Going Away to Come Back, Coming Back to Go Further: Lessons from Vietnamese Football's Overseas Chapter

One late afternoon in late 2026, I stood by the auxiliary pitch of a youth training center in Hanoi. The U.21 team session had just ended. The players had gone to the dressing room, but one young forward remained on the field, alone, shooting at an empty goal. I counted eleven shots that missed the frame. Nobody yelled at him. He threw his boots to the ground, sat down, and held his head in his hands. No camera captured the moment. That evening I wrote a short line on social media: “Who among us has never thrown his boots after training? He needs us, not a judgment.” Less than a day later, he scored three goals in a friendly match. Some might call that a young player recovering from a mental crisis. But I could not help seeing in him a mirror of an entire Vietnamese football generation: what they need is not harsh criticism or cold analytics, but room to breathe, a tolerant enough stand so they dare to fail a ninth or tenth time before they finally succeed. People often remember Vietnamese football through its glorious achievements: the 2026 AFC U-23 Asian Cup final run in Changzhou, the 2026 AFF Cup title, or the quarterfinal run at the 2026 Asian Cup. Those are heroic pages written by what many call the “golden generation” — players born in the 1990s who grew up in the academies of Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Hanoi T&T, Song Lam Nghe An, and Viettel. They lifted Vietnamese football to a stature the region had never seen. They made all of Asia pay attention. They turned My Dinh and Hang Day stadiums into seas of red, where applause and drums never stopped. Then, at some point, some of them faced the biggest question of their careers: go or stay. Should they go abroad, or remain inside the comfortable zone of the V.League, where they were adored, well paid, and treated like stars? The answers given by Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Quang Hai, and Doan Van Hau created a chapter full of turbulence and messages that I think we still have not fully understood. Over nearly a decade following Vietnamese and Southeast Asian football, I have seen how passionately fans welcomed every overseas signing. Cong Phuong went to Japan to join Mito Hollyhock in 2026, then returned. He tried the K League 1 with Incheon United in 2026, then Sint-Truiden in Belgium the same year, and later Yokohama FC in Japan in 2026. Quang Hai signed for Pau FC just months after Pau survived relegation in Ligue 2 for the 2026-23 season, in a transfer that media everywhere chased. Doan Van Hau went to the Netherlands to play for SC Heerenveen on a contract widely seen as a turning point for a young defender. Every departure filled fan forums with hopeful lines: “Vietnamese football is ready to export players.” Every return brought sighs and reproaches that they had not been persistent enough, not brave enough to compete abroad. If you look closely at the actual minutes played, however, it is clear the story is not simple. Quang Hai’s statistics in Europe were very sparse, almost heartbreakingly modest. Van Hau fought through injuries and never had a sustained run in the side. Cong Phuong, despite some appearances in Japan, could not establish himself as a consistent starter at clubs with higher tactical foundations. If you read only the spreadsheets, anyone would be entitled to write: “Why Vietnamese players fail abroad?” But I am someone who has sat in press rooms, stood outside training grounds, and listened to the players themselves and to the people around them. And I have realized that we have been asking the wrong question all along. The question should not be: “Why did they fail?” but rather: “What did they bring back from the journey?” First of all, there is one thing no statistic can measure: awareness of the tempo of elite football. When a Vietnamese player first trains alongside teammates in Europe or Japan, the first shock is not physical strength, but processing speed. In the V.League, a midfielder can receive the ball, lift his head, look around, and then decide where to pass. In an advanced football environment, that third of a second does not exist. The ball arrives; the decision must already be made before it reaches your feet. Training sessions at Pau or Heerenveen are designed to force players to operate in tight spaces, under direct pressing pressure, and with absolute requirements of precision. The first time Quang Hai went through a full training week in Europe, he told me in a private conversation that he felt “like running on tracks that were already laid down — and if you do not keep up, you will be left behind.” That fear of being left behind can frighten a young man. But it can also become the most valuable lesson in the cruelty of top-level football. These overseas stints also exposed a truth rarely stated at home: the physical gap and the gap in reading the game when Vietnamese players perform at high intensity. I remember a national team match during the 2026 World Cup qualifiers. Vietnam faced Indonesia, a team that had invested heavily in naturalized and physically imposing players. In the first half, Vietnam moved the ball well. In the second half, when Indonesia raised the tempo and pressed high, Vietnam’s passes began to slow. Not because they lacked