Vietnamese Women's Football and the Quiet Change of Guard After the World Cup Milestone

On July 22, 2026, at Eden Park in Auckland, I sat in the international press area and watched the Vietnamese women's players line up for the national anthem. Opposite them stood the United States women's national team, the reigning world champions. Chuong Thi Kieu, who had been part of the national team for more than a decade, stood at the centre of the back line. When the whistle blew, I noticed a small detail the television cameras never caught: Huynh Nhu placed her hand on her chest, took a deep breath, and smiled at her teammates. That was not the smile of someone afraid. It was the smile of someone who had waited her entire career for this moment. Vietnam lost 0-3, conceding from a set piece in the 46th minute, and finished the match with only 20 percent of possession. But what stayed with me after the final whistle was not the scoreline. It was the way a football nation once treated as abandoned territory stood upright in front of a superpower. After more than thirty years holding a microphone, I have learned this: sport is not only about the score. And Vietnamese women's football is the clearest proof of that statement. The neglect of Vietnamese women's football is not a recent invention. It has its own history, longer than the memory of most young fans today. For many years, matches of the women's national team were held in stadiums with a capacity of a few thousand, with no live broadcast and no shirt sponsor. The women's national championship took place in silence, sometimes known only through a few short lines in a newspaper. When the women's team won a match in Olympic or Asian Cup qualifying, the news appeared, then vanished as quickly as it came, making way for a report on a men's friendly. I remember 2026, when I began producing my own online series, searching for data on the women's national championship. What I found were a few scattered statistics, no distance-covered figures, no passing data, almost nothing a analyst could work with. This poverty of data is the deepest form of neglect. People do not neglect through hatred. They neglect through not recording. And when a football nation is not recorded, it has no history. When it has no history, it cannot be analysed. When it cannot be analysed, it cannot be respected. Yet within that silence, the characters emerged. I spent years listening to Vietnamese women's players tell their stories, and what I learned is this: they did not wait to be respected. They played while being ignored. Huynh Nhu, the striker born in 2026, trained in conditions a male player of equal standing would never accept. Chuong Thi Kieu, the national team centre-back, anchored the defence for more than a decade without ever complaining publicly about pay. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Dung, who once scored directly from a corner twice in a single international match, became an icon not through a media campaign but through a single moment of pure technique. The turning point began to appear in the early 2020s. In 2026, Vietnam won the AFF Women's Championship in the Philippines, beating Thailand in the final. It was not the first time Vietnam had overcome Thailand, but it was the first time a regional title was broadcast live, mentioned in the evening news, followed by fans on their phones during lunch breaks. And above all, in February 2026, Vietnam officially secured qualification for the 2026 FIFA Women's World Cup after beating Chinese Taipei in the play-off. For the first time in history, a Vietnamese women's team stepped onto the world stage. This is the point where I want to pause. Because in the way Vietnamese media covered this milestone, I see a familiar paradox. News about the 2026 Women's World Cup appeared densely across Vietnamese media in the two weeks before the opening match, peaked on the day the team faced the United States, then fell sharply after the second defeat. By the time the team finished the group stage with three losses, public discourse returned to the familiar question: how can Vietnamese women's football develop? But that question, asked at that moment, missed the most important thing. It missed analysis. Following Vietnam's three matches at the 2026 World Cup, I recorded the passing accuracy of each line. Against the United States, Vietnam reached around 71 percent passing accuracy, but most of those passes took place in their own half and were played sideways or backwards. The number of line-breaking passes, those that broke at least one defensive line, could be counted on one hand across 90 minutes. This is not a player problem. It is a structural problem. Head coach Mai Duc Chung, who led Vietnam through this transitional period, chose a 5-4-1 formation for most major matches. This was a reasonable theoretical choice against higher-ranked opponents. Five defenders form a dense defensive block, four midfielders narrow the gaps between the lines, and a single striker acts as an anchor for counter-attacks. But there is one tactical detail rarely discussed by commentators in Vietnam: when Vietnam defended in the 5-4-1, the midfield line was frequently dragged too deep, forming a seven-player block in front of the penalty area. This block protected the central zone well but exposed both wide corridors, where European and North American opponents moved the ball comfortably. I re-checked this in the match against the Netherlands. Their second goal came from a situation where their full-back had more than ten metres of space before the touchline, enough time to look up and deliver an accurate cross into the box. In that moment, Vietnam's winger had dropped back to help, but dropped too deep, creating a second gap in the inner channel. This is the problem of a zonal defensive system when there is not enough training time to synchronise the lines. The paradox is this: during the same period, if you watched the Vietnamese women's national championship, the leading clubs such as Ho Chi Minh City I, Hanoi I and Phong Phu Ha Nam played differently. They deployed 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1, controlled the ball more, and used technically gifted attackers such as Huynh Nhu, Nguyen Thi Tuyet Dung and Bien Thi Hang in freer roles. The difference between club level and national team level is one of the biggest blind spots in Vietnamese women's football today. When the national team gathers for short periods before major