The Silent Touchline: Vietnamese Football and the Wingers Forgotten by the Age of Data

In the seventy-eighth minute, in the right-hand corner of the stand, a young man still stood rooted to the touchline as though he had grown there. The ball did not come. He took three soft steps forward, retreated, then stood still. His eyes drifted toward the central corridor — where the ball spun among seven or eight red shirts, passed back and forth like a ritual with no ending. Nobody looked at him. Nobody needed him. He was a right-footed winger, and in Vietnamese football of recent years, that almost meant he was a relic to be preserved rather than a weapon to be fired. I have sat through many afternoons like that. From the small stands of the V.League, where the drumbeat of support mingled with the calls of street vendors, to the cold video rooms where I rewound a ten-second passage of play for two straight hours. What I saw was not on the scoresheet. It was a quiet disappearance. Nobody banned the traditional winger. They simply stopped giving him the ball. The pitch never lies — only the storyteller knows how to hide his loneliness behind every goal. And the greatest loneliness on the field today does not belong to the scorer. It belongs to the man on the touchline, the one who created the space for that goal to be born, then was left behind like a shadow that had finished its task. To understand why the touchline became a wasteland, we must look at how Vietnamese football changed over the past decade. When I began following the V.League seriously, the common formations were still 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1, with wingers hugging the chalk, ready to dribble past a man and cross with their natural foot. That was the era of one-on-one duels on the flank, of curling deliveries into the box, of a collective sigh when a winger was scythed down without mercy. Then the tactical wave from Europe arrived. Foreign coaches brought the idea of the inverted winger — names like Mohamed Salah or Sadio Mané were replayed over and over in tactical meetings. Wingers no longer ran down the line; they cut inside, finding pockets between the box and the midfield, finishing with their weaker foot. The touchline was handed over to the overlapping full-back. And the natural-footed winger, once the soul of attacking play, became an obsolete link. In the V.League, this change came slowly but surely. Clubs began to prioritize foreign strikers who were strong, fast, capable of holding up play and finishing inside the box. Domestic wingers, trained to cross and dribble, were forced to learn a different game — or accept a place on the bench. A generation of talent was abandoned in the very position they were born to illuminate. The Vietnamese national team mirrored the trend. The counter-attacking style under coach Park Hang-seo once took the team to heights never before reached in its history, but it relied on a compact defensive block and rapid transitions. Within that system, wingers often had to drop deep to support the defence, turning the touchline into a trench rather than a stage. Safety was placed above creativity, and to a certain extent, that was reasonable. But there is a difference between choosing safety in a specific match and turning safety into a training philosophy. That is where the story becomes troubling. There is an economic factor rarely mentioned when people discuss the disappearance of the winger. In the V.League, a club with a limited budget often chooses to spend its money on a foreign striker capable of scoring fifteen goals a season, rather than investing in a system that needs time to take shape. A foreign striker is a quick solution — measurable, ticket-selling. A properly developed domestic winger is a long-term investment — something Vietnamese football, with its short seasons and pressure for instant results, rarely has the patience to wait for. Look at neighbouring leagues in the region, and the picture is not very different. The football nations of Southeast Asia are all racing toward a common model, where uniformity is treated as professionalism. The price paid is identity. And identity, in football, is often written by wingers — men who dare to do what nobody asked them to do. What I want to point out is not the popularity of a formation. It is how a tactical idea turns into an unchallengeable truth, and then that truth begins to erase the things it does not understand. Based on my experience watching matches, there is a sad pattern in the V.League: when a natural-footed winger receives the ball on the flank, the number of subsequent passes he receives within the same attacking move is almost zero. The ball goes inside, switches flanks, or is played backwards. The winger is treated as an endpoint, not a starting point. And in modern football, whoever is treated as an endpoint is soon eliminated. Look at how the top V.League clubs construct their goals. Most come from central combinations, from foreign strikers finishing inside the box, or from set pieces. Goals born from a dribble past a man on the flank followed by a cross are increasingly rare. Not because they are ineffective, but because they are no longer encouraged. A winger who dares to dribble on the flank is considered reckless, selfish, even tactically undisciplined. I once watched a young player substituted simply because he dared to attempt a breakthrough on the wing. The coach told him he should pass backwards to keep possession. He nodded. The next match, he sat on the bench. That is how a talent is bent out of shape. That is how a football culture teaches the next generation that creativity on the touchline is a mistake. Tactics are prose, moments are poetry — and the match is where the two devour each other. The problem with Vietnamese football is not that it chose prose. The problem is that it forgot poetry was once written on the touchline, and it burned that book. There is a paradox here. While the European leagues that gave birth to the inverted-winger trend are gradually recognizing its limits and seeking to revive traditional wingers, Vietnamese football is rushing to copy a model that is already old. People imitate the most visible part of an idea — a player's position — while ignoring the hardest part: the ability to create individual difference within a collective system. I remember an evening in a small coffee shop, sitting beside a young coach. He told me the traditional winger was finished. I asked him: if your opponent parks the bus inside their box, and every route into the centre is sealed, what will you do? He went silent. The answer lies on the touchline. It always lies on the touchline. That was when I realized intuition is a dead star whose light is still travelling — and I choose to stand under that sky to receive it. Intuition tells me that the forgotten wingers are not inferior players. They are players placed into a system that does not know how to use them. Look at the numbers people often cite to justify the change. Crosses are down, successful dribbles are down, goals from wide situations are down. But those numbers measure outcomes, not causes. They tell us what is happening, not why. If a winger is no longer