Nguyen Xuan Son, the Empty Seats and Vietnamese Memory Seen from Sao Paulo

In Sao Paulo, the final kicked off in the morning. I sat in my small apartment, listening to the whistle drift out of the phone propped sideways on the table, and wondered why my heart was racing so hard when I was more than sixteen thousand kilometres from Rajamangala Stadium. Nguyen Xuan Son — the boy born in Brazil, raised on Brazilian football, who then chose to wear Vietnam's red shirt — stood over the ball. I watched how he planted his standing foot, how he took one long breath, and I understood something simple: this story reaches beyond the frame of a naturalised player. It is a meeting of two stretches of memory, between a Brazilian learning to love Vietnam and a Vietnamese abroad learning to miss home through a phone screen.

That night, Vietnam beat Thailand to win the 2026 ASEAN Championship. A whole nation poured into the streets. In Hanoi, in Saigon, in Da Nang, people honked until they were hoarse, people sang, people wept. I rewatched those clips around midday Brazilian time, and while scrolling past hundreds of status updates I came across a photo of a V.League stand, empty, from a matchday two weeks earlier. The two images sat side by side in the same feed. On one side, tens of thousands of people; on the other, plastic seats lined up neatly like a classroom after the bell. I asked myself: which is the true face of Vietnamese football?

That question has followed me through years of covering football in Brazil, where football is religion, where every match at the Maracana or the Morumbi is a ritual of tens of thousands of people. But when I look home, I see a different picture, one I am forced to describe with both tenderness and bare truth. Vietnamese football lives on two heartbeats. The first is the national team — the explosive one, the one that makes a whole country hold its breath at every AFF Cup or World Cup qualifier. The second is the V.League — the domestic championship, where real matches are still played every weekend, by real people, in stands that are usually emptier than outsiders imagine.

The paradox of Vietnamese football lies in how rarely those two heartbeats beat together. The national team is loved so much that people will stay up all night, pour into the streets, cry as if it were a family matter. Yet the clubs those same internationals play for week in, week out, struggle with modest crowds, low broadcast revenue, and wage debts that the press only occasionally mentions. A player can be a national hero in January and return to a stadium holding a few thousand people in March. That contrast is not unique to Vietnam — it is the story of most Southeast Asian football nations — but in Vietnam it is denser, more painful, because the love for the national team is so large that the gap with the domestic league is proportionally wide.

In the Asian qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, Vietnam reached the third round — a milestone worth celebrating — only to face opponents superior in every department, such as Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia. Those matches exposed the distance between Vietnamese football and the continent's leading group, and laid bare an uncomfortable truth: a national team can spring a surprise in a single game, but to sustain a level across a long campaign it needs a firmer foundation — and that foundation has to come from the domestic league. A strong national team cannot grow out of a weak league. This is the link fans often forget when they look only at the red shirt.

When it comes to money, Vietnamese football is a small economy running on faith. Most V.League clubs depend on sponsorship from local businesses and backing from provincial authorities. Ticket revenue makes up only a small share of total income; broadcast rights, the backbone of European football, remain modest here. When a company withdraws, an entire club can wobble within months. I once spoke with a club administrator, and he told me something I have never forgotten: "Here, we run football on passion first, and only then do we think about the bills." Passion is beautiful, but bills do not wait for anyone.

The running of the competition is entrusted to the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF), under the management of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF). The model aims to separate commercial governance from administrative management, but in practice the line between the two is sometimes blurred. V.League broadcast rights have been a subject of argument for years, and how revenue is shared among clubs remains an open question. A league can only grow sustainably when clubs have a genuine voice in deciding their own fate.

The club licensing standards of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) set requirements on facilities, finance, youth development and organisation. That is the objective yardstick by which a professional league can examine itself. Vietnam has made progress in applying these standards, but the gap between rules on paper and reality on the pitch persists. A club can meet the administrative requirements to enter the competition while its training ground floods in the rainy season, and its wage budget is so thin that every injury to a key player becomes a financial ache. Club licensing is not just paperwork; it is a mirror. And that mirror, looked at squarely, reflects a football nation that is growing up but has not yet fully grown.

But if I looked only at numbers, I would betray myself. What makes me love Vietnamese football is not a balance sheet; it is the people on the margins. I remember one afternoon a few years ago, when I was back home and dropped into a stadium in the north on a V.League matchday. The stands were sparse. But outside the gate, an old woman selling tea had sat there for thirty years, and she told me about the matches she had witnessed, the generations of players whose faces she remembered. She did not remember scorelines. She remembered who cried, who laughed, who brought a child to watch for the first time. In her memory, football is not a sport; it is the chronicle of a neighbourhood.

Then I think of the stadium guard. I think of the people sweeping leaves off the stands after the final whistle, when the floodlights have dimmed and only the sound of brooms on concrete remains. They are the quiet keepers of the pitch's heartbeat. When the national team wins, no one calls their names. When the V.League stands are empty, they are the ones who still show up, still do their work, still believe someone will come to watch tomorrow. Vietnamese football is kept alive not only by the stars on the pitch, but by the people working in silence at the edge of the frame. And I believe that if you want to understand a football nation, you have to start with those people.

There is another figure I always remember: an elderly man in Hanoi who had followed his local club for forty years. He told me Vietnamese football had gone through many loops — winning then losing, hoping then despairing, then hoping again. He said: "I don't need my team to be champions. I need to know that next season they are still there." That sentence left me speechless. Because in a football world where clubs can change owners, change names, even disappear, endurance itself is a victory. He did not demand glory. He only demanded presence.

