From Cam Pha to Eden Park: The Quiet Journey of Vietnamese Women's Football

I still remember a late afternoon in Cam Pha. A small stadium sat by the bay, and only a few rows of seats on the stand had anyone in them. On the pitch, the women of the Than Khoang San Vietnam team were practising passes in the fading sunlight. No camera pointed at them, no electronic scoreboard, no commentator's voice echoing from the loudspeakers. There was only the sound of the ball against the grass and the coach counting out each pass. Years later, on an evening in July 2026, I sat in front of a screen and watched those same women walk out at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand, to face the United States women's national team. It was the first match Vietnamese women's football had ever played at a World Cup. In the stands, a small group of Vietnamese supporters held up the red flag with a yellow star. Back home, millions stayed up late. And I thought of that Cam Pha afternoon, because behind the historic moment broadcast live were thousands of afternoons just like it that nobody recorded. Vietnamese women's football is not a new story. The national women's team was founded in the early 1990s, and for more than three decades it existed alongside men's football in a completely different ecosystem. While the men's team was nurtured with salaries, training grounds and European tours, the women's team regularly had to borrow pitches, apply for funding and wait for whatever investment was left over. I have tracked this gap for many years. Matches in the National Women's Football Championship were often played on grounds without full stands, sometimes without floodlights, and were almost never broadcast live. Women players earned a fraction of what their male counterparts did. Many still had to take second jobs to make ends meet. Yet it was precisely under those conditions that a generation of players grew up. They won SEA Games gold medals, won Southeast Asian titles and went deep in Asian competitions. In 2026, at the Women's Asian Cup finals in India, the Vietnamese women's team qualified for the World Cup for the first time. That was the result of a long accumulation, not of a lucky moment. In this article, I want to look back at that journey through the lens of tactics and data, and to ask a question few dare to ask directly: how far behind its sporting value is the commercial value of Vietnamese women's football? The match against the United States exposed the gap in physicality and speed. Vietnam set up with a deep defensive block, dropping numbers into their own half and waiting for counter-attacks. Huynh Nhu, the captain and the only player at the time playing professionally abroad in the colours of Lank FC in Portugal, was given the role of lone spearhead in attack. Based on my experience watching these matches, I noticed that the biggest problem was not mentality. The Vietnamese players contested without hesitation, pressed at the right moments and held their shape through the first half. The problem lay in the speed of decision-making under pressure. When the opponent pressed high, the midfield's time to decide was cut short, and within that brief window, long passes were often intercepted. I take the match against the Netherlands as an example. The 0-7 scoreline was painful, but it accurately reflected a reality: against a team with one of the fastest transitions in the world, a deep defensive line gets stretched and torn apart. The Netherlands needed only a few direct passes to cut through Vietnam's midfield. What stands out is that the defeat was not a mental collapse. If you rewatch the footage, you will see the players still moving, still calling each other's names, still trying to reorganise after every goal. The difference lay in the threshold of physical endurance. From the 60th minute onwards, when the legs grew heavy, gaps appeared more often, and the opponent exploited them ruthlessly. Huynh Nhu is a special case. She was the first Vietnamese woman to move abroad to play professionally, joining Lank FC in 2026. In her early thirties, she chose to leave her comfort zone to learn a different football culture. When she returned to the national team, she brought new habits with her: off-the-ball movement, holding the ball under pressure, reading the game before the ball arrived at her feet. In the defensive line, the problem was different. Vietnam's goalkeeper and defenders performed well in regional competitions, but at World Cup level they faced shots with a very different speed and power. I noticed that the Vietnamese defenders often fell short in aerial duels. Not because they were poor, but because they had never trained regularly against opponents of that calibre. Midfield is where the physical gap showed most clearly. In Southeast Asian competitions, Vietnamese midfielders could outrun opponents and win the ball back. But against European sides, the difference in stature and strength made duels unfavourable. To close this gap, there is no other way than to play more matches against strong opponents. Behind the national team lies a youth development system that remains thin. A few centres in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and provinces with a women's football tradition still run talent classes, but the number of female trainees sufficient to sustain a stable national team is small. Many girls who love football must choose between their academic education and their dream, because their families do not believe women's football can support them. Looking at the domestic league structure, the issue lies in the number of teams and the density of fixtures. The National Women's Football Championship has only a few participating teams, a short season and few matches. A young player needs around 25 to 30 matches a year to develop, but in Vietnam that figure is often only half. Fewer matches mean fewer chances to compete, fewer chances to learn from mistakes and fewer chances to be seen by scouts. The road to World Cup 2026 was not smooth. At the 2026 Women's Asian Cup finals in India, Vietnam were placed in a tough group and had to face strong continental sides. They got through the group stage with resilience and a little necessary luck. It was the kind of result that reminds you that football is decided by talent, and also by persistence. This is where the story goes beyond a single match. When I sit in a commentary booth for a men's football tournament, I often remember the women's matches played the same day with no one commentating. On the feast day of men's football, I quietly slip women's records into every bulletin. A goal by a women's team, a milestone by a woman player, a record crowd at a women's match, all of them deserve a place in the wider flow of information. Years in the profession have taught me that the voice of the dressing room never speaks on its own. It has to be listened to, recorded and passed on. During the pandemic, when competitions were suspended, I learned that if you do not actively seek out the players, their stories disappear. Vietnamese women's football is the same. If no one holds a microphone towards them, they will remain a small footnote at the end of a bulletin. Back to the question of commercial value. Vietnam's women's team qualified for the World Cup and won SEA Games gold, yet sponsorship, broadcasting rights and commercial revenue still flow mainly towards men's football. This is a familiar paradox in many countries, not only Vietnam. But in Vietnam, the gap is especially wide. An argument is often made: women's football has fewer viewers and less advertising money, so less investment makes sense. It sounds logical but misses a point. Audience size is not a natural constant; it is the result of investment. Without broadcasting, without media coverage, without decent stadiums, there will naturally be no audience. That vicious circle feeds itself. I once ran a small poll after a men's World Cup commentary in which I had woven in information about a win by the women's team. The result showed that most viewers wanted more women's football content. The demand exists. The problem lies in supply and in the habits of those who work in the media. So where does the real value of Vietnamese women's football lie? I believe it lies somewhere different from men's football. Men's football sells frenzy and historic rivalries. Women's football sells a different story: the story of people who had to overcome more just to play. In an era when audiences increasingly look for meaning behind the sport, that story has value of its own. What I do not want to do is paint a rosy picture. Vietnamese women's football still has many problems: scarce facilities, low incomes, few teams, limited international opportunities. Those problems are real and cannot be solved by a few articles or a few livestreams. But acknowledging a problem does not mean being pessimistic. It only means we need to look at them squarely. Change is happening, slowly but genuinely. After World Cup 2026, some businesses began to take an interest in the women's team. Viewership of women's matches rose. Young players gained more role models to look up to. And at 56, I still ask one question: where are women scoring in this game? The answer, I believe, will come from afternoons of training that nobody records, on small pitches by the bay, where a girl is still passing the ball to her teammates in the fading sunlight.