passed the ball, of course his dribbles will fall. It is a self-fulfilling circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy written in innocent numbers. I want to use this section to speak about what has been lost — not to reminisce, but to place it on the scales. A traditional winger does three things an inverted winger cannot. First, he stretches the opposing defence horizontally. When he hugs the touchline, the opposing full-back must follow him, creating space in the centre for his teammates. Second, he creates one-on-one situations on the flank — a kind of opportunity no defence can fully prevent through organization alone. Third, he is an escape valve when his team is pressed. The ball can be played wide, where he stands, and he can hold it, win a foul, or dribble past a man to break the pressure. The inverted winger does other things. He creates overlaps in the centre, he arrives in the box to finish, he combines quickly with the striker. But he also suffocates space. When both flanks invert, the centre becomes crowded, and the team loses width. The opponent only needs to sit deep and wait. In matches where a team must break down a dense defensive block, the absence of a traditional winger becomes a fatal weakness. Truth is, football has no manifesto, only souls searching for one another — those words from a mentor I once met haunt me every time I look at a tactical board. Because behind every arrow on that board is a human being, with habits, limits, and capacities that no algorithm can measure. In Vietnam, where the football culture is still young compared to the powerhouses, copying foreign models mechanically is a trap. We have wingers who are small, agile, skilful — perfect qualities for the traditional winger role. Instead of using that strength, we force them to play a model designed for bigger, stronger players. There is a story I always carry in my notebook. It is about a boy in a rural province who spent his whole childhood practising crosses into a wooden gate. He crossed the ball thousands of times a day, until the ball flew on a trajectory he could picture before it left his foot. When he joined a football academy, the coach told him crossing was outdated. He was confused. He no longer knew what to do with his feet. And then he vanished from the football map, like hundreds of other boys. At the same time, another trend was creeping into the analytics rooms of the V.League. Metrics like expected goals, key passes, or pressing rates were introduced into briefing sessions. That is a welcome step forward. But data, used without intuition, becomes a dangerous weapon. It allows people to discard a player simply because he fails to meet a certain statistical threshold, without looking at context — which system he plays in, how much his teammates trust him, whether he was ever given a chance. I once read an internal report from a club in which a winger was rated as ineffective because his assist count was low. But when I watched the footage again, I saw that he was the one creating the space for those assists. He ran into the gap, dragged a defender with him, and left the position for someone else to shine. Football has invisible contributions, and those contributions appear in no spreadsheet. That summer taught me that forgetting is sometimes a gift — because only the one left behind learns to see ahead. I believe the forgotten wingers of today are precisely the ones who will reshape Vietnamese football tomorrow, if someone is brave enough to give them the ball. But I do not want to fall into the opposite trap: mythologizing the past and turning every traditional winger into an innocent victim. The uncomfortable truth is that many domestic wingers failed because of themselves, not only because of the system. They dribbled too much, passed too poorly, lacked the ability to make a final decision. They crossed on instinct rather than on plan. They could not read the game. And when the system changed, they did not have enough tools to adapt. The blind spot of collective memory is that we tend to remember the moments of brilliance and forget the failures. We remember the dribble past three men and the goal, but forget the ten times that same dribble ended in a lost ball. We remember the cross that led to a goal, but forget the hundreds of crosses that vanished into nothing. So my argument is not to return to the traditional winger. That would be a lazy and dangerous argument. My argument is: do not erase a position just because it no longer fits a fashionable model. Keep it in the arsenal, develop it, teach it how to adapt. A modern traditional winger does not merely dribble and cross. He knows when to hug the line, when to cut inside, when to pass backwards to keep the ball, when to break through. He is a complete player, not a one-dimensional piece. The problem is that we stopped training players like that. In Vietnam's youth academies, I hear that coaches increasingly prioritize teaching young players how to play inside, how to combine in groups, how to move off the ball. These are all valuable skills. But the skill of one-on-one dribbling, of accurate crossing, of holding the ball under pressure on the flank — the skills that once made Vietnamese football's name — are being neglected. We are producing a generation of uniform players. They pass well, they move intelligently, but they lack that individual quality, that explosive moment capable of changing the course of a match. And in the big matches, when the system is figured out, it is precisely those individual moments that make the difference. There is one more aspect few notice. In Vietnamese women's football, where investment remains modest and often symbolic, wingers suffer the same fate. They are celebrated in short media campaigns, then forgotten when those campaigns end. The attention they receive often comes from social obligation rather than a genuine belief in their value on the pitch. And when the attention is fake, so is the development. When the stands fall silent, we hear the heart of this sport beating with the longing of millions. And that longing, sometimes, is for passages of play on the touchline — passages no data model can predict. So what happens next? I do not believe in grand prophecies. I believe in small, quiet changes made by people who go unnoticed. A young coach deciding to give his winger the right to make mistakes. An academy deciding to spend more time teaching one-on-one dribbling. A player deciding not to abandon the position he was born to play. There are talents that do not appear in the rankings — they hide in the eyes of those who believe in what has never happened. And in Vietnam, I believe those talents are standing on the touchline, waiting for a pass that never comes. If you are a coach, try once looking at your winger and asking: what could he do if I gave him the ball? If you are a supporter, try once noticing the man on the flank instead of only watching the scorer. And if you are a young player forgotten on the touchline, remember this: the pitch never forgets those who dare to run into the space others left behind. The ball will keep rolling. The only question left is: who will dare to chase it toward the touchline?