Vietnamese Women's Football: One World Cup and the Price of Lights That Fade Too Fast

I still remember that silence. In Dunedin, after the final whistle of the last group-stage match, the dressing room of the Vietnamese women's national team was utterly quiet. No crying, no shouting. Just the sound of studded boots scraping against the wooden floor, the steady rush of water in the showers, and then everything went still. Outside the stadium, Dutch fans were still singing after the 7-0 win. Inside, more than twenty women had just closed the first World Cup in the history of Vietnamese women's football. One sat down on the floor, hugging her knees, staring at the empty space in front of her. Another unwound the tape around her ankle, rolling it up slowly, as if trying to stretch out a few more seconds inside this room, inside a World Cup, before everything returned to the rhythm of a domestic championship few people watch. I sat there without turning on my recorder. After more than thirty years holding a microphone, I have learned this: sport is not only about the scoreline. There are moments when the best reporter is the one who knows how to stay silent, to let the room speak for itself. And that room, that night, told me a story far longer than three group-stage defeats. The story does not begin in Dunedin, nor at Eden Park, but on a small training pitch in Hanoi, long before, when Vietnamese women's football was something almost invisible in the public eye. To understand why a 0-7 defeat could be a milestone, one must understand the ground on which that milestone was built. That is what I want to recount today, not as a summary, but as a whisper from the dressing room sent out to the world. On men's football days, I quietly slipped women's records into every bulletin. That has been my way of working for years. When the whole country glued its eyes to a men's national team match, I would often insert a short line between the two halves: today the women's team won, today a female player signed a contract, today a women's tournament kicked off. Many colleagues thought I was wasting prime airtime. But I believed in something very simple: public memory is built through repetition, and if we do not repeat the names of those women on the days when the most people are watching, they will forever exist only in a small corner no one bothers to visit. The 2026 Women's World Cup was the first time that small corner flung its doors wide open. The Vietnamese women's national team was present in Australia and New Zealand, drawn in a group with the United States, the Netherlands, and Portugal. For anyone who has followed Asian women's football, this was no ordinary group. It was the group of a four-time world champion and a European side at the peak of its form. It was a group one enters to learn, not to count points. And Vietnam entered it in exactly that posture. The road there was never smooth either. I followed every step of the qualifying campaign, and what caught my attention was not the grand victories but the tiny matches so small that the general public had no idea they existed. The qualifying matches in Asia, where the Vietnamese women's team had to face Thailand and Chinese Taipei in a playoff round for a World Cup ticket, took place against a backdrop of near-total domestic media silence. Those matches were like a long-distance race in the dark, where one only learns the result upon reaching the finish. And when the team secured the ticket, that ticket appeared as a surprise gift to the many, but to those inside, it was the result of years of quiet accumulation. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Shenzhen, rewatching the playoff footage, and asking myself: what allows a women's football nation poor in resources to go this far? The answer does not lie in individual talent, but in something harder to see: organizational discipline. The Vietnamese women's team has long been known for a tight, disciplined style, knowing itself and its opponent. They have no stars the world knows by name, but they have a system in which every player understands her role down to the smallest detail. And so, when they set foot on the biggest stage, that system had to face its harshest test. The opening match against the United States was a shock on every level, not because of the scoreline, but because of the speed. I sat in the stands, and in the first ten minutes I felt something the screen cannot fully convey: the gap in tempo. The ball moved one beat faster than the reflexes of the Vietnamese players. It was not that they were slow, but that the opponent was faster. In football, one beat is a whole sky. What moved me in that match was not the scoreline, but the way the Vietnamese women's team held their defensive structure until the final minutes. They dropped deep, organized into a crowded defensive block in front of the box, and tried to limit the space behind the back line as much as possible. It was a sensible tactical choice. When you cannot win a race of speed, you try to slow that race down by sealing every path. The problem is that when an opponent has enough patience and enough technical quality, they will find a path, sooner or later. The match against Portugal was a different story, closer, more painful. This was the opponent Vietnam was seen as capable of surprising. But elite football does not let you choose your opponent as you wish. Portugal was also at a higher level, and they seized exactly the moments when Vietnam slackened. This defeat, for me, was the most painful, because it showed that the gap lies not only in physicality but in the ability to seize the moment in decisive seconds. And the match against the Netherlands, which ended 7-0, was the match I learned the most from. Not about the Vietnamese team, but about myself. Sitting in the stands, I had prepared in my head commentary lines like "this is