Vietnamese Youth Football: Smooth Pitches, Thin Coaching

A March afternoon in Van Giang, Hung Yen. PVF's training ground has no spectators. A group of U15 players runs a three-man combination drill on turf as flat as a carpet. I stand outside the touchline, close enough to hear the ball roll — one, two, pass — and far enough to see the whole shape of the drill. The coach walks parallel to the line, a clipboard in hand, occasionally stopping to shift a small square on his diagram. Nobody shouts. No long blast of a whistle cuts across the session.

An empty stadium makes everything audible. When the ground is empty, the roll of the ball becomes data. I listen and I write it down.

Over the past seven years I have sat at youth training grounds from Gia Lai down to Ho Chi Minh City, from Hung Yen into Da Nang. The scene repeats almost intact: better turf, better-equipped gyms, cleaner dormitories. The slowest thing to change is the one at the centre of everything — the person standing on the touchline.

The infrastructure boom in Vietnamese youth football started early. In 2026, the Hoang Anh Gia Lai – JMG Academy opened in Gia Lai on the Jean-Marc Guillou model, and its first intake produced names that would become pillars of the national game: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan. A year later, in 2026, the Vietnam Football Talent Development and Investment Fund — known as PVF — was founded, moving to its new base in Van Giang, Hung Yen, in 2026 with a multi-pitch complex.

Alongside them came the youth centres of better-resourced clubs: Viettel, Hanoi, Song Lam Nghe An, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, and later Nutifood under a partnership with JMG in Ho Chi Minh City. On the governance side, the Vietnam Football Federation runs a coaching licence system benchmarked to the Asian Football Confederation, from the D, C, B and A certificates up to the Pro licence.

Look at the infrastructure and the picture is bright. Look at the pipeline that trains the people behind it, and the picture has a long crack running down it.

What produces players is not the pitch; it is the number of quality coaching hours. That is the line I keep writing in my notebook after every trip. A beautiful natural pitch does not, by itself, create the ability to scan space. A gym full of machines does not, by itself, teach how to hold distance between two lines. Those things come from the person who designs the session, the person on the touchline who stops the drill at exactly the thirtieth second.

At many Vietnamese youth centres, that person is usually a former player. They bring valuable playing experience, but playing experience and teaching ability are two different things. A midfielder with three hundred V.League appearances can feel very well when to pass, but teaching a fourteen-year-old to see the gap before the ball arrives requires a different skill set: breaking drills down, setting constraints, reading errors and correcting them individually.

I asked a young coach at a southern academy about his most recent session. He described the three-man pressing drill in detail, how he wanted his players to force the pass wide. Then I asked where he had learned it. He went quiet for a few seconds and said: "I watched it online."

He was not lying. He was doing what a great many people inside this system are doing: teaching themselves in silence.

The licence framework exists. Asia's D, C, B, A and Pro certificate ladder is designed to standardise competence. The problem lies in throughput and in the gap between the classroom and the pitch. A course lasting a few weeks cannot replace years of guided observation. On top of that, the number of Vietnamese coaches holding a Pro licence — the top level, mandatory to lead at the continent's elite competitions — remains modest against the real demand of a football nation with dozens of active youth centres.

The consequence of that mismatch shows up on the pitch, in moments few people notice.

I have re-watched footage of many Vietnam youth matches over the past three years. One pattern repeats: Vietnamese youth players handle tight spaces well. They receive under pressure, turn, keep the ball. Close-range individual technique is a clear strength, and it is the direct product of dense technical sessions from a young age.

But when the game changes state — the instant the ball is lost and the team must defend immediately — the structure tends to break. The distance between midfield and defence stretches. The player nearest the ball charges in on instinct while the rest of the block does not shift with him. One through-ball and everything collapses.

That is a coaching problem, not a talent problem. Tight-space technique can be taught through volume of sessions. Transition defending must be taught through the quality of session design, by recreating the loss of possession hundreds of times under controlled conditions, and through a shared language the whole team understands.

That shared language is what I do not find much of at Vietnamese academies. Each centre has a former player as technical director, and each brings his own idea of football. When he leaves, the idea leaves with him. No blueprint is written down as a document; no internal curriculum is updated intake after intake. Method passes from person to person, and like everything passed on by word of mouth, it wears thin over time.

Tactics are not magic. It is just that someone looked a little longer.

On my most recent trip to an academy in central Vietnam, I brought a stack of paper. I do not draw with an app; I draw by hand, as I did in 2026. I sat in the small stand through a two-hour session, sketching the positions of ten players in the transition drill, marking every time the gap between two lines exceeded what the coach had asked for. The result was not in a final figure. The result was in the head coach, after looking at the drawing, admitting he had never measured that distance in two years of work.

I draw no conclusion from a single session. I only record a small fact: the tool for fixing the error was already within reach, but nobody had handed it to him.

The crowd waits for the star; I look at the space behind him. In youth football, the star is the final product, while the space is the process. When an intake graduates, people count how many made the first team. Few count what their coaches learned over those four years, how many bad habits they corrected, how many new drills they built that could be reused for the next intake.

The value of an academy lies not in its first graduating class, but in its ability to produce the eleventh without needing luck.

In recent years a new wave has appeared: former internationals opening academies bearing their own names. That is understandable, and in some way an encouraging signal. But I do not read these projects through the reputation of the founder; I read them through three unglamorous questions: who pays the grassroots coaches, how are those coaches trained, and is the curriculum written down.

In most cases I have looked into, the third answer is no. An academy named after a former star is often strong in communications and thin in technical documentation. Children are recruited, trained, filmed for social media, but no internal curriculum is independently audited. This is the biggest blind spot in Vietnamese youth football: the system trusts the brand of the teacher more than the process of teaching.

When brand becomes the criterion, money flows towards facilities — because facilities photograph well — rather than towards coach education, because a workshop for twenty people produces no image to post.

The paradox is this: the academies with the finest pitches are often the ones most likely to overlook investing in the people standing on them. A new pitch can be completed in eighteen months and has an opening day. A generation of properly trained grassroots coaches takes ten years and has no opening day at all. Between those two options, most of the resources in Vietnam choose the first.

I do not think former internationals opening academies is wrong. The issue is not their motives but the incentive structure around them. In Vietnam today, no mechanism rewards an academy for producing a good coach. There is no award, no ranking, no public index that measures teaching quality instead of counting exported players. When rewards come only from things that can be seen, people invest in things that can be seen.

In the first half of the next match, I will not count the passes of Vietnam's youth teams. I will count how often the gap between two lines exceeds fifteen metres when the ball is lost, and how many times a coach stands up to adjust positions rather than letting the game drift. It is a small measurement anyone can make with a sheet of paper and a pen. If that number falls over the next few years, Vietnamese youth football is on the right road. If it stays the same, better turf will change nothing.