Vietnamese Football: Memories That Live Beyond the Numbers

In the summer of 2026, when Vietnam's professional football leagues were suspended due to the pandemic, I sat down in a small editing room in Hanoi with a pile of old videotapes. The first tape I opened was the 2026 National Cup final. The image was scratched, the commentary crackled like rain on a tin roof, and in the corner of the frame there was a text overlay lasting only a few seconds: the names of the two teams, the score, the date. Beyond that line, almost nothing had been preserved. No squad list, no statistics, not even the minute of the goals. I sat in silence for a long time in front of the screen. A pitch is not merely a place where the ball rolls, but a place where dreams land. But if no one records them, where do those dreams land, and who will remember them? That question stayed with me for nine months. I decided to rewatch all 14 National Cup finals from 2026 to 2026, not to check who won — anyone can look that up in seconds — but to find what had been forgotten. I scrubbed frame by frame, paused on plays nobody remembers, and took notes in a notebook with a worn spine. And I found something strange: in matches with a goal scored in stoppage time, the celebration instinct of Vietnamese players repeated almost exactly three identical actions — turning toward the stands, striking both hands down into empty air, then running toward the corner of the pitch where family members sat. Three actions, no more, no less, across more than two decades. That was the moment I realized I was not merely watching football. I was doing the work of an archaeologist. I came to this profession rather late, but I came from a very distant place. In 2026, after graduating from the Academy of Journalism, I began my career at Bong Da newspaper, while also working as a correspondent for The World of Sports newspaper in Madrid. Those years taught me something that seemed simple but that I have had to relearn my whole life: writing means recording first. Emotion may come later, but data must come first. Then I moved into documentary screenwriting. That profession taught me that a frame of film is only valuable when we know where it was shot, who stands within it, and what happened just before the camera started rolling. Without those things, an image is only a beautiful but hollow shadow. And that is precisely the problem of Vietnamese football. For many years, our fans have lived with a paradox. We have one of the most emotionally rich football cultures in Asia. The My Dinh stands can shake so hard that people think the roof is about to collapse. On nights when the national team plays, the streets of Hanoi blaze red with flags, and the roar rises like a choir with no conductor. Yet at the same time, we have almost no decent data system to preserve what created that emotion. I am not talking about the numbers broadcast on television while a match is being played. I am talking about the kind of data that remains after the match ends — the kind that ten years later, twenty years later, a researcher can still open and understand what happened. In many major leagues around the world, people preserve even the smallest details: how many kilometres a player ran, in which minute, in which direction. In V.League 1, even basic data such as the starting line-up of a match fifteen years ago sometimes has to be reconstructed by asking people one by one. Based on my experience of following matches over more than four decades, I can say this is not a small matter. A football culture without memory cannot correct itself, because it does not know where it once went wrong. Take a specific example. In 2026, while filming a short documentary about Hanoi FC, I happened to capture the moment goalkeeper Van Cong saved a penalty in a match against Becamex Binh Duong. He dived to his right, but his eyes looked left before the ball was struck. It was a classic "dive opposite to the guess" reflex that any goalkeeping coach teaches, but rarely do we see it so clearly on tape. A newly founded sports radio station used that clip as the subject of discussion. I went on air and said something I still remember: a goalkeeper is the poet of the penalty area, writing with the body instead of words. The match ended 2-1, and Van Cong was voted man of the match. But what troubled me was not that performance. What troubled me was that if I had not happened to film that moment, it would have vanished. No one recorded it. No one archived it. It existed only in the memory of a few thousand people in the stands — and human memory, as we all know, is the most perishable of all perishable things. Radio taught me that a voice can touch fate, the way a foot touches the ball. But a voice needs a recording to survive, and a ball needs a notebook to be remembered. That is why I began to emphasise documentary material in everything I write. Every detail I recount must be verifiable through data or footage. My writing has therefore become more "investigative," but I try to preserve poetic quality — because I believe a dry number with no human soul behind it is a meaningless number. In 2026, I was invited to Russia as a freelance correspondent for a digital television channel. It was the first time in my life I lived inside a World Cup, at the age of 52. At fifty-two I learned what the World Cup is — an obsession that needs no reason. I travelled across cities, from Moscow to Sochi, and what I brought home was not scores but people. In the semi-final between France and Belgium, which ended 1-0, I did not write a single line of tactical notes. Instead, I wrote a three-thousand-word piece about the loneliness of Eden Hazard on the right flank. He was blocked by three layers of defence, and every time he received the ball he had to create for himself the space his teammates should have created for him. I called him a wanderer in a tactical forest — someone searching for a door that no one opens. That piece spread widely. Not because it was better than others, but because it told the story of the losing side in a different way. I learned that people do not need another hymn to the champion. They need someone to sit beside the one who lost. Three years later, at Euro 2026, I was assigned to make a short documentary about substitute players. I met Switzerland forward Breel Embolo right after