The Forgotten Ones in the Middle of a V.League Season: Notes from Lach Tray

Hai Phong, late August. Sea wind blows along Lach Tray stadium, carrying the salty taste of the sea and the smell of freshly cut grass. After training, the stands are empty, and only one figure remains on the substitutes' bench, bending down to take off his boots one by one, tapping the two heels together to let the dirt fall. He has just been told he will move to a lower-division team on loan, after a whole season in which he played just forty-seven minutes.

I sit thirty metres away, my notebook soaked with sweat. Nineteen years in this profession, and I have learned one thing: the decisive moments of Vietnamese football rarely happen inside the penalty box. They happen here, on the boundary between the pitch and the dressing room, where a twenty-one-year-old player is trying to understand why his path has suddenly turned sideways.

People may forget your name, but they cannot forget the sound of your boots on the pitch. I first wrote that line years ago, and with every passing season, it becomes true one more time.

Vietnamese football is in the middle of an annual season. This is a time when everything unfolds slowly and quietly: the table is not yet long enough to draw conclusions, form is not yet a large enough sample to trust, and the arguments still lie beneath the surface. Fans follow every round, but what they are really watching is not the three points, but the pulse of a collective trying to find itself again.

V.League 1 has fourteen teams. Below it lies V.League 2, then the Second Division, then a youth system stretching from U11 to U21. It is a multi-tiered machine, and each tier operates by its own logic. The top tier fights for the title and a continental cup place. The middle tier fights for survival. The bottom tier fights for a promotion place, and above all, for the chance to be seen.

I go to the stadium not to watch who scores, but to watch who gets back up after a missed shot. For an observer of training grounds like me, what is worth recording does not lie in the post or the crossbar, but in the small movements between the two halves, in the way a substitute warms up knowing he is unlikely to get on, in the way a captain squeezes the shoulder of a young teammate after a failed touch.

The season machine runs on money, on fitness and on belief. Over many years of watching, I have realised that Vietnamese football has a rarely discussed trait: its dependence on short cycles. A team can flourish in the first seven rounds, then collapse in three mid-season rounds, then revive during the run-in. Fans are used to that rhythm. But those inside never get used to the price that must be paid.

The earliest signal of a season is not in the league table, but in how a team handles a round in which it has nothing to win but its own self-respect. That is the kind of signal no statistical table fully records, and it is the kind of signal I spend most of my working life tracking.

The flow of talent in Vietnamese football begins in the academies. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai Football Academy, founded in 2026 on a model of cooperation with a French youth-training organisation, was once seen as the template. Several generations of players matured there, went on to the national team and played abroad. But behind the names that get mentioned lies a deeper tier: hundreds of young players enter the system each year, and only a very small fraction of them survive in V.League 1.

I once spent three months sitting at the fence of a training ground to record how a twenty-one-year-old midfielder packed up his belongings after his final session. He had played only forty-seven minutes all season. There was no farewell ceremony, no press release, no line of news. There was only a bag, a pair of old boots and a hug from a familiar security guard. I wrote three thousand two hundred words about him, and that article helped him find a new home. But I always ask myself: how many others are there like him, whom nobody writes about?

The forgotten ones are not an abstract concept. They are the men in the back row of the team bus, the men who train before the team trains, the men who stay after the team has gone. They are the men whose contracts can end at any moment, and when they end, nobody notices.

Every transfer window is a parting. Those who stay are quieter than those who leave. That is what I have learned across many seasons, as the domestic transfer market operates like a chain of decisions made in silence. A player can be moved on in a ten-minute phone call. A foreign-player slot can be settled in a single evening, and a domestic player can be pushed to the margins after just one poor match.

The V.League transfer market has two clear tiers. The upper tier is the arms race among the big clubs, where deals are negotiated with figures that force newspapers to give up their front pages. The lower tier is where young players and lesser-known players are exchanged, loaned, or simply released. What is worth noting is that the true value of Vietnamese football lies more in the lower tier than the upper one. Small clubs, on limited budgets, are forced to work more scientifically: they hunt for players in the provinces, they retrain those discarded elsewhere, and sometimes they build squads with a clearer identity than the wealthy clubs.