a match to learn from." But by the sixtieth minute, I realized I was lulling myself with platitudes. The truth is that a team that concedes seven goals does not need ceremonial consolation. They need to be seen honestly, even when that honesty hurts. So what actually happened on the pitch, tactically? Let us start with the numbers. In all three matches, the Vietnamese women's team held possession at a very low level, usually around twenty to twenty-five percent. This is the inevitable consequence of a counter-attacking style built on a deep defensive block. The PPDA metric, a measure of pressing intensity, showed that Vietnam pressed very little, meaning they actively ceded the initiative and waited for the opponent's mistakes. This was a reasonable choice when facing teams far stronger in every respect. The problem lay elsewhere. When you drop deep and cede the initiative, you need a striker capable of holding the ball and a midfield capable of switching state instantly upon winning it back. Here, Vietnam had Huynh Nhu, the captain, who became the first Vietnamese female player to play professionally abroad when she joined Lank FC of Portugal. Her role in the counter-attacking scheme is crucial, because she is the one who must hold the ball, act as a wall, and create the rare counterattacks. But when the midfield cannot move the ball forward quickly enough, a striker, however good, becomes isolated. This is a classic tactical lesson I have witnessed many times in my career: a counter-attacking system is only effective when there is connection between the lines. If the defense wins the ball back but the midfield cannot convert it into chances, then defending becomes a hopeless rearguard against relentless pressure. The Vietnamese women's team defended bravely, but the ball could not go forward, and when the ball cannot go forward, pressure keeps piling toward the goal. In defense, I want to say a word for the defenders. Chuong Thi Kieu is one of the most experienced center-backs in the team, someone who has been attached to Vietnamese women's football across generations. The way she commands the back line, the way she covers for her teammates, shows a deep understanding of the craft. But even a good center-back cannot stand against a continuous wave of attacks if the midfield cannot hold the ball and slow the game down. In football, defending is not the work of the back line alone. The player who impressed me most in this tournament was the goalkeeper. Tran Thi Kim Thanh had a memorable match against the United States, with a string of saves that made me rise from my seat. There were moments when she reacted so fast that I wondered how a human body could respond in time. But this is also a paradox of football: when your goalkeeper is the best player on the pitch, it usually means your team has problems ahead of her. A superb goalkeeper hides many holes, but cannot hide them all. In midfield, Vietnam's players had to carry an enormous workload. They had to drop deep to support the defense and still try to transition when they had the ball. This is work that demands extraordinary fitness, and in long matches, fitness is what decides. I observed that in the final thirty minutes of each match, Vietnam's duels began to fade in intensity. That is not a sign of a lack of effort, but of a physical foundation not yet built to play at this level. And here is the key point I want to pause on: the biggest gap between Vietnamese women's football and the top teams in the world lies not in technique, but in physical infrastructure. The top European and American teams have fitness centers, nutritionists, and sports scientists paid well to ensure every player reaches peak condition. What does Vietnam have? An extraordinary fighting spirit and a passion that cannot make up for the resource gap. But I do not want the story to stop at deprivation. For if we look only at what is missing, we will miss what has been built. The Vietnamese women's team has won gold in women's football at three consecutive SEA Games, an achievement any nation in the region must respect. They have asserted their dominance in Southeast Asia for years. That is a solid foundation, a launchpad from which the continental dream can be nourished. Interestingly, while Vietnamese men's football has made waves in Asia with sought-after stars and million-dollar contracts, women's football has taken a quieter path but one no less glorious. Here, I want to open a parenthesis on how the public receives these two football worlds. When the men's team loses, the whole country talks. When the women's team loses, few know. This injustice is not an accusation, but a reality that those of us in the profession must acknowledge and try to change. And this is where the story turns to a different, more counter-intuitive angle. The 2026 Women's World Cup brought an unprecedented prize fund to the participating teams. FIFA sharply increased the prize money for this tournament, and Vietnam, despite losing all three matches, still received a sum no one had dared dream of before. Many see this as a sign that women's football is being treated more fairly. I do not entirely believe that. When the old wave recedes, I step onto a new platform - and the voice is still my own. And that voice tells me that a one-time prize fund cannot change the structure of a football nation. Look at the bigger picture. How many teams are in Vietnam's national women's football championship? How much are female players paid each month? How many women's clubs have their own training grounds, their own doctors, their own fitness specialists? The answers to these questions will show that the gap between a moment of glory and a sustainable foundation is still enormous. The World Cup lights can illuminate a team for a few weeks, but they cannot warm an entire system all year round. Throughout my career, I have witnessed