he came on and scored the equaliser against France in the round of 16 — a match Switzerland won 5-4 on penalties. Embolo told me something I used as the title of the film: "I can't remember the feeling of touching the ball, I only remember breathing like a hunted animal for twelve minutes." Twelve minutes of a predator. Only twelve minutes, yet enough to illuminate a long journey ahead. What I learned from Embolo is this: the shortest moments often contain the most truth. And those truths vanish forever if no one sits down to record them. Now let us return to Vietnamese football, where the story of memory takes a different shape. During the nine months of rewatching 14 National Cup finals, I noticed something sad. In old matches, material about the losers had been almost erased. We remember the champions, the decisive goal, the moment of lifting the trophy. But we remember almost nothing about the runners-up — the ones who went to the very end of the tournament and stopped exactly one step short. No one preserved their faces in the moment the match ended. No one recorded how long they sat on the pitch while their opponents celebrated. That is the blind spot of collective memory. Collective memory tends to select light and forget shadow. It prefers stories with happy endings, and it erases stories without them — not out of malice, but out of habit. I believe this is one of the deepest problems of our national football. We have too many short joys and too few long memories. Whenever the national team wins, the whole country celebrates. Whenever the national team loses, we turn to find someone to blame. But rarely do we sit alone with that defeat, to understand it, to write it in a notebook, to open it three years later and read. I once spent a great deal of time researching young Vietnamese players sent to compete in Japan and Korea. Each time, I met the same difficulty: it was very hard to find complete physical records for them before they went abroad. We know their names, we know how many goals they scored, but we do not know how many matches they played in a single year at seventeen or eighteen. We do not know how their unripe bodies were pushed into the machinery of adults. This is what worries me. When a young player is overused — playing continuously across multiple tiers, from youth to first team, from national to club level — that unformed body has no time to adapt. And because we have no overload data, we can prove nothing. We only see young players shine, then fade a few years later, and no one knows exactly why. The same is true of the transfer market. I have always believed that the truly valuable contracts are not found at big clubs racing to buy stars. The arms race of the giants is a race of brand weaponry, where transfer fees are inflated not by on-pitch value but by off-pitch value. It is at small clubs, where budgets are tight and every coin must be weighed, that people truly do the work of scouting: finding a person who fits a system, rather than buying a name that fits an advertising board. Every contract is an unfinished poem; every transfer window is a parting. Even esports, a field seemingly far from the ball, is repeating the same story. Professionalisation turns players into products of an assembly line. Individual style — the thing that makes a player's soul — is gradually sanded smooth in digitalised training, where every action is optimised by data. ESport has no ball, but it still has the heartbeat of fans. And that heartbeat also needs to be recorded, not merely measured. There is one thing I want to say plainly, even if it may upset some people. Painting the past in rosy colours does not make the present better. Many of us like to say that Vietnamese football was more beautiful, more graceful, more worth watching in the old days. But if we truly had enough material to compare — not just memory — we would probably see that the old days were also full of mistakes, dreadful matches, and poor decisions that audiences of that time themselves booed. Our memory has bathed the past in a soft light it does not deserve. The work of the guardian of memory's fire is not to protect a lost sky from all criticism. That work is to cross-check original material, to accept the dark corners, and to preserve the whole truth — even when that truth disappoints us. When the stadium is empty, I hear clearly the applause of bygone years. But I also hear clearly the silence of things never spoken, never written, never preserved. So what must we do? I do not believe we need to wait for some great top-down project. What we need, first of all, is a change in how we look. Every spectator in the stands can be a record-keeper. Every young reporter holding a camera can be a future archaeologist. Every fan who takes a photo, writes a line, keeps a ticket to a match — all of it helps build the house of memory of our national football. But individual memory, however precious, cannot replace systematic data. A single fan's photograph is one piece of a puzzle. It becomes history only when placed beside thousands of other pieces, arranged by time, by match, by club. What needs doing must be done starting today, because with each passing day a tape degrades a little more, a person who remembers a story passes away, and a detail sinks into oblivion. I have spent forty-four years observing this industry, and I still believe one thing. Football, at its deepest level, is not about winning and losing. Football is about memory — how we remember each other, how we remember ourselves in moments we thought we had forgotten. In the summer of 2026, I opened the tape of the 2026 National Cup final and almost wept because I could not remember the name of the only scorer. I asked myself: if my memory has faded, then where will the memory of an entire football culture fade to? And I answered myself with the most ordinary act: I opened my notebook, and began writing again from the start. Not to retell what happened. But to keep it able to happen once more in someone's head, on some very distant day. Because a football culture is truly lost only when no one is left to sit down and record it. As long as one such person remains, then even if the stadium is empty, the applause of bygone years will still ring out — and that memory will remain whole, like a ball rolling slowly toward the goal of the future.