technique, but because they lacked the habit of making decisions in shrinking spaces and compressed time. That is the distance between a team trained in a V.League environment and a team whose players compete across European leagues. That distance cannot be closed by tactical drills on paper. It can only be narrowed when players live, breathe, and make mistakes in a faster football environment. I am not judging the players who chose to return. On the contrary, I understand their reasons very well. The V.League has its own pull. The salaries that clubs like Cong An Hanoi, Hanoi FC, and Thep Xanh Nam Dinh offer their stars are competitive, if not higher, than what a young player might receive at a small European club. Abroad, they face language, culture, and climate pressure. They have to organize their own daily lives, accept that no fans will surround them after training, face terrible loneliness in empty apartments, and scroll through angry comments from home during a sleepless night. I once watched a young player video-call his family after going unused in a match. He smiled and told his mother everything was fine, then hung up and cried alone for a very long time. People see only his smile in training clips, not the inner torment. Stars also know hunger and loneliness in front of a keyboard, and they fear the judgment of those who once loved them most. We must honestly acknowledge that the V.League is turning into a comfort trap. A good player can live well, be loved, and face no pressure to improve. At a top V.League club, a central midfielder can hold the ball for two or three seconds without pressure. He can play safe passes and receive praise from the coaching staff. He can score from set pieces and be flattered by the media. In a harsher league, two misplaced passes in a row could cost him his spot the very next match. Without a strong enough platform that constantly pushes players beyond their limits, the V.League will keep producing players who are “good at home” — who perform well when opponents grant them time, but shut down the moment intensity rises. So what did the golden generation do to break that trap? The answer may surprise many: they turned their stints abroad into a unique school, not only for themselves, but also for everyone watching. When Cong Phuong returned after his months in Belgium, he was no longer a player who ran a lot but lacked precision in his final decisions. He had learned to move more intelligently inside the box, to choose positions to receive the ball between two center-backs, and above all to face the pressure of being treated as a star while not playing. When Quang Hai returned from Pau FC, despite limited playing time, his passing rhythm and field vision had become visibly quicker than before departure. Those details are very small. In football, small details often make the greatest difference. At Pau, many sessions were held in tight grids requiring two-touch circulation and constant calling in French. Quang Hai could not speak French; he had to learn to communicate with his eyes, with his body, and by scanning his teammates before receiving the ball. After six months, his reading of the game had changed dramatically. This leads me to another important observation: the golden generation, after their travels, became “interpreters” of football culture for their own teammates. In the national team dressing room, when a young player panics under the pressure of a big match, those who have tasted harshness abroad are the ones who will approach him and say: “Stay calm — I have been through worse than this.” They become the bridge between international experience and V.League reality. They understand that a match can be decided not by the scoreline, but by the silence between two passes, by how a team keeps its breath when squeezed. The next generation — players born in the 2000s or after — is inheriting an invisible legacy built by their elders: the understanding that the gap to world football is not infinite, and that a Vietnamese player can compete if he is willing to endure the hardest days. Nguyen Thai Son, Nguyen Dinh Bac, Bui Vi Hao, Phan Tuan Tai, and many other young names have grown up in modern football, with better physiques and earlier exposure to advanced methods. They are products of the transition era that the golden generation opened. Yet I still see a great gap in mindset. We still treat going abroad as a referendum on an individual’s class. If a player succeeds abroad, he is a star. If he fails, he is a pretender. This view makes young players afraid to go. They are afraid of being labeled failures, of being compared with their elders, of losing their place in the national team. Meanwhile, advanced football nations do not view an overseas move as a short-term success or failure. They view it as one step in a long journey. A Japanese player may go to Germany and spend a season in the reserve team before being promoted. Nobody calls it a failure; he is adapting. A Korean player may start at a small European club before moving upward. They do not scrutinize every single match as if it were a verdict. The difference lies in how one perceives risk and time. If we keep treating an overseas move as a gamble, few Vietnamese players will dare step outside their comfort zone. This brings me to a view that may be contrarian: the golden generation’s