I remember the atmosphere of a V.League afternoon. Outside the gate, people sell shirts, banh mi, sugarcane juice. Children scamper along the pavement in oversized jerseys bearing the name of a player they may never have seen play live. Inside, the drums of a supporters' group beat steadily, persistently, like the breathing of a body trying to stay awake. In the stands, middle-aged men sit still, eyes fixed on the pitch, a bottle of water in hand. It is a raw, plain football, without glamour, but real. And in that realness I find what globally televised matches sometimes lose: closeness.

In recent years, the V.League has welcomed more and more foreign players and coaches. Brazilians, Koreans, Japanese, Africans come here to work, to earn a living, to find an opportunity their homelands no longer offer. I look at them and see myself — the uprooted, carrying a piece of memory, trying to take root in new soil. A contract is a farewell wrapped in tracking and expectation. Some succeed, becoming local heroes. Some fail, slipping away quietly after a season, leaving a name fans will forget within months. Football is always this harsh, but in a small league the harshness shows more clearly.

At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together. And Vietnamese football teaches me that in its own way. When the national team wins, people stay together for joy. When the V.League stands are empty, people stay together out of habit, out of memory, out of a loyalty that needs no reason. Both are ways for a community to recognise itself. A loop does not exist for us to endure, but for us to catch sight of ourselves in time.

What troubles me most, watching Vietnamese football from afar, is the story of youth development. Vietnam has academies known across Asia, producing generation after generation of internationals such as Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Tien Linh and Nguyen Hoang Duc. But that talent stream hits a bottleneck: when a young player becomes good enough, he often faces a choice between staying in the V.League on modest wages and limited competition, or going abroad for opportunity. Many leave. Some return. And each time a talent departs, the domestic league loses a little more weight. This is the problem of every developing football nation: how to keep your best without losing the ability to pay. Vietnam has not solved it yet, and perhaps will not for a long time.

The question of naturalised players sits within the same current. Nguyen Xuan Son is both the most beautiful example and the most contested one. He came from Brazil, carrying the football of a country I call my second home, and became Vietnam's hero at ASEAN 2026. To me, that is a beautiful story of belonging: football can turn someone born on the other side of the planet into part of the family. But I also understand why many ask questions. If the national team increasingly depends on naturalised players, will the identity of Vietnamese football be diluted? This is a question without an easy answer. Modern football runs on the flow of people, and Vietnam is not outside that flow. What matters, perhaps, is keeping the door open just enough — wide enough to welcome those who want to belong, but not so wide as to paper over the gaps in youth development.

Women's football in Vietnam also deserves a place in this story. The women's national team once earned a ticket to the 2026 World Cup, a feat that made all of Asia look again. But as with the men's game, the national team's success does not automatically translate into the growth of the women's domestic championship. Women players still struggle with low incomes, limited facilities and a shortage of spectators. Their story is a reminder: love for the national shirt, if not nourished at club level, becomes only fleeting moments that flare and fade.

There is an aspect rarely discussed when people talk about Vietnamese football: the quality of information. In the age of social media, every transfer rumour, every coaching change, every internal dispute can spread at the speed of light, while verifying them is as slow as a cross into the box. In Brazil, I learned to distinguish between official sources, professional sports journalism and unchecked aggregator sites. In Vietnam, that tiering exists too, but it is not yet fully recognised. Fans have a right to know what is true. And a football nation can only be professional when the information about it is professional too. A league matures not only when its pitches are upgraded, but when the way people tell its story is respected.

So what is holding the V.League back? Many say it is the standard of play, the empty stands, the lack of stars. I think otherwise. I believe the problem lies in the weak bond between clubs and their local communities. In Brazil, a club is the heart of a neighbourhood, a city, a social class. People love their club like a family member, with all the fatigue and disappointment that comes with it. In Vietnam, that love is poured almost entirely into the national team, while clubs are often treated as vehicles for internationals to stay in form. When a club is not part of local identity, the stands will stay empty whether the team wins or loses. This is the blind spot of collective memory: we remember the moments the national team won, but forget that it is the Saturday nights of V.League football that keep Vietnamese football alive.

When the pitch stands empty, homes become their own grandstands. I have seen it in Vietnam: families gathered around a television, neighbours calling to each other through thin walls, cheers drifting out of narrow alleys whenever the national team scores. Without spectators, football is stripped down to a children's game and a longing. And in those moments, I realise that Vietnamese people have never stopped loving football — they simply have not found a way to love the V.League the way they love the national team.

I was born in Vietnam and grew up to the drums of football nights. That memory followed me all the way to Brazil, and every time I sit in Sao Paulo watching a V.League match on a small screen, I feel I am standing in the stadium of my childhood. People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. Vietnamese football, to me, is the story of a nation learning how to stay together — through the joy of the national team, through the sorrow of its clubs, through the empty seats and the people who stay behind after the lights go out.

So I am not worried about the future of Vietnamese football in the way people usually worry. I do not fear defeats. I fear indifference. A football nation can endure failure, but it cannot endure being forgotten. If tomorrow a child in Quang Nam or Nghe An chooses to go and watch a V.League match instead of staying home, then Vietnamese football has won a bigger game than any final. And if adults teach children that their city's club deserves love as much as the national team, then the loop will close — not with a trophy, but with a habit.

The night at Rajamangala ended with the roar of millions of Vietnamese around the world. In Sao Paulo, I turned off the phone, stepped onto the balcony, and looked at the lit city below me. I asked myself: what will remain after the roar fades? The answer, perhaps, lies in those empty seats out there — seats waiting for someone to sit down once more, not for a cup, but for love.