Football is one of the biggest sports in all of the world and the biggest in Vietnam. Millions of kids sacrifice their lives for this wonderful sport. Some make it to the big leagues. Some realize that they are not good enough for this sport and take their talents somewhere else. This game means something to the nation. They celebrate every minor win like a World Cup victory. They treat every footballer in this nation like a god. You can tell just the love this nation has for the sport. And yet, what is the result? Millions of dollars spent on horrible facilities, never any sort of responsibility from the federation, match fixing scandals, rich clubs buying out the league and rising from the ranks as easy as 1, 2, 3. And of course, 0 World Cup qualifications. What lead to all the corruption? What lead to all the match fixing? What lead to the state that this footballing nation is now?
First we gotta know where this national team all started. Predecessor of the VFF was originally established in September 1962 in North Vietnam, as the Football Association of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Hội bóng đá nước Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hoà). Its first president was Hà Đăng Ấn, who was head of the Railway Department and had been a former football star. At that time, there was a separate football association in South Vietnam handling football in that region. Because of the division of Vietnam in 1954, association football developed separately in the two halves. The South Vietnam Federation was established in the early 1950s as the Vietnam National Football Association (VNFA, Vietnamese: Tổng cục Túc cầu Việt Nam, lit. 'General Department of Vietnamese Football') and joined FIFA and the AFC in 1964, while the predecessor of South Vietnam (State of Vietnam) had already joined FIFA in 1952 and the AFC in 1954 as the founding member.[17] Following the country’s reunification under the North in 1975, Vietnam also inherited South Vietnam’s memberships in FIFA and the AFC.
In 1989, after the Đổi Mới reforms, Vietnamese sports, including association football, began re-integrating into more international activities. In August 1989, the first Congress of the later version of the federation was held in Hanoi. At that Congress, the organization was formally declared the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF).
Vietnam was reunited on 2 July 1976 and returned to international football in 1991, when they participated in the 1991 Southeast Asian Games. They drew 2–2 against the Philippines (the hosting nation), in the first ever match played by a united Vietnam. During the 1990s-2000s, Vietnam had limited international success, mostly due to a lack of investments. Vietnamese football also suffered several corruption scandals, including the 2005 Vietnamese football match-fixing scandal.
Despite this, Vietnam made some notable performances, at the 2007 AFC Asian Cup when Vietnam shocked international football by advancing to the quarter-finals. Their 2–0 victory against the UAE was especially remarkable. The following year, Vietnam won the 2008 AFF Championship, marking a successful period for Vietnamese football, the “first golden generation” and renaissance of Vietnamese football.
Vietnamese football suffered heavy decline in 2009-2016, where they would fail to qualify for 3 Asian cups, and lose the next 4 AFF Suzuki Cups. They also could not qualify for the FIFA World Cup. Meanwhile, the Olympic team did not do well in the next few Asian Games and Southeast Asian Games.
Following the 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup, Vietnam would start to have tremendous success, after hiring Park Hang-Seo as coach. In 2018, the Vietnam national under-23 football team recorded another remarkable achievement during the 2018 AFC U-23 Championship, winning the silver medal after losing to Uzbekistan in the final, thus becoming the first Southeast Asian team to qualify for the final of an AFC tournament since 1998 when the Thailand U17 won the 1998 AFC U-17 Championship. Later that year, the Olympic team, consisting largely of players who had competed at the U-23 Championship in January, won the fourth place of the 2018 Asian Games, losing 1-3 to South Korea in the semi-final and the UAE on penalty shoot-out in the bronze medal match.
With most of these young players, Vietnam created a fever in 2019 AFC Asian Cup, in which the national team made it to the quarter-finals where they were defeated by eventual runners-up Japan with the score 0–1. Then, in the 2019 Southeast Asian Games, Vietnam won its first gold medal in men's football since 1959.
On 6 February 2022, the Vietnam women's national football team qualified for the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup for the first time.
