The Unseen Training Nights: Why V.League Still Cannot Raise Its Next Generation

In the 78th minute, from stand B of a stadium with more than twenty thousand seats, I heard someone shout a name. It was not the name of the man who had just scored. It was the name of a nineteen-year-old pulling off his windbreaker by the touchline, about to come on. He ran into the right channel, touched the ball for the first time after eleven seconds, and passed it backwards. Safe. Nobody remembers.

I wrote exactly one line in my notebook: "78th minute, the boy came on, nobody knows his name."

My trade is writing match reports. Fifty-one years with a pen have taught me that what I actually do is retell destinies that never had time to happen. I write the report, but I tell the destinies. That moment in the 78th minute weighs more on me than any transfer deal of this season.

Context: a football nation looking for its heirs

About seven years ago, Vietnamese football lived inside a long dream. The U23 team reached the final of the Asian championship in 2026 under coach Park Hang-seo, the senior national team won the AFF Cup the same year, then came two consecutive SEA Games gold medals. The names back then were very young: Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Van Toan, Nguyen Tien Linh, later Nguyen Hoang Duc. A whole generation stepped out at once, and a whole country believed that was the beginning.

Looking back now, it may well have been the peak.

Not because that generation got worse. Because behind them, the stream thinned out. In the registration lists of V.League clubs this season, the number of players born after 2026 who play regularly can be counted on the fingers of one hand. A few start matches, most sit on the bench, and a fair number only come on once the game is already settled. This is where I want to linger, because it never shows up in the table.

What happens at seventeen

The HAGL JMG Academy opened in 2026 with a first intake of more than thirty boys. Those children were fed, schooled and trained six days a week for nearly a decade. When they entered the V.League, people called them the golden generation. What is rarely said: most academies in Vietnam have no such model. They have a pitch, a coach, a few youth tournaments, and the pressure of results at U17 and U19 level.

And there, something snaps.

I have watched many U19 matches over the years. The typical rhythm: long balls, duels, tactical fouls, one goal ahead and then dropping deep. A seventeen-year-old with good technique is usually withdrawn on the 60th minute to make room for a taller, stronger, harder-running boy. Young Vietnamese coaches do not necessarily like it. They are forced to like it, because their evaluation metric is points, and points come from not losing.

The sixty-million-pound storm is only wind passing through; what remains are the quiet nights of training. There is no sixty million pounds here. But there are exactly those nights, and they are being cut short.

Technique traded for physicality, and the bill arrives late

A modern attacking player in the V.League needs three things: the ability to receive under pressure, the decision in about a second and a half, and the stamina to repeat that fifteen times a match. The first two belong to technique and perception, built between the ages of eight and fifteen. The third can be constructed at eighteen or twenty.

In Vietnam, that order is reversed. Training centres push sessions towards endurance running, sprint work and strength work very early. Ten years later, the product is a player who runs without tiring but handles the ball inside the box half a beat late. In football, half a beat is everything.

I do not need a data table to see this. Put two matches side by side: a national U19 game and a V.League game. Different tempo, but almost identical way of playing. That is the problem.

I have a habit: every season I count the minutes Vietnamese players under twenty-one get in the V.League. This season, the total is shorter than last. There is no need for minute-by-minute precision to see the direction. What matters is where it is heading.

The money storm and where young players stand

Every season, V.League clubs spend heavily on foreign strikers. A South American forward can score fifteen goals and keep a team from relegation. A nineteen-year-old Vietnamese can be better overall, but he will score three. Which number gets remembered? The goals.

Based on my experience watching these matches, there is something I have learned about patience: it is always granted to foreigners first. A foreign striker who plays nine games without scoring still gets the tenth. A young local who plays three without scoring returns to the bench. This asymmetry appears in no rulebook, yet it exists at every club.

People blame money. Money is part of it. But money is only the consequence of a choice: taking the certain thing in three months instead of the possible thing in three years.

The blind spot: the problem is not the players, it is the decision-makers

This is where I disagree with the majority.

Debates about Vietnamese youth football usually circle around the players: this one lacks hunger, that one will not suffer, another only cares about social media. I see something else. I see a system in which decision-makers are never questioned. How long is the technical director of an average V.League club in post? The head coach? A development cycle needs ten years. A coach's contract usually lasts one year, two at most. Nobody is accountable for year ten.

So every decision is short. Every decision is right for one man and wrong for a generation.

And here is the real blind spot: we are trying to export players far too early instead of keeping them long enough to become good. A twenty-year-old going abroad with fifteen V.League matches behind him is merchandise, not yet a player. Japan and South Korea send players abroad when they have already played hundreds of professional matches. The difference is not talent, it is the age of maturity.

Esports is a mirror held up to modern football: faster, younger, and lonelier. Eighteen-year-olds are pushed onto the big stage before they have learned how to lose. Vietnamese football is walking that same road, only a few years behind.

This generation passes on to the next, not technique, but the way you stand up after conceding. If the previous generation handed down a false lesson, that leaving early is success, then what we passed on was haste, not craft.

One supporter's story

That night, after the match, I stood at the stadium gate talking to a man named Hung, a supporter of more than forty years. He said something I copied down word for word: "I do not need my team to be champions. I need to know that the grandchild watching this match today will grow up with a team to watch."

I wrote two thousand words about the transfer market that week, and this sentence is still in my notebook. The boy who once ran on a wire of silk is now the guide for new dreams. But only if someone is still standing at the stadium gate, waiting.

The ball does not remember who kicked it, only the emotions gathered around it. After this season there will be more contracts, more signatures, more promises. There will again be young players coming on in the 78th minute whose names nobody remembers.

The work to be done is not buying another striker. It is letting a U17 coach lose three matches in a row without losing his job, and letting a nineteen-year-old play ninety minutes without scoring. Those things do not make headlines. They make the next ten years.

If this season ends and I have written only one line about the boy in the 78th minute, I will still write. I write the report. But I tell the destinies, including the ones that never had time to begin.