Kim Sang-sik's Race Against Time: Vietnam's Squad-Depth Problem Before the Asian Cup

One October evening at the training centre, I stood outside the fence watching Vietnam's national team train. Three training bibs lay folded on the substitutes' bench, unused. Kim Sang-sik stood there, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on a group of players passing the ball in the corner. He counted. So did I. Seventeen outfield players, plus two goalkeepers. Not enough for a full opposed session, let alone for preparing a continental tournament. That detail, unused training bibs, is not a pretty opening image for an article. But it is true. "The loudest applause does not come from the stands, but from the empty seats." And right now, Vietnam has too many empty seats. To understand why Kim Sang-sik is racing against time, the context must be placed correctly. After an ASEAN Cup judged disappointing, Vietnam enters its Asian Cup preparation cycle with a list of problems longer than its list of solutions. Injuries. A punishing club schedule. A November FIFA window approaching while the real time left is counted in weeks. I have followed Vietnam's matches at both regional and continental level for years, and what caught my attention in this phase is not any specific defeat. It is the sense of a team trying to change its own shape while still having to compete. Kim experimented with the squad at the ASEAN Cup. He gave chances to new faces. He rotated. But results did not arrive as hoped, and those experiments exposed something everyone knew but few wanted to say plainly: the gap between Vietnam's first-choice and backup tiers is larger than is safe. The regional scene is not standing still for Vietnam. Indonesia is pushing hard on naturalisation to close the gap, while Thailand retains structural stability. Vietnam, meanwhile, must solve its own problem: holding its regional standing while trying to reach the continent with limited resources. One thing must be stated clearly from the outset. Vietnam's problem right now is not a tactical system. There is no evidence Kim is trying to impose an entirely new style, and there is no match data to conclude that any such system is failing. What the matches expose is a problem of personnel and squad depth. Vietnam depends on a small core of key players, and whenever that group is absent through injury or out of form, the whole machine immediately loses its rhythm. This is a structural weakness, not a one-off accident. It has survived multiple coaching regimes and tournament cycles, and it becomes especially dangerous when continental opponents are markedly stronger in both physique and technique. "The rhythm of a match can only be heard when you put your ear to the grass." When I put my ear to that grass, what I hear is the sound of a team trying to expand its resources. Kim needs new faces. He needs at least a squad deep enough to rotate without collapsing. But each time he throws those faces in, he faces rawness, a lack of cohesion, and gaps in collective play. There are two ways to read this. First: the trialled players are not yet good enough. Second: those experiments were never given a stable structure in which to succeed. Both readings lead to the same conclusion: Vietnam is in a transition phase, and transition always demands time, which Kim does not have much of. A generational handover always creates friction. Introducing new faces can hurt short-term results, but keeping the old core intact risks stagnation. Kim is caught between two options, each with its own price. There is one thing worth pausing on. The way the media and fans frame it, "race against time", "uphill road", is running ahead of the actual evidence. We have no process data to claim the recent ASEAN Cup was a deserved failure or an unlucky result. Nor do we have data suggesting Vietnam will suddenly rebound. The pressure on Kim Sang-sik is more narrative-driven than grounded in new data, and that places him in a dangerous position: judged against a standard that even the judges have not clearly defined. At regional level, Vietnam is a top power. At continental level, Vietnam is a second-tier side, aiming for the Asian Cup knockout rounds rather than the title. The current anxiety accurately reflects the gap between those two tiers. But it also reflects something else: we are demanding of this team a maturity it lacks the foundation to reach, in personnel, in scheduling, in how domestic football is organised. What is notable is that the injuries to the core players have inadvertently opened space for experimentation. This is the paradox: a negative event opening a door for newcomers. But that door is only valuable if it sits inside a long-term plan, not a firefighting reaction. The congested club schedule is one example. V.League clubs squeeze their players through punishing league campaigns. The national team bears the consequences, injuries, depleted fitness, without controlling the source of the problem. This is a cost-transfer relationship, where risk is pushed from clubs to the federation, and the one who ultimately pays is the national-team coach. So what should be watched in the coming November FIFA window? Not the scoreline of a single match. It is the emergence of new faces, and how they are given chances, within a stable structure, or as patchwork pieces. It is whether the core group is managed with better load control, or squeezed dry again. And it is the bigger question: will Vietnamese football dare to view the gap between first-choice and backup tiers as a systemic problem, not the fault of any one person. "A missed shot is the answer; the question lies in how we stand up together." The recent ASEAN Cup may have been a missed shot. But it is only a comma in a longer story, if we choose to stand up together rather than look for someone to blame.