Vietnamese Football's Soft Power: Real Influence Is Decided in the Provinces

On January 5, 2026, in the final minute of stoppage time in the second leg of the ASEAN Championship final at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Nguyen Xuan Son fell and could not get up. Vietnam led Thailand 3-2, 5-3 on aggregate, and the trophy was within reach. What I remember most from the press tribune that night is the blue light of thousands of phone screens rising in the Vietnamese supporters' corner, lit before the referee even blew the final whistle. Fifteen-second clips had left Bangkok before the match ended. Nguyen Xuan Son scored twice that night, finished the tournament with seven goals and the best player award, and was carried off with a fractured fibula.

I sat there long after the stands emptied. In my notebook, I wrote about something with no connection to football at all: a film festival in Pakistan.

A film festival that travels to ten cities

The 5th European Union Film Festival in Pakistan is presented by the European Union Delegation to Pakistan and co-curated with Olomopolo Media. The programme includes sixteen European short films, eleven Pakistani short films, a documentary strand and a children's strand. The opening remarks were delivered by Dutch Ambassador Robert Jan Siegert and Austrian Deputy Head of Mission Hannes Machor; the curation was led by curator Kanwal Khoosat.

The interesting part is the city list. The event does not stop at Lahore and Karachi. It has travelled through Quetta, Gujrat, Lahore, Gilgit, Karachi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Multan and Sialkot, before closing in Jamshoro and Hyderabad in the last two days of September. It began as a single screening; it is now a multi-city tour that shows up in places a European film festival would normally never bother with.

The language the organisers use is the familiar language of cultural diplomacy: cinema crossing geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries, people drawn closer together in diversity. I read those lines and noted a professional caveat in the margin: this is a statement from a party with a stake in the story. Ambassadors and diplomatic missions are advocacy sources, not neutral ones. Alongside that, phrases like "large, enthusiastic crowds" appear without a single ticket number or attendance figure. Success is asserted, not measured.

But the operating principle behind that city list is worth learning from. A small event, repeated annually, travelling widely, in short formats, with wide access. No grand stage, no A-list stars, no exclusive broadcast deal. Just repetition and proximity. Soft power is not generated where the crowd is largest; it is generated where people come back a second time.

I have followed Vietnamese football for more than forty years, and I believe our football industry has misread precisely that principle.

The three mechanisms that give a football nation influence

In my work following teams, I have identified three mechanisms. The first is repetition: a child who watches one match remembers one night; a child who watches ten matches across ten months forms a habit. The second is proximity: the distance from home to stadium determines how often people show up, and how often people show up determines how deep the attachment goes. The third is participation: someone who only watches becomes a spectator; someone who is touched becomes a stakeholder.

These three mechanisms explain why football is the most efficient soft-power machine ever built. It needs no translation. It needs no qualifications. It needs no intermediary class to interpret it.

2026 proved that in Vietnam. On January 27, 2026, the Vietnam U-23 team led Uzbekistan in the AFC U-23 Championship final on Chinese soil, then lost in extra time in the snow. An entire country stood in the streets at three in the afternoon. On December 15, 2026, Nguyen Anh Duc scored the only goal in the sixth minute, Vietnam beat Malaysia 1-0 at My Dinh Stadium and won the AFF Cup after ten years. But if I had to name one data point more valuable than either memory, it would be the number of screens. In Buon Ma Thuot, in Tam Ky, in Sa Dec, in Lao Cai, people set up outdoor screens, and the crowds outside the stadiums were many times larger than those inside.

By January 2026, that mechanism had changed shape. Viewers no longer needed a shared screen. They needed one in their pocket, and a clip short enough to watch while waiting. I once mispronounced an Iranian player's name three times during a live broadcast at the 2026 World Cup in Russia, and I spent two weeks fixing it by reviewing the tape with twelve colleagues. The lesson was not about pronunciation. It was that a small factual error costs you all of your credibility, and in an environment where information moves in fifteen seconds, credibility is the only asset you have left.

The map of Vietnamese football's influence is skewed

In 2026, when I signed on as a beat reporter following SHB Da Nang at the age of fifty-two, the club finished fifth in the V-League with eleven wins, and young striker Ha Duc Chinh scored nine goals. But my lasting memory is not the league table. It is the Hoa Xuan training ground, where younger colleagues propped up their phones and interviewed players on Facebook Live immediately after sessions, while the sweat was still wet.

That same year I organised joint meetings between veteran and young reporters, and I realised something that still holds: Vietnamese football has a highly decentralised information-production system at the local level, and a highly centralised match-product distribution system at the national level.

Look at the league structure. Most of the big clubs and most of the money sit in the two metropolitan areas of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, plus an industrial belt in Binh Duong. My Dinh Stadium holds more than forty thousand; Hang Day holds around twenty-two thousand, while Da Nang's Hoa Xuan holds only about twenty thousand. For years, almost every major national team match was staged at My Dinh. Meanwhile, average V-League attendance typically hovers around five to six thousand.