On a recent reporting trip, I sat in the technical area of a mid-table club. The head coach opened his notebook, drew a diagram of circles and arrows, then said something I recorded word for word: We do not have the money to buy good players, so we have to create a system that makes players better. That is a philosophy, and it is also a truth about Vietnamese football that few are willing to look at directly.

Tactically, the annual season usually reveals an interesting gap. The leading clubs tend to dominate possession and organise a high press. The mid-table and bottom clubs choose a counter-attacking style, with a low block and quick transitions. The gap between the two groups is not only a gap in player quality, but also a gap in the ability to sustain intensity across ninety minutes.

Based on my experience watching matches, one notable indicator is the number of successful presses in the opponent's half during the first twenty minutes of the second half. Teams with a good fitness base tend to raise this figure after the break, when opponents begin to tire. Conversely, thin squads tend to drop off sharply, and that is when goals are conceded. I have watched many matches in which the result was decided not by technique, but by the ability to endure.

What is interesting is that Vietnamese clubs are paying more and more attention to data. Some clubs have hired analysts, installed camera systems to track player movement, and built predictive models. But data is only valuable when it is read correctly. A figure for completed passes does not say whether that pass opened up a chance. A figure for distance covered does not say whether that player ran with purpose or simply chased the ball.

This is where I want to return to the story at Lach Tray. The young player I observed had fitness metrics among the best in the squad. He ran a lot, contested a lot, and was always in the right position during tactical sessions. But he still did not get on the pitch. When I asked the coaching staff, the answer was very simple: he is not ripe enough. That word, ripe, is a concept that cannot be measured by any indicator. It lies in the ability to make a decision in an instant, in composure under pressure, in the ability to endure the silences of a career.

The dressing room does not lie. It is only quiet enough for you to hear the truth. Over many years sitting in the dressing-room corridor after every session, I learned that the atmosphere of a team is not found in its victories. It is found on Wednesday afternoons, when the team has just lost a match it should have won, when the laughter disappears and everyone can only hear the sound of the taps. That is when a team truly reveals itself.

In Hai Phong, I once followed a veteran goalkeeper through the hardest period of his career. He tore a ligament, and because he played in an atmosphere without spectators, he slipped into mild depression. I asked the coaching staff to let me talk with him by video for fifteen consecutive sessions, without filming, only listening and taking notes. The article about him, headlined around the idea of a cry with no audience, helped him receive thousands of messages of encouragement. The club then decided to extend his contract by one more year. Lach Tray stands were empty, yet the goal still held the shadow of a goalkeeper sitting and waiting.

That story taught me something about Vietnamese football: the strength of a team lies not only in its starting players, but also in how it treats those who do not get on the pitch. A team that knows how to keep people during hard times usually has a more sustainable foundation than a team that only buys and sells. That is a kind of strength that never appears on the transfer list, but appears in the final months of a season, when everything becomes harsh.

The pressure of the annual season is unevenly distributed. In the early phase, the big clubs feel the pressure to win to keep pace with the leading group. In the middle phase, the bottom group begins to feel the chill of the relegation fight. And in the final phase, every match becomes a miniature final, in which a single goal can decide the fate of an entire club, of dozens of staff, and of thousands of fans.

I once witnessed a team secure survival on the final matchday. The whole stadium erupted, but what I remember most is the image of a substitute running onto the pitch, kneeling in the middle of the circle, and crying. He did not score. He did not even come on in that match. But he had stayed all season, training every day, enduring the silence of the bench. That victory was his, in a way that nobody recorded.

Now I come to the part I want to spend the most time on: the angle that runs counter to the usual way of looking at Vietnamese football.