In the 2021 Southeast Asian Games, as hosts, both the men's and women's football team successfully defended their gold medal title in front of home fans.
They also won the ASEAN Games in 2026, beating out Thailand 4-2 on aggregate in front of home fans, as well.
Now after all of these victories, how are the Vietnam national team doing? Well all those achievements sound nice while in reality, most of those victories can be taken with a pinch of salt. In the Southern Asian Games, you can only play players from U-23 and can get 2-3 specialized players (meaning players who are not U-23), just like the Olympics. Because of those Olympics style rules, most of the Southern Asian countries use that tournament for the young guys in their foreign league to grow (because it is not a FIFA approved tournament so you couldn't get players outside of SEA to compete, however there are talks of expanding with Gianni Infantino just last week and he was even there at the AFF Cup handing out awards). The same goes with all the AFF tournaments too which is why I don't take these victories seriously. Now the state of our national team is in absolute shambles. Most of the facilities are super aged (10-20 years), there have been talks of upgrading facilities but plans are expected to deliver at around 2028-29 so we know that won't come in a while. Our entire starting attack is Brazilians. Yes, I'm not exaggerating when I say this, our entire starting attack is naturalized Brazilians. It sounds so dumb when you hear it from another country like the USA or Brazil or whatever. But that is the epidemic happening in South East Asia. Anyways, it's clear that this national team has gone through hell and back and it's fans (me) have suffered through a whole lot. That's why we celebrate every small victory like a World Cup win. Even though it takes a toll on our team because they get complacent every time they win against a team even as small as Bhutan. Now if I had the balls to talk trash about this federation, I should be able to know the solution to all of their problems, huh? Actually, the solutions are incredibly simple.
1: We should pay more attention to the development of our under 23 players. Our talent pool is so much bigger than what most people imagine. As I said, Football is our god sport here in Vietnam. A lot of talent comes in this country and they give their life for the sport. That leaves room for a lot of talent. We should bank in on all these young talents and build lots and lots of top tier 5 star training facilities.
2: We should focus more on the league. Our league is easily one of the most mismanaged leagues of all time and that's not even a debate. There has literally been 5-6 match fixing scandals throughout the V-League pyramid in just the past 20 years (bonkers). Now the solution is simple. Sign more great players to improve the competition. There may not seem like a lot of good players in the wild but trust me. There are a lot more than Evanilson (no I'm not saying his stupid Vietnamese naturalized name) and Kyle Hudlin. My best targets in Free Agency is currently Mohamed Elneny, former starting CDM for Arsenal, Jeffrey Schlupp, former starting CM for Crystal Palace and Romarinho, former starting CF for Al-Ittihad. There are a lot more I can name but that is the best ones for now.
3: The final solution is just to ease the naturalization process, I know very ironic coming from the guy who doesn't support the endless cycle of naturalization in football but just stay with me for now. Because of the thousands of years of French and Chinese colonization and the Vietnam war and overall just a lot of people moving to different countries once they have got a good and stable financial background, a lot of our world-class talent are often scattered all around all sorts of countries around the globe. But our naturalization process requires a player to also play/live in Vietnam for 5 years after 18 before representing our national team. This affects a lot of the overseas talent who never truly get a chance to show their pride for their national team without throwing away their careers in the V-League. Take Jason Pendant for example, in 2019 he was one of the most hyped up prospects in the world playing for RB Salzburg and was actually willing to join our national team at that time. But because our naturalization process is so damn rigid. Instead of us getting a world class midfielder, we got a player who was already done for good and was chasing the bag. Because of it, countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and others have gotten a crazy upper edge over us because they can get players from La Liga and Serie A and other world class leagues around the globe without having to worry.
So that is it. That was the article. Thank you so much for voting "Yes" and hopefully all of you guys enjoyed the article and found it interesting. This was my biggest project and I spent ages trying to get this done.
Love you guys. Peace.