After the 2026 Women's World Cup, Vietnamese Women's Football Needs a Bench That Is Heard

On August 1, 2026, at Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand, the Vietnam women's national team walked out for their final group-stage match of the FIFA Women's World Cup against the Netherlands. I was sitting in the press area, headphones straining to the English commentary, and what I remember most is not the 0-7 scoreline. It was the image of a young player rising from the substitutes' bench in the 78th minute, pulling off her jacket, running to the touchline, then being waved back to wait by the referee. She stood there, one foot on the line, three minutes stretching like three hours. When the final whistle blew, she had still never touched the ball. On the scoreboard was a dry result. But there are stories that do not begin with a goal, but from a substitutes' bench where someone is heard for the first time.

Vietnam qualified for the 2026 Women's World Cup after defeating Chinese Taipei in the Asian play-off round, held in India in February 2026. It was the first time in the history of Vietnamese women's football that the team reached the planet's biggest stage. Before that, the team had won SEA Games gold medals several times in a row. In the World Cup group stage, coach Mai Duc Chung's side was drawn in Group E with defending champions the United States, the Netherlands and Portugal. Three matches, three defeats: 0-3 to the USA, 0-2 to Portugal, and 0-7 to the Netherlands. Not a single goal scored, twelve conceded.

But behind that set of results is an entirely different story. I followed the team from their first training sessions at the training centre, where the players ate together, slept together, and shared every bottle of water. There was no dedicated nutritionist, no proper video-analysis room. Some tactical meetings took place in a hotel room with a borrowed projector. And some players still had to steal a moment to reply to family messages before dinner.

Place that result next to the reality of Vietnam's National Women's Football Championship. Each season, eight teams compete in a short competition format, usually held in a single location over a few weeks. The spectators who come are mostly players' relatives, mobilised schoolchildren, and a handful of journalists like me. A group-stage match might have only a few dozen real spectators. The income of most women players comes from subsidies paid by their parent units, not from professional wages.

The problem for Vietnamese women's football is not that they lost 0-7, but the gap between the development structure and the commercial structure — a gap that SEA Games victories cannot fill.

Tactically, the Vietnam women's team under Mai Duc Chung played a 5-4-1 shape against stronger opponents. A dense five-player defence, two wingers dropping deep, a lone striker working in isolation. Theoretically this is a reasonable choice: compress space, limit central combinations, force opponents out wide. But against the USA and the Netherlands, two sides with speed and the ability to convert chances at a completely different level, that five-storey house collapsed not because the shape was wrong, but because the materials were missing.

I stayed behind after the Netherlands match, reviewing footage in my hotel room until nearly two in the morning. What struck me was not the goals conceded, but the number of times Vietnam won the ball back in the opponent's half. It could be counted on one hand. When you defend deep for ninety minutes and cannot counter-attack, you are not defending — you are merely waiting to be attacked. Modern football punishes passivity. The Netherlands dominated possession, switching from flank to flank, and every time Vietnam's defence turned, a gap opened. The goals followed the same formula: stretch, then drill into the space between centre-back and full-back.

But if we look only at the defeats, we miss something more important. Against Portugal, a team of a far closer standard, Vietnam produced coherent attacking phases. Huynh Nhu, then playing for Lank FC in Portugal, was the only spearhead capable of holding the ball and turning under pressure. She was the first Vietnamese player to play professionally in Europe, and her presence in the Portuguese league is not merely a personal story — it is proof that Vietnamese players can adapt when placed in the right environment.

The same holds true for Nguyen Thi Tuyet Dung, who once scored two goals directly from corner kicks in a single match, a skill rare enough that the international press had to mention it. The individual technique of some Vietnamese players is by no means inferior within the region. The problem is that individual technique cannot compensate for an outdated collective system with no regular competition. A player who only plays a few weeks a year in the domestic league, with the rest filled by short training camps, will never reach the fitness and decision-making speed of world football.

People count goals. I collect the times they fell and got back up.

Here is the counter-intuitive angle I want to put on the table: Vietnamese women's football does not lack talent, nor does it lack spectator interest during major tournaments. What it lacks is a transfer market — a mechanism by which the value of a women's player is priced, contested and circulated.

The paradox lies here: every time the women's team reaches a major tournament, viewership soars. The 2026 Women's World Cup drew millions of views in Vietnam. SEA Games stadiums are always packed. But between those tournaments, there is a vast information void. No transfer news, no notable contracts, no deals strong enough to keep women's football on the sports pages. Meanwhile, a young male player who has not played fifty top-flight matches can be valued at hundreds of billions of dong. That asymmetry belongs to structure, not to morality.

The value of a player is not on the price tag, but in what they dare to demand back. For Vietnamese women's football, what they need to demand back is not the glow of a World Cup run, but a league system long enough and competitive enough that every young player competes weekly, not yearly. A wage fund sufficient that they do not have to take second jobs. A transfer mechanism so that strong teams and weak teams genuinely differ in quality, rather than sharing poverty equally.

Some say investing in women's football is not commercially viable. I see it as a self-justifying vicious circle: no investment because there are no viewers, no viewers because there is no product, no product because there is no investment. The most successful women's football leagues in the world — England, Spain, the United States — all broke that circle by deciding to invest first, not by waiting for audiences to arrive on their own.

In the longest night, I learned to listen to the breath of the empty stand. Three years after the 2026 World Cup, what I want to see is not another ticket to a major tournament, but a domestic league that lasts longer, has more teams, and draws more spectators. Because if we only learn to cry on glorious nights, we will forever forget that most of a women's player's life unfolds in silence. And the real question is not when Vietnam will score at a World Cup. The question is: when there is no World Cup, who will stay with them?