Vietnam's youth football and the trap of results: teaching how to win before teaching how to play

On the stands of Changzhou, the snow fell so thick that nobody could read the shirt numbers. On the night of 27 January 2026, a Vietnamese team reached the final of a continental U23 tournament for the first time. Nguyen Quang Hai curled a free kick past Uzbekistan, a whole nation held its breath, then extra time came, the goal came, and the dream dissolved into the white snow. And here is the strange thing: after that defeat, almost nobody wept for the lost trophy. They wept because, for the first time, they had been allowed to believe.

Seven years later, sitting down again in front of the screen to watch the national U18 and U19 games, the memory of that snowy night is still intact. But it is no longer a source of joy. It has become a question: why does a country that produced that generation still fail to go further?

To answer, you have to look at the bigger picture. Vietnamese football entered 2026 with a generation hailed as golden: Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Doan Van Hau, Luong Xuan Truong — names raised in academies such as HAGL - JMG, PVF and Viettel. Under the South Korean coach Park Hang-seo, the national team won the 2026 AFF Cup, ending a ten-year wait since the 2026 title, reached the quarter-finals of the 2026 Asian Cup, and the U23 side produced its continental miracle in 2026. V.League 1 — the top division organised by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) under the supervision of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) — became the launchpad for that generation.

In early 2026, Vietnam won the AFF Cup again, confirming its status as Southeast Asia's number one. But behind the glow lies an unresolved paradox. While the national team keeps collecting regional trophies, Vietnamese clubs still struggle on the continental stage. Berths in the AFC Champions League or AFC Cup usually end in the group stage. The gap between winning Southeast Asia and competing in Asia is not small, and it begins very early — on the training pitches of the U15 and U17 age groups.

I have spent many nights rewatching youth matches, and what made me pause was not the goals but the passes that were never played. A small midfielder receives the ball in the centre, lifts his head, sees an open space — and then plays it square, safe. He is not short of technique. He is short of the right to make mistakes.

That is the consequence of an incentive structure embedded deep in Vietnamese youth football. In many academies and youth teams, coaches are judged by medals, by placings in U-level tournaments, not by how many players they develop into the first team. When the reward sits in the immediate result, people choose the safe path: pick the early developers, the bigger and stronger boys, to win now. The fifteen-year-old who has not yet gone through puberty, however soft his touch, is usually pushed to the margins before anyone has properly looked at him.

Vietnam's football does not lack talent; it lacks a system that rewards development instead of medals.

Look at how the youth competitions run. The national U19 and U21 finals are crammed into a short window, the pressure to win is heavy, and teams tend to funnel the ball to two or three outstanding individuals to secure victory. Collective play, game reading, the patience to keep the ball — qualities that only bloom when a player is allowed to try and fail — are pushed aside. The result is a paradox: the more you win at youth level, the fewer players you produce who are good enough for continental football as adults.

The physicalisation of the U18 level makes it worse. When speed, strength and size are prioritised, the reward goes to early maturers — the group that peaks physically early and also stalls early. Meanwhile the technically gifted late developers, the very group that makes the difference at the top level, are discarded at U15 and U17. The technical soil is eroded at the root.

In the V.League, the consequences show up more clearly. Clubs tend to favour foreign players in attacking positions, while young domestic players are pushed wide or onto the bench. A nineteen-year-old midfielder who wants to start must compete with an established import — a contest he can almost never win. Without playing time, without the chance to clash and learn, a young player cannot grow, and the vicious circle closes.

The continental stage waits for no one. As Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia invest heavily in academies and in naturalisation, Vietnam cannot live forever on the memory of one generation. The lesson from the football nations ahead of it is clear: the ceiling of a national team is always decided by the quality of the youth cohorts behind it.

Based on my experience of watching these matches, one pattern repeats clearly: the best players at U19 level are often not the ones with the longest careers. Conversely, a few names once dismissed as too slight at seventeen become pillars of V.League sides by twenty-five. Youth football is not a contest for those who win today; it is a contest for those still standing ten years later.

The pitch is a page, and every season is a long stanza — but a stanza cannot be written by copying down only the lines you already know by heart.

There is a counter-argument worth considering. Many people say the knot in Vietnamese football is money: poor facilities, too few accredited academies, low pay for youth coaches. That is partly true. But money is not the decisive variable. PVF and HAGL - JMG have shown that with good facilities and the right methods, Vietnam can produce continental players. The problem is that those models remain exceptions, not the norm. And the real knot lies elsewhere: the incentive structure.

As long as a youth coach is judged by an U19 medal, someone will pick strong boys to win a youth tournament rather than be patient with a technical one. As long as youth competitions are treated as a stage for adults' achievements, youth football will serve the coach's ego rather than the player's future.

What is worrying is that the trend is spreading. Across age groups, people talk about the modern physique, about the need to physicalise in order to catch up with Asia. But catching up by losing technique is the wrong trade. Japan and South Korea did not take that road. They kept technique as the foundation and added physicality on top. Vietnam has an advantage in skill, in the ability to handle the ball in tight spaces — a heritage of street football. Losing it in exchange for a few U-level medals is a losing bet.

Nobody remembers the score; people remember the moment their own heart stopped. The 2026 U23 final is remembered not because Vietnam lost, but because of the moment an entire country believed together. That is what youth football should create: not a golden table of results, but people with enough character to play their own football on the biggest stage.

So where does the solution lie? Not in another academy, and not in another foreign signing. It lies in how success is measured. A youth coach should be judged by the number of players he sends to the first team, by the quality of football his side leaves behind, not by the number of U-level trophies. A youth tournament should be designed to encourage experimentation, not to maximise wins. And a small player should be given more time, not discarded at fifteen.

Glory falls in the end; only the poems written about it remain standing. What remains standing for Vietnamese football will not be dusty U19 medals, but players taught how to play — those who dare to keep the ball, dare to make mistakes, dare to go further than the snowy night in Changzhou.

That night, the snow fell. But once the snow melts, what is left? It is a question Vietnamese youth football has still not answered — and it may have to answer it before the next generation grows up.