many waves of enthusiasm for women's sport. After every Olympics, after every World Cup, there comes a wave. But every wave recedes. And when it recedes, those left on the beach are the girls who must fend for themselves on meager wages. I have heard stories of female players selling their medals to make ends meet. These are not isolated stories. They are symptoms of a disease called a lack of sustainable investment. The pandemic fell silent, the dressing room spoke up - I was only the one holding the mic. When competitions paused, I spent many months sitting with players, listening to them talk about their worries over daily bread. What I learned is this: what happens on the pitch is only the tip of the iceberg. The submerged part is sleepless nights, loans, dreams postponed for lack of money. And the submerged part is what decides the visible part. A football nation cannot produce world-class players if those players must spend half their energy worrying about their own survival. This leads me to another counter-intuitive angle. We often praise stories of overcoming hardship, of poor heroes rising through willpower. But when we praise overcoming hardship, we inadvertently turn hardship into part of the beauty, and we forget that hardship is something to be eliminated, not celebrated. A girl forced to play football in deprivation is not a beautiful story. It is a waste of talent. Look at the developed women's football nations in the region. Japan, with a women's football foundation built over decades, has won a World Cup. South Korea and China have also invested heavily in women's football. Vietnam, with a still-young foundation, stands in a different position. But precisely because it stands in a different position, it has the chance to learn from others' mistakes. We do not need to walk the entire path Japan walked. We can take a shortcut by investing in the right places from the start. So what is the right place to invest? I believe the answer lies in school football. If women's football is introduced into schools seriously, we will have a steady supply of players in the next ten years. If women's tournaments at the secondary and university levels are held regularly, we will have a competitive system that helps young players develop. If female coaches are properly trained, we will have role models that young girls can look to and believe their path is viable. But there is one thing I want to say plainly, even if it may upset some people. It is the habit of praising mere presence at a World Cup as the ultimate achievement. Yes, qualifying for the first time is a historic milestone. But if we stop at celebrating that milestone, we will miss the chance to use it as a launchpad. A milestone is worth nothing if it does not lead to the next milestones. And the next milestones can only come if we invest in the foundation, not in the moment. I have spoken with many young players throughout my career. What they want is not pity. They want a fair playing field. They want to be treated as true professionals. They want to be judged by ability, not by gender. And above all, they want a future in which being a female footballer does not mean sacrificing a stable life. So where are we on that journey? I would say we are at the point where the potential has been proven, but the investment has not caught up. This is the most dangerous moment, because if we cannot seize the wave of inspiration from the World Cup, it will fade, and we will have to wait for another chance for many years. Those who work in Vietnamese women's football understand this very clearly. They know the lights fade faster than we think. Transfers buzz all season, but what lingers are the lives after the contracts. While the whole country talks about million-dollar men's contracts, few notice that a female player may have to weigh continuing to play against finding stable work to support her family. This is a truth the glossy numbers never reflect. And this is why I always try to tell the stories behind the numbers. I want to return to the dressing room in Dunedin, to the silence I opened this story with. After a while, one player stood up. I do not remember exactly what she said, but I remember the tone. It was not the voice of someone defeated. It was the voice of someone who had just seen the horizon and was calculating the road to it. She told her teammates that they had come this far, which meant they could go further. And in that moment, I understood that what the Vietnamese women's team brought home from this World Cup was not three defeats, but a new certainty about their own capability. I do not know what the future holds. Football is always full of uncertainty, and predictions are often wrong. But I know one thing: if a women's football nation can produce a team willing to step onto the biggest stage in the world with its head held high, that nation deserves serious investment. Not out of pity, but out of potential. Not out of duty, but out of fairness. And above all, because those girls have proven they deserve it. At fifty-six, I still ask one question: where are women scoring in this game? That question is not only for football. It is for the way we perceive the value of women in sport in particular and in society at large. Every time a girl walks onto the pitch and plays football with all of who she is, she scores a goal that does not appear on the scoreboard. And those goals are the most important ones. When I left the stadium that night, Dunedin was cold and the wind was strong. I walked alone, in no hurry. In my head the sound of studded boots on the wooden floor of the dressing room still echoed. It was the sound of one chapter closing and another opening. And I knew that my work, as a storyteller, had only just begun. For the story of Vietnamese women's football does not end at the 2026 World Cup. It has only just begun to be told properly.