tournaments, they do not have enough time to build a complex attacking system. So they choose to defend. But when they return to their clubs, they play in a different system. The result is that every call-up requires relearning. This is why I disagree with how many people frame Vietnam's 2026 World Cup defeats as evidence of Vietnamese women's football being weak. Those defeats, against the United States, the Netherlands and Portugal, were predictable. What deserves analysis is not the result. It is how Vietnam adapted from match to match. Against Portugal, Vietnam's passing accuracy rose to around 76 percent, and the number of line-breaking passes nearly doubled compared to the United States match. Tran Thi Thuy Trang, at 31, started in midfield and became the link between defence and attack. She completed more than 40 passes, the most in the team. This is a small detail, but it shows Vietnam can recognise opponents and adjust. Portugal is not as strong as the United States or the Netherlands, but nor is it weak. Vietnam choosing to hold the ball more in the second match was a step forward psychologically. However, I must say this plainly. Progress in tactical adaptability cannot compensate for the gap in physical foundations and infrastructure. At the 2026 World Cup, Vietnamese players were rated below their opponents in muscle strength, acceleration and high-intensity endurance. These are physiological traits that can be improved through sports science, but they require time and investment. No Vietnamese women's club currently has a sports science department strong enough to do that. And no league is financially attractive enough to keep players at home rather than abroad. Huynh Nhu, with her 2026 move to Lank FC in the Portuguese women's league, became the first Vietnamese women's player to turn professional in Europe. Watching her in Portugal, I realised the gap is not in individual technique. Huynh Nhu can handle the ball as well as many forwards in the Portuguese women's league. The gap is in match tempo. In Vietnam, a player can take two seconds to control the ball and make a decision. In Europe, there is one second. That tempo can only be learned by playing in that environment, every week, across multiple seasons. No training camp can teach it. But this is where my view may differ from many. Many experts in Vietnam argue that more investment should go to men's football first, because that is where revenue and attention are generated. I do not think so. I think the commercial value of a football nation is not a precondition for investing in women's football. It is the result of that investment. I have seen this in many markets. No one sponsors a women's league nobody watches. But no one watches a women's league without media coverage, without reasonable broadcast slots, without known players. This circle can only be broken from within, by an investment decision made before profit exists. In Vietnam, I see the first signs of that change. The number of women's teams in the national championship has increased in recent years. Some women's national team matches are broadcast live with better production quality. Sponsors are beginning to appear on some women's club shirts. These are small steps, but they point in the right direction. What is still missing is a long-term strategy. Vietnamese women's football needs a youth development system built from school level, not relying only on traditional sports centres. It needs a national league with a stable schedule and consistent media coverage. It needs incentives for men's clubs to invest in women's teams, similar to the model developing in Europe. Back to the moment at Eden Park. After the match ended, I went down to the mixed zone and waited for the players to pass. Chuong Thi Kieu emerged with a calm expression. She stopped in front of a Vietnamese television camera and said something I wrote in my notebook: "We did not play this match to prove anything to the world. We played it so that the little girls at home could see that this is possible." That is everything that needs to be said about the meaning of the 2026 World Cup for Vietnamese women's football. Not the score. Not the group. The image. On the day of the men's football festival, I quietly inserted women's records into every bulletin. I have done this for years, from my time in traditional television studios to building my own online programme. Every time I slipped a piece of news about the Vietnamese women's team into a bulletin dominated by men's matches, I knew someone would be annoyed. But I also knew someone would remember. And that is how change begins. Not through a grand campaign. Through small persistence. At 56, I still ask one question: where are women scoring in this game? The answer, for Vietnamese women's football, is becoming clearer. They score in forgotten moments. In training sessions under unideal conditions. In seasons played with no one watching. In defeats where they still stood upright. And in the children who, after watching a match on television, decide they want to play too. The pandemic went silent, the dressing room spoke up, and I was only the one holding the microphone. I did that in the hardest years, when tournaments were cancelled and Vietnamese women's players lost their meagre incomes. Back then, no bulletin reported on them. No sponsor called to ask after them. And I realised that is exactly why listening matters more than commenting. A football nation can only mature when it has someone listening to its own story, before trying to tell that story to others. What I want to say to Vietnamese readers, who are following women's football with growing interest, is this. The 2026 World Cup milestone is not a destination. It is a starting point. What happens next will determine whether that moment becomes a landmark in the history of Vietnamese women's football, or merely a brief memory buried by indifference returning. And indifference does not return naturally. It is nourished by silence. Because when no one writes about something, it gradually ceases to exist in the collective consciousness. I will keep writing about Vietnamese women's football. Not because it is a duty. Because it is the right thing. And because, across more than thirty years in this profession, I have learned that the most remarkable stories are usually the ones never told. Vietnamese women's football is one of them. It waited a long time to be told. And now, at last, it has someone listening.