This skew has a very concrete technical consequence. A provincial club that wants to maintain its presence must cover its own travel costs, its own communications and its own audience. When finances tighten, the first thing cut is community activity, and the second is the youth academy. That is why clubs with some of the most loyal fanbases in Vietnam, from Nghe An to Hai Phong to Nam Dinh, live in permanent financial fragility. They have enormous cultural influence and a very thin economic base. A football nation can have deep influence in places where it has no money, and money in places where it has no influence.

This is exactly where that film festival does the opposite. It does not base itself in the capital and stage a few touring shows. It travels from Quetta to Sialkot, from Gilgit to Multan, and it comes back the following year.

Three times Vietnamese football tried that road

The first attempt was the SEA Games 31 in 2026. The organisers placed men's football at both My Dinh and Viet Tri, and moving a major group to a midland city was a distribution decision, not a sporting one. It let the people of Phu Tho watch an international match without a two-hour drive.

The second attempt, and the most important one, was the 2026 ASEAN Championship. Vietnam played the first leg of the final at Viet Tri. A regional final, the most valuable product in Southeast Asian football, was staged at a provincial ground rather than the national stadium. I consider this a decision of far greater strategic significance than the media coverage acknowledged. It is precisely the logic of that film festival, translated into football: do not make people come to the cathedral; bring the cathedral closer to them.

The third attempt sits at club level, and it has been less successful. Clubs still hold a community day once a season, a meet-and-greet, a school visit. But these are isolated events. They do not repeat in the same place in the same month across several consecutive years.

I watched this difference play out in Da Nang from 2026 onward. The club's communications operation became technically much stronger, but its geographical footprint barely widened. The lesson from the film festival is clear: what creates influence in Sialkot is not better films, but Sialkot being chosen for the fourth time.

Internationally, the way big clubs use soft power shows a similar split. In July 2026, Arsenal came to Hanoi and beat the Vietnam national team 7-1 in a friendly at My Dinh, drawing unprecedented attention for a foreign club. It was a huge night. But it was only a night. Japanese clubs, by contrast, invested in something else: children's camps, coach education courses, academy partnerships lasting years. Their influence is quieter and takes deeper root.

Fifteen seconds matters more than ninety minutes

There is one detail in that film festival I consider the most important, and it is usually missed in analyses of soft power. The organisers chose short films. Sixteen European shorts, eleven Pakistani shorts.

Choosing shorts is not an artistic decision; it is a strategic one. Short formats lower the viewer's commitment threshold to near zero. Someone who has never watched European cinema can still sit through eight minutes.

Vietnamese football arrived at exactly this conclusion, but by a different route, and most of the people running the game have not realised what they are holding. The final on January 5, 2026 lasted more than ninety minutes. But its true unit of influence was fifteen seconds, multiplied tens of thousands of times within half an hour of the final whistle.

This changes how a football nation should be evaluated. If the unit of influence is a fifteen-second clip, then the precondition for a good clip is a moment worth filming. And moments worth filming occur more often where the stands are close to the pitch, where the touchline and the terraces are metres apart, where a boy can touch a player after the match.

My Dinh Stadium is magnificent, and that is precisely its problem. The distance from row thirty to the touchline is so great that television cameras need long lenses, and players become flat images on a screen. At a smaller provincial ground, players have faces, sweat, expressions. And expressions are what people share.

I think about this after every session at Hoa Xuan. My younger colleagues understood very clearly that a training session is not news, but a moment inside a training session can be. They taught me that the structure of attention has changed, and that football organisations which fail to change with it will steadily lose influence even while holding onto their broadcasting rights.

The blind spot: we label everything as football

There is one detail from the analytical work I want to mention, because it applies to football too. When the documents about that film festival passed through a data-processing system, they were tagged as football content. An enormous analytical report on tactics, club finance, the transfer market and competition rules was generated for an event with no player, no team and no match. By the time it was caught, every field had to be replaced with a "insufficient information" marker.

That sounds like a technical error. But it is a very precise metaphor for how the football industry evaluates itself.

We label things that are not football as football. A sponsorship contract is called development. An international friendly is called elevation. An academy with a name on a plaque is called youth training. An awards gala is called honouring the game. Meanwhile, the thing that actually is football — a nine-year-old in a mountainous district with a ball and a patch of ground — appears in no report at all, because it has no data and no sponsor.

We mislabel in exactly the same way that data system mislabelled. We check for the presence of keywords instead of checking for the presence of substance.

There is a way to counter this, and it is fairly simple: before calling something football, check whether it contains at least one player, one team or one competition. Applied to Vietnamese football's internal reports, I suspect a great many documents would fall out of the category.

What to watch next

If the film festival's principle is right, the signal to watch is not the next final. It is whether any club can build a repeating annual schedule at district level, rather than a single community day per season. It is how many official national team matches are staged outside My Dinh over the next three years. And it is who will be the first club to declare that its headquarters sits in a province, not in the capital.

A football nation can win a final in Bangkok and still fail to create a new generation of viewers, if three years later it is still delivering its product to exactly one city. Conversely, a football nation can win nothing for several years and still be winning a long war, if every month it appears in one more place it has never been. The question I want to carry with me on my next assignment is this: out of the twenty cities, towns and districts I will pass through, how many will I come back to a second time?