overseas stints, even the supposedly failed ones, were actually some of the smartest, cheapest investments Vietnamese football has ever made. The cost of a loan or a modest salary at a Japanese, Korean, or European club is small compared with what a player learns about training culture, daily discipline, and match tempo. If we viewed each trip as a short training course, its result should not be measured by appearances but by the player’s growth upon returning. And to me, that growth was clearly demonstrated by the 2026 ASEAN Championship victory, when a Vietnam side led by many players who had experienced foreign environments knew how to stand firm under the weight of finals and how to keep a stable rhythm through the whole tournament. In the second leg of the ASEAN Championship 2026 final at Rajamangala, as Thailand pushed forward and thousands of home fans created a furious atmosphere, I noticed the calmness of the Vietnamese players. They did not rashly clear the ball. They kept their rhythm, passed short, moved constantly, and waited for the space to open. From the stands, you could attribute that to the coaching staff’s tactical calculation. But I knew that calmness could not have been built in a single month of training. It came from a long accumulation of experience: from defeats at major tournaments, from public criticism for playing too safely, and from living inside football cultures harsher than the V.League. The rhythm of a match does not live in the score; it lives in the silence between two passes. At Rajamangala that night, amidst tens of thousands of screaming people, the silence of the Vietnamese players was what shaped the final result. There is one image from the pandemic period that I will never forget. When stadiums were forced to close and matches were played without crowds, I witnessed groups of Vietnamese fans in Shanghai, where I live, opening laptops together to watch livestreams of the national team. They could not go to the stadium. But they wore red shirts with yellow stars, taped flags onto their screens, and sang anthems together in a small room. When a player scored, they jumped and hugged each other as if they were standing on the terraces of My Dinh. The match had no spectators, yet I could hear applause from small screens. That experience taught me that Vietnamese football is sustained not only by what happens on the pitch, but also by the powerful faith of millions following from afar. That faith is why every young player who dares to test himself abroad deserves respect, no matter the result. I am not writing this to defend unsuccessful trips or to blindly praise overseas moves. I want to see a transformation of mindset within our football culture. If we only sit at home and analyze statistics, if we continue to treat the fact that a Vietnamese player cannot consistently start in Europe as a humiliation, then we will never be patient enough to build generations who can compete at the highest level. A player needs to go abroad not only to succeed, but also to fail, to understand what he still lacks, and to return with a greater hunger. There are apologies that do not require forgiveness, only a stadium wide enough to be tolerant. When a player returns from an imperfect journey, the first thing we should say is not “I told you so,” but “What did you learn?” The answer may well determine the future of Vietnamese football. The golden generation has walked such journeys. They may not have become European stars as fans once hoped. But they brought back something far more important: a cognitive map of what needs to be done to take Vietnamese football further. The map shows that Vietnamese players have good technique and good spirit, but need to be trained in an environment with higher tempo, fiercer competition, and professionalism in every meal, every sleep, and every training session. The map shows that the V.League alone cannot take Vietnam to the World Cup. The only path is a multi-layered ecosystem: a strong domestic league, modern youth academies, and a policy that encourages young players to experience international environments, even for one season, even at the cost of bitter defeats. The distance between millions of waiting fans and a World Cup berth cannot be erased overnight. It must be narrowed step by step through every journey, every mistake, and every lesson. In June 2026, when the world’s top teams gather in North America for the first 48-team World Cup, the hearts of Vietnamese fans will surely pulse with every image broadcast on television. Some will feel regret; some will dream about the day the red flag with the yellow star appears on the game’s grandest stage. But that dream can only come true when we stop looking backward and begin believing in the generations rising every day. The next generation is out there, somewhere in youth training centers, on sun-scorched pitches, in small rooms where boys watch foreign games and wonder why they have not made it yet. Between lifeless transfer numbers, I find the beating of a heart. That heart is beating in the chests of boys who dare to dream and who dare to leave their safe zones. The only question left is whether we can be tolerant enough to let them fail, patient enough to let them grow, and trusting enough to keep the rhythm with them, one more half, until the door to the World Cup finally opens.