From My Dinh to Rajamangala: Vietnam Football's 2026-2028 Window

Hanoi, the evening of 26 March 2026. My Dinh Stadium was not full, but the sighs were. Vietnam lost 0-3 to Indonesia at home — a second defeat to the same opponent in five days, after a 0-1 loss in Jakarta. When the referee blew the final whistle, Philippe Troussier walked straight down the tunnel without looking back at the stands. Two months later, the Vietnam Football Federation terminated his contract.

Eight months after that night in Hanoi, in Bangkok, a Korean named Kim Sang-sik stood motionless on the touchline at Rajamangala Stadium. Vietnam had just beaten Thailand in the second leg of the 2026 ASEAN Cup final, closing out the tie 5-3 on aggregate. It was the national team's third title, after 2026 and 2026.

I watched from six thousand kilometres away, in front of a screen in Chengdu, aged 67. The empty seats still sing, because memory is a form of support too. But what I remember most from that night is not the trophy. It is the feeling that one cycle had just closed, and another — shorter, tighter, far less forgiving — had just opened.

Why the possession project collapsed

In February 2026, the VFF signed Philippe Troussier. He arrived with a clear project: pull Vietnamese football away from its fast, physical, wing-based counter-attacking model and move the national team toward possession, tempo control and a crowded midfield.

In principle, the direction was right. Southeast Asian football cannot live on counter-attacks forever. But a possession project needs three things Vietnam did not have in sufficient supply: time, midfielders who can play under pressure, and a domestic league that produces those midfielders consistently.

V.League 1 is not an academy. For many seasons, the leading clubs have chosen short-term fixes: buy foreign strikers, funnel the ball to them, and let domestic midfielders play safe. Promoted to the national team, those players meet a demand they never faced at club level — receiving on the half-turn, escaping the press, distributing under pressure from Japan or Iraq.

The calendar waits for no one. AFC qualifying for the 2026 World Cup runs on FIFA windows, a few days of camp at a time. A project that needs two years to take shape was audited after two months. The result was a run of defeats, and the night at My Dinh was the full stop.

In May 2026, Kim Sang-sik arrived. In Korea, he had led Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors to the 2026 K League 1 title. He is not famous for a purist philosophy. He is famous for knowing what he has.

What Kim Sang-sik fixed

Kim did not rebuild from zero. He changed the order of priorities.

First, he returned the team to a familiar structure: three centre-backs, two wing-backs, and a front two. The system is not new, but it fits what Vietnamese players are taught as children. Then came transition speed — win the ball, go forward in three or four passes rather than circulating it sideways.

The second point was more personal. Kim recalled players the previous project had pushed to the margins. Nguyen Quang Hai, once the centre of the team at the 2026 AFF Cup, returned in a free role behind the striker. Do Hung Dung reclaimed the anchor position. Que Ngoc Hai, at 31, led the back line with his voice more than his legs.

The third point was a contested decision: using naturalised striker Nguyen Xuan Son. A player born in Brazil in 2026, capped after completing naturalisation, became the primary spearhead. For fans, he solved a striker problem that had lasted nearly a decade. For sceptics, he was evidence that Vietnamese football still cannot produce its own number nine.

I rewatched the second leg of the final three times in the following fortnight. What stood out was not the highlight-reel moments. It was how Vietnam defended the opening minutes of the second half, when Thailand pushed bodies forward needing a goal to stay alive. Vietnam dropped the block deep, kept the distance between the three lines under fifteen metres, and surrendered possession entirely. That is the choice of a team that knows it cannot win by holding the ball.

Set pieces became a weapon again, after nearly two years in which they had almost vanished from the scoring list. Corners, free kicks at the edge of the box, headers at the far post — the part of football no coach should be embarrassed to use.

What the trophy does not say

This is where I want to slow down, because I have followed Vietnamese football through enough cycles to notice a pattern: every Southeast Asian title Vietnam wins is misread.

In 2026, the title was read as the start of a golden generation. Ten years later, it was still the start. In 2026, the title was read as the product of a special cohort, the U23 side that reached an Asian final in Changzhou. Four years on, most of that cohort was still the framework, only older.

The 2026 ASEAN Cup risks repeating exactly that loop. A trophy arrives, and people call it a comeback. But a Southeast Asian title is a lagging indicator. It confirms what has already happened; it does not forecast what comes next.

The calendar says more than any review.

In December 2026, the SEA Games take place in Thailand. The men's football tournament is U22. The Vietnam squad there will not include Do Hung Dung, Que Ngoc Hai or Nguyen Tien Linh. The burden falls on Bui Vi Hao, Nguyen Dinh Bac and a group of players born after 2026 whom most fans know only from a handful of V.League appearances.

Meanwhile, the senior team must still play the 2026 ASEAN Cup and Asian qualifiers. Two calendars running in parallel, two different squads, one talent pipeline.

This is the biggest blind spot in Vietnamese football right now. The 2026 ASEAN Cup title confirms the quality of a generation that is passing, and simultaneously obscures the gap left by the generation that follows. That gap is not about talent. It is about minutes.

In V.League 1, a 19-year-old who wants 1,500 minutes a season must compete with two foreign attacking slots and a naturalised striker. At ambitious clubs, pressure for results pushes coaches toward the safe option. The consequence is a cohort reaching 22 with far fewer top-flight minutes than Nguyen Quang Hai's cohort had at the same age.

There is another reading, and I think it is the truer one. Kim Sang-sik's decision to recall the veterans is not tactical laziness. It is a rational response to a fact: the supply of high-quality young players is narrower than it was in 2026-2026. When you have no better option, you use what you have. And when you use what you have, you win Southeast Asia but go no further in Asia.

In China, where I have worked for more than thirty years, the story ends almost identically. China's national team also chose a possession project under a foreign coach, also failed in qualifying, also returned to experienced players. The difference is scale: China has tens of millions of recreational players and still does not produce enough midfielders who can dictate tempo. Vietnam's population is dozens of times smaller. The problem belongs to no one in particular, and it will not be solved by a single contract.

Based on my experience covering matches since 2026, I have drawn one conclusion: small football nations usually win through identity and lose by imitation. Vietnam's identity is speed, stamina, collective spirit and set pieces rehearsed until they are muscle memory. When the national team returns to those things, it wins. When it tries to become a different team, it loses itself for two years.

The 2026-2028 window

I do not believe in long-term plans written after a title. I believe in the fixture list, because the fixture list does not lie.

Between now and 2028, Vietnamese football passes at least four milestones: the SEA Games in Thailand in 2026 with its U22 limit, the 2026 ASEAN Cup with the senior team, Asian qualifying, and a new World Cup qualifying cycle beginning in 2027.

Those four milestones cannot be met with a single framework. They demand two squads of adequate quality running in parallel, and they demand that V.League pays the price — by opening slots for young players, accepting dropped points, accepting a few bad seasons.

That is the kind of decision nobody wants to sign. The pitch never betrays anyone; people simply forget that it also knows how to embrace. It embraces even the seasons you accept losing in order to build.

I write this at 69, more than two thousand kilometres from My Dinh. I have watched Vietnamese football pass through afternoons spent waiting in front of old loudspeakers, through the nights in Changzhou, through the empty seats of the pandemic season. At 69, I have learned that the world still runs faster than I do, but memory always stands still.

And I wonder: if the 2026 ASEAN Cup was the final chapter of one generation, who writes the first chapter of the next — and how many minutes will they have on the ball before that question is answered?