V.League Regular Season: The Relegation Battle Is Decided in Training Sessions Nobody Watches

The electronic clock at a stadium in central Vietnam ticked over to the 89th minute. On the touchline, a coach stood motionless, arms folded, eyes locked on the ball rolling toward the corner flag — where his left-back had just gone down, still trying to cut out a long pass. Rain fell at an angle with the wind. In the stands, a few hundred supporters stayed on their feet, without raincoats, letting the water run down their faces.

That match ended 0-0. No goals, no moment that made a thirty-second evening bulletin. But if you want to understand how the V.League is actually running in its annual regular season, you should start in the silence right after the final whistle — when the two teams bow to each other, and only then does it become visible that both of them had covered more than ten kilometres on a rainy night. One player sat down flat on the grass, hands propped behind him, chest heaving. Nobody ran over to help him up. In the V.League, you stand up on your own.

I have followed professional football for more than half a century, most of it in England, but for nearly twenty years now in Asia. The V.League is the competition I watch most each week. I write reports, but I tell destinies.

Context: a league compressed to the limit

The V.League 1 regular season still keeps its familiar shape this year: fourteen clubs, a double round-robin, and a closing stretch so tightly packed that each team plays almost every three days. The difference is that the race split early. The leading group — Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, Cong An Ha Noi, The Cong – Viettel, Hanoi FC — pulled clear with steady home wins. The bottom group — Song Lam Nghe An, SHB Da Nang, Quang Nam, Ha Tinh — clung to each other with slender points totals and goalless draws.

The gap in squad quality between the two groups is not as wide as the table suggests. What separates them is endurance. The V.League calendar is dictated by weather: fierce sun in the north early on, persistent rain in the centre mid-season, then the cold at year's end. Pitches in many provinces cannot hold a stable moisture level, so the ball bounces differently between the two halves. Add the travel — a team from Nghe An may have to fly to Binh Duong and back to Ha Noi within seven days — and you begin to see why fitness becomes the league's main currency.

I still remember afternoons sitting in the stands at Pleiku, watching young Hoang Anh Gia Lai players pass the ball under the sun, and asking myself: if the schedule stays this dense, will anyone still have the time to teach a child how to strike the ball with the inside of the foot? That question has never left me.

At many V.League clubs, the coaching staff numbers three or four people. A head coach, an assistant, a fitness coach, and sometimes one man who doubles as data analyst and translator. No separate video-analysis room, no sports psychologist, no on-call sports physician. What they have is time — and time is not enough. A session lasts ninety minutes; subtract the warm-up and the cool-down and roughly fifty minutes remain for tactics. In those fifty minutes they must prepare for a match three days away.

Core analysis: what actually decides the table

Based on my experience watching these matches, when I go back through the closing-stretch data, one pattern emerges clearly. The teams that win most are not the teams that keep the ball most. They are the teams that switch fastest after winning possession in the middle third. In the V.League, a counter-attacking goal typically takes under ten seconds and no more than four passes — markedly shorter than in European leagues, where a textbook counter can take six or seven.

The pressing numbers tell another story. The top sides post a low PPDA in the first thirty minutes, meaning they allow opponents very few passes before closing down. From the 60th minute on, that figure spikes. Not because they choose to drop off, but because their legs stop obeying. Heat and humidity collapse recovery speed, and a high-pressing team without squad depth digs its own grave in the final half hour.

What few are willing to look at squarely: in Vietnamese football, the table is not decided by how long you keep the ball, but by the quality of your set pieces and your ability to recover after the 60th minute.

Look at the numbers. In the closing stretch, the share of goals coming from set pieces — corners, free kicks, long throws — is substantial in the totals of the bottom-half clubs. The reason is practical: when fitness drains, man-marking systems lose concentration, and a corner becomes a better chance than any crafted combination. For teams that cannot afford a quality foreign striker, set pieces are the shortest road to a goal.

I once stood beside an assistant coach in a session before a derby. He spent nearly forty minutes repeating a single corner routine: three movement options, two delivery directions, and one inviolable rule — nobody touches the ball before it leaves the taker's foot. Forty minutes for one situation. That is the quiet investment no supporter ever sees, and it regularly produces the goal that decides a season.

And this is where foreign players enter. The V.League depends on foreign strikers more than any league in Southeast Asia. But that dependence is not only about goals. It is about how a team builds its game around one man: long balls forward, duels, and hope. When that striker is injured or out of form, the whole system collapses because there is no contingency — because nobody taught a contingency to a twenty-one-year-old domestic player who should have been given his chance three years ago. In the V.League, names such as Nguyen Hoang Duc, Nguyen Tien Linh or Do Hung Dung are still cited as the yardstick of domestic class, but a new generation of comparable quality has not been grown.

I have watched many matches where a side controlled possession well, produced seventeen or eighteen shots, and still put only one of them on target in the second half. That is not a tactical problem. It is a problem of fitness and concentration — two things you cannot buy with a transfer fee.

Contrarian angle: the market nobody looks at

People usually talk about the V.League in large numbers: sponsorship deals, transfer fees, foreign salaries. But there is a market few look at, and it is far more corrosive — the free-agent market. When a club brings in a player on a free transfer, the signing-on payments to the agent and to the player do not appear in the accounts the way an ordinary transfer does. It sits outside scrutiny, outside every wage cap, and outside every audit.

I am not saying this to accuse anyone. I am saying it because it explains a paradox: why so many V.League clubs report modest budgets yet still make expensive signings that do not add up. People call it the market. I call it a garden where lives are planted, and sometimes uprooted with no one writing it down.

The bigger blind spot is in youth football. At academies, the pressure for results pushes young coaches to prioritise physique over technique. An U18 who runs fast and duels hard is chosen ahead of a player who passes intelligently but is half a step slower. Ten years later, we have a generation of muscular players short on feet that think. What is lost is not a few matches, but an entire technical layer of the game.

The whirlwind of million-dollar contracts is only wind passing through. What remains, once all those whirlwinds have cleared, are the quiet training nights — where a fourteen-year-old learns to strike a ball with the inside of the foot, repeating it thousands of times, under the yellow light of an empty training pitch. Applause in an empty stadium is the most humane lie football has ever produced — but the light out there does not lie.

Takeaway

The ball does not remember who struck it, only the emotions around it.

This season's relegation battle will end in some late-afternoon match, with one team leaving the pitch in silence and one staying to celebrate under floodlights that snap on suddenly. Then next season, everything begins again. The question is not which team goes down, but whether anyone stays behind after the whistle to look back and ask why — and to teach the next group not how to score, but how to rise after conceding. The boy who once ran on a tightrope must now become a guide for new dreams. This generation passes to the next not technique, but the way you stand up after a goal against. If the V.League learns that, the regular season will stop being just a table.