls are appearing in the big cities. And the dressing-room conversations I ran during the pandemic years showed something simple: when women players are handed a microphone, they tell stories no scoreline bulletin can hold.

At fifty-six, I still ask one question: where are women scoring in this game?

The answer is not at Eden Park. It is on a small training pitch in Son La, in a girls' football class on a Saturday afternoon, in a sponsorship contract someone agrees to sign for three years instead of three months.