Vietnamese Football 2026: A Season of Blank Pages

Hanoi, late 2026.

On the second floor of the housing block beside Hang Day stadium there was a low wooden cabinet. Inside were four hardcover notebooks. Three were full of writing, in blue ink that had bled in the damp. The fourth was blank from the first page to the last. The man who kept the cabinet, a competition official past fifty, opened the blank notebook, closed it again, and said one sentence: this one is being kept for the national championship. The national championship has not arrived.

I sat on a bench in the corridor outside the stadium for nearly two hours that night. No match took place. Only bicycles passing the gate and a man sweeping leaves off the stand. In that corridor I learned something I have carried through an entire career: news has a breath of its own, and some seasons breathe very slowly.

Context

Vietnamese football entered 2026 with the country barely two years reunified. The north already had a long competition tradition: according to the Vietnamese football records commonly cited, the Northern A Division was organised from 2026 and ran across many seasons. The south, whose urban football had been lively before 2026, stood broken — clubs dissolved, grounds reassigned, players changing trades.

A unified national championship could not appear immediately. It required a calendar, a unified refereeing structure, railways and trucks to move teams from Hanoi down to southern provinces. In the late 1970s those conditions were not yet ripe. In this period Vietnamese football operated mainly through regional tournaments, inter-provincial friendlies and short training camps.

That is why the 2026 season left almost no trace on paper.

On the pitch and in the corridor

I travelled with several northern teams through the winter of 2026. The grounds were not full. Most tickets went to work units, and the B stand was usually more than half empty. Matches were played in the afternoon, starting while the sun was still harsh and finishing as mist came down.

What I remember most was behind the pitch.

In the dressing room of a provincial ground I wrote this into my notebook: after the players had all left, boots were left behind in two rows, the smell of sweat still thick in the air, and on the tactics board were half-finished lines of chalk that nobody wiped away. The people I met there were mostly not famous players. They were the kit man, the cook, the groundsman. A cook travelling with an away team told me that some days only eleven people ate, but the pot still had to be full, because a youth player might come up to train that afternoon.

No other reporter was there. No match report had been kept anywhere I could find. A few spectators still remembered the score; the starting line-up was remembered differently by each of them.

The most memorable thing about the 2026 season is that it was barely recorded at all. What we call the history of Vietnamese football has in fact been rebuilt from loose fragments of memory, and much of what happened in the two years after reunification will stay outside the notebook forever.

Based on my experience of watching matches in that period, I would separate two questions: whether football was played, and whether football was written down. In 2026 the answer was yes to the first and no to the second. Matches were still played. Teams still trained. People still cycled tens of kilometres to watch a friendly. It is only that nobody recorded enough for later generations to read.

The contrarian angle

The common reading of 2026-2026 is that it was a pause, a hollow between northern wartime football and the first unified national championship, a milestone recorded in 2026 with the A1 competition. Read only the timelines and one easily concludes that Vietnamese football stood still for several years.

But what I saw in the corridors and training grounds in 2026 was a different kind of movement, slow, quiet and unseen by any media audience. Where there was no press coverage, the work continued: pitches were cut, nets were mended, youth lists were drawn up again, referees were trained. None of that produced headlines, but without it there would have been nothing to start from in 2026.

The counter-intuitive point sits here: the period that looks empty on paper was the period when the system carried its heaviest load. People did not write because there was no structure yet to write into, not because there was nothing to write about.

I think again of what the keeper of the notebook cabinet said: this one is being kept for the national championship. He did not say the national championship would never come. He only said it had not arrived.

What remains

That blank notebook, if it still exists, would be a far more valuable document than its appearance suggests. It records exactly one thing: there was a season in which the record-keeping could not keep up with the work on the pitch.

For someone in my trade, the lesson lies elsewhere. Waiting is not doing nothing. Waiting is listening to the pitch whisper. And a good reporter is not the one who arrives first, but the one who stays last, staying until the dressing room is empty, the lights are off, and the cook puts the lid back on the pot.

The next season will have its notebook. What stays open is who will hold the pen, and whether that person is willing to sit in the corridor long enough.