From Liberdade Looking Back at Changzhou: The Unclosed Loop of Vietnamese Football

From Liberdade Looking Back at Changzhou: The Unclosed Loop of Vietnamese Football

The small café tucked deep in an alley of São Paulo's Liberdade district was packed that night. An old television hung slightly askew on one wall, replaying Vietnam versus Indonesia in the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying. Nobody spoke loudly. Only the clink of spoons against glasses of iced milk coffee and the Vietnamese commentary drifting from a small speaker on the counter. When Indonesia scored their third, a man past fifty, in a frayed wool jacket, set his glass down very slowly and went still. He did not cry. He stared at the screen as if waiting for the referee to overturn something. After the final whistle he told me in an old Saigon accent: 'Back then we watched Changzhou here, the whole café clapped. Now nobody can clap anymore.'

I left the café close to midnight. Outside, March rain fell softly over São Paulo, dampening my shoulders. On the bus home I opened my phone, reread the scoreline, and asked myself: what has closed, and what remains open?

To understand why a café seventeen thousand kilometres from Hanoi fell so silent, we need to look back two years. In the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying in Asia, Vietnam was drawn in Group F with Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines. The team opened with a 2-0 home win over the Philippines, then lost 0-1 to Iraq away. The turning point came in March 2026: Vietnam lost 0-1 to Indonesia in Jakarta and, three days later at Mỹ Đình, lost again 0-3. It was the first time in history Indonesia had beaten Vietnam twice in a single World Cup qualifying campaign. Coach Philippe Troussier was dismissed immediately afterwards. Kim Sang-sik took over, beating the Philippines 3-2 but still losing 1-3 to Iraq, closing the second round in third place and out of the tournament.

For Vietnamese fans, the reference point is always Changzhou 2026. On a snowy night in Jiangsu province, the U23 side under Park Hang-seo reached the final of the AFC U23 Championship, losing to Uzbekistan in extra time to a long-range strike through the falling snow. Before that came a nerve-shredding penalty shootout against Qatar. That generation — Nguyễn Quang Hải, Đoàn Văn Hậu, Nguyễn Tuấn Anh, Nguyễn Công Phượng, Đỗ Duy Mạnh — became national icons. But six years later, most of them have passed twenty-eight, their physical peak behind them, and the players who should have replaced them have not arrived in sufficient numbers.

I once wrote: 'People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves.' For Vietnamese football, that story is called Changzhou — and perhaps, precisely because it was so beautiful, it became a standard the next generation could never touch.

Vietnam's decline in 2026 qualifying did not come from a single defeat. It came from three layers of problems stacked on one another: the quality of the domestic league, the youth development pathway, and a mismatch between expectation and actual resources.

In V.League 1, each club may register a maximum of three foreign players in the matchday squad, plus one naturalised Vietnamese player. The rule was designed to protect opportunities for local players. But the price paid is competitive quality. When a domestic striker faces no threat from a genuinely strong foreign signing, his motivation to improve stalls. V.League matches are noticeably slower than those in the Thai League or Indonesia's Liga 1, where foreign quotas are broader and match tempo higher. Football is a competitive environment — and competition requires someone better than you standing beside you.

Another layer lies in the development pathway. The HAGL-JMG, PVF and Viettel academies were once among the most talked-about models in Southeast Asia. But a model produces one generation, then stands still. After the Công Phượng — Tuấn Anh — Xuân Trường cohort, very few young players have moved directly from academy to national team and stayed there. Most spend several V.League seasons barely starting, then lose momentum. Meanwhile, regional rivals have sent young players to Europe, Japan or South Korea earlier — accepting that they must sit on the bench abroad in order to grow.

Alongside this sits a tactical mismatch. Philippe Troussier arrived with ambitions of building a possession-based game, but imposed it on a squad without an even technical base and without enough training time. The result was a team that lost the defensive solidity it had under Park Hang-seo while failing to generate enough attacking pressure to compensate. Kim Sang-sik later returned to a more pragmatic approach, but the window was too short to rebuild an identity. A national team cannot change its footballing philosophy in a few international windows.

The rare bright spots lie with individuals. Nguyễn Filip, a Czech-born naturalised goalkeeper, brought stability to the goal. Nguyễn Đình Bắc, a striker born in 2026, shows promise but needs a more competitive environment to develop. Nguyễn Thái Sơn and Võ Hoàng Minh Khoa are names worth watching in midfield. But individuals cannot compensate for a system. A football nation can only go far when it no longer depends on a handful of names happening to be at the right age of maturity.

In Indonesia, an aggressive naturalisation drive featuring Jay Idzes, Ragnar Oratmangoen, Rafael Struick, Thom Haye, Calvin Verdonk and Mees Hilgers produced a squad that differs radically in physicality and match experience. It lifted Indonesian football from AFF Cup contender to the third round of World Cup qualifying. This is a real model, effective in the short term, and Vietnam must look at it directly rather than turning away.

But here I want to pause for a beat. The story of 'Indonesia naturalising en masse' is becoming a stick for Vietnamese fans to beat themselves with. It is convenient, because it pushes responsibility beyond the border. The drier detail is that Indonesia has had better physicality, speed and build than Vietnam for years. What they lacked was organisation, and they have just added exactly what they lacked. Vietnam is the opposite — organised, but with a physical base being left behind. That is a problem that can be fixed through nutrition, strength programmes and the age at which professional training begins — not by blaming someone else's passport.

The blind spot in Vietnamese collective memory lies in assuming Changzhou 2026 was the norm. It was not the norm. It was the exception. A golden generation born from a single academy, under the right coach, in the right period, against opponents who had not yet prepared. An exception cannot be repeated through belief, through slogans, or by waiting for a new hero. It can only be repeated through infrastructure.

I think about this when I recall a friend, a photojournalist in Hanoi. He used to shoot V.League matches at Hàng Đẫy Stadium, where the stands crumble a little more each season. He told me: 'Young people now stream the Premier League online; they don't come out to watch the domestic game.' That remark was not bitter. It was simply a description. And that description is truer than any tactical analysis.

'A loop does not exist for us to endure, but so that we can finally see ourselves.' There was a time when Vietnamese football healed through collective memory — through nights the whole country stayed awake, through Changzhou, through Mỹ Đình. But if memory becomes a shelter rather than a starting point, the loop closes into a circle that goes nowhere. 'At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together.' And what I understood from the Vietnamese in Liberdade is this: they stay together not because they believe the team will win. They stay because the team is a piece of the homeland they carry in their jacket pocket.

On the bus that night, I remembered the man's words in the café: 'Now nobody can clap anymore.' Perhaps he was right, and perhaps he was wrong. Vietnamese football does not need another Changzhou in order to be applauded. It needs a system durable enough that sorrow stops being a full stop — so that a ten-year-old in Nghệ An today can look up and see a path, not just the medals of those who came before. The question I carried off that bus: a football nation that wants to go far — does it travel by memory, or on the legs of a generation not yet born?