The common view holds that the problem of Vietnamese football lies in money, in the quality of youth development, in infrastructure, or in the vision of those who run it. All of that is true, to some degree. But there is a blind spot that almost nobody notices: Vietnamese football does not lack talent. Vietnamese football lacks a mechanism to keep and develop the talent that is not outstanding.

A young player praised from the age of fifteen will have protectors. He has an agent, media coverage, fans. But a young player of moderate talent, someone who could become a pillar of a mid-table club if given the right opportunity at the right time, has nobody to protect him. He is pushed down to a lower division, loaned out again and again, and gradually disappears from the football map. The number of such players is greater than the number of stars, and that is the true resource of Vietnamese football.

The counter-intuitive point is this: focusing on stars and expensive deals may be harming Vietnamese football more than helping it. When resources are concentrated in a few big clubs, the rest of the system is starved. When the media only cares about names that are already famous, players who are not yet famous have no incentive to develop. When a young player believes there is only one path to success, he gives up when that path closes.

Moscow has snow, Hai Phong has sea wind. Football brings both into the same story. I once met, in a fan zone abroad, an older man from Kien An who had walked hundreds of kilometres to cheer for the national team, carrying an old flag. He could not speak English, and I spent two days telling his story to the world. What I learned from him is this: Vietnamese football does not lack people willing to sacrifice. It only lacks mechanisms to recognise that sacrifice.

Another angle worth reflecting on: provincial clubs are quietly becoming the nursery for players who have been overlooked. Without big budgets, they are forced to look for players in places the big clubs do not look. They build a style of play based on cohesion rather than on outstanding individuals. And sometimes, it is precisely these clubs that produce pillars for the national team. That is the paradox: the clubs with the least money are the ones that invest most in people.

Against that backdrop, the role of observers like me becomes more important than ever. Not because we can change the system, but because we can record what the system forgets. An article about a player about to be forgotten may not change the course of a season, but it can change the fate of a single person. And in football, where everything is measured in goals and points, changing the fate of a single person is also a way of scoring.

Wherever there is the sound of a ball rolling, there is someone keeping the rhythm. I am only the listener. I listen to the sound of boots on the training pitch, to the sigh in the dressing room, to the burst of laughter in the stands, and to the silence of a player who knows he will not get on. Those sounds never appear in any data report, but they are the true pulse of Vietnamese football.

Looking ahead, there are a few internal signals that I believe will shape the rest of the season. First, clubs are gradually recognising the value of rotating their squads during a dense fixture period. The clubs that manage the fitness of their key men will have a big advantage in the run-in. Second, this year's relegation fight may be decided not by direct head-to-head matches, but by the games in which the bottom clubs take points off the strong ones. Third, and perhaps most importantly, clubs are starting to pay more attention to players' mental health, an aspect Vietnamese football overlooked for many years.

I do not believe everything will change in a single season. But I believe real change always begins in the smallest places. A player kept rather than pushed away. A club choosing to build rather than to buy. An article about someone nobody noticed. Those small things, added together, can create a different kind of football.

Back at Lach Tray that afternoon. The young player finally stood up, picked up his bag, and walked off the pitch. He did not look back. I sat for a while longer, listening to the sea wind blowing through the empty goal, and wondered whether he would ever return. Vietnamese football has thousands of stories like that, and each season adds new ones. And the rhythm keeper has only one job: to record them, so that at least once, people do not forget.

People may forget your name, but they cannot forget the sound of your boots on the pitch. That sound still echoes in my head, even when the stadium is empty, even when the season has closed, even when that name no longer appears on any list. Because football, in the end, is not a game of numbers. It is a game of people, and the forgotten ones are always the most honest storytellers.

I will keep going to the stadium every afternoon, sitting at the fence, recording every detail. Not to find a new star, but to make sure that those left behind are not forgotten. Vietnamese football is changing, slowly but surely, and the most important changes always begin in the places few are willing to look. The next signal will not come from a blockbuster signing. It will come from a quiet training session, where some young player is still trying, still waiting for his chance.