Vietnamese football needs an anchor.
From a youth football perspective, the failure of the Vietnam U16 team at the Southeast Asian U16 Championship is nothing to make a fuss about, even the heavy defeat against Indonesia in the bronze medal match. But the feeling of disappointment is real, and it's not good for Vietnamese football at this time.
One could say that the image and belief in Vietnamese football is like a rudderless ship in a storm. If left to drift, the ship risks being wrecked. It needs an anchor to keep everything in place, waiting for the storm to pass.
We had hoped the U23 team would improve after coach Troussier's departure, but at the U23 Asian Championship, the team led by coach Hoang Anh Tuan also performed unsuccessfully.
Hope is once again pinned on new head coach Kim Sang Sik, but after two matches in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, the performance has fallen far short of expectations, given the limited time the South Korean coach has had.
Naturally, hope has shifted back to the youth teams, and as we've seen, the situation isn't looking good; in fact, a sense of pessimism has returned.
It's safe to say the current situation is no different from the 2012-2013 period, when Vietnamese football was at its lowest point in every aspect. The V-League witnessed a "transfer" to wealthy club owners, and the national teams suffered crushing defeats at the SEA Games and AFF Cup. During that terrible time, the Vietnam U19 team created a breath of fresh air with a generation of players from the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Arsenal JMG academy.
Their starting point was also at the Southeast Asian U19 Championship, and although they lost to Indonesia in the final, the important thing was the passionate performance of the young players that changed everything. From just a breeze, they created waves of belief that kept surging, rising higher and higher.
We tend to rush to victories to restore fan confidence, but the lesson from 2014 shows that this "anchor" isn't necessarily about achievements.
In the international U19 four-team tournament held in Ho Chi Minh City in 2015, the U19 team also suffered a crushing defeat against their European opponents, but that did not affect the positive impact they had at that time.
The "U19 fever" was even bigger. At a time when confidence was at its lowest point, sometimes just playing entertaining football was more than enough for the fans.
Perhaps this is exactly what Vietnamese football needs right now. We are in a phase where progress is difficult, but decline is incredibly easy. The process of preparing for the next generation of players is facing serious problems. Fairly speaking, only the national team still has prospects for improving its performance, possessing players from the "golden generation," while the youth teams have stagnated. The match against Indonesia in the U16 tournament showed that our players are inferior in physique, weak in tackling, and lacking in technique, not to mention tactical thinking. This situation is occurring in both the U19 and U23 teams. To change anything, it will certainly require a lot of time and new methods, including a new coaching system for the youth teams.
Unfortunately, a similar U19 success story will not be repeated. Simply put, the number of our youth football training centers has not increased, only decreased. A place specializing in training players to "play football" like Hoang Anh Gia Lai no longer exists, while our youth football league system has too few matches, further contributing to the development of young players who are more focused on achieving results rather than simply "playing football."
They have no space to find joy, and therefore there can be no joy for the fans either.
Now, however reluctant we are, our only hope rests on coach Kim Sang Sik.
