Le Cong Vinh in Kanazawa: Ten Days Learning How to Teach Others to Score

On a whiteboard at a training ground in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, on 6 September 2026, three words were written in marker: attacking, defending, counter-attacking. There is nothing glamorous about them. They are the first bricks of any coaching curriculum, and the man who wrote them was born in 2026, and once scored 51 goals in 85 appearances for the Vietnam national team.

Three sessions. Ten days of internship, from 6 to 15 September. One report to be submitted to Japan Football Association instructors.

That is the entire workload of Le Cong Vinh at Hokuriku University as of 6 September. From the outside it looks too small to be news. Yet that smallness contains a larger story than a routine internship: the story of a man who spent his youth learning how to put a ball in the net, and now has to learn how to explain to someone else why the ball should go there.

Why Japan, and why a university team

The AFC A License sits one step below the Pro License, the highest Asian coaching qualification required to lead top professional clubs and national teams. Cong Vinh completed Phase 1 in June 2026. Phase 2 runs through September 2026, and the practical internship belongs to it. Phase 3 is scheduled for December 2026, with the license expected in April 2027 – after which a Pro License pathway becomes possible.

According to information from the internship, he contacted VFF Technical Director Koshida Takeshi directly to seek support, and JFA President Miyamoto sent a message of encouragement. His stated reasoning was concrete: Japan has more instructors, a more frequently updated curriculum, and he wants to expand his professional network.

One detail tends to be skipped. In 2026, Cong Vinh played for Consadole Sapporo in J.League 2. Japan is not foreign ground to him. He once lived inside a football culture where running into the right space is taught as a subject, not treated as a gift. That makes this choice less symbolic than people assume, and more professional.

The second point is where he landed. Hokuriku University's Team 1 recently competed in the national finals of the Japan Student Soccer Championship. This is not a recreational side. Japanese university football is a genuine development tier: many J.League players come through it, and national-finalist teams tend to be tactically better organised than plenty of semi-professional clubs elsewhere.

In other words, Cong Vinh did not go somewhere easy. He went somewhere difficult enough that three sessions cannot be a formality.

Three words on a whiteboard, and the three phases of a match

Attacking, defending, counter-attacking. To an outsider these words are bland. To a coach, they split a match into three moments, each with its own logic that must be taught.

The attacking phase is not "passing forward". It is a system: who holds the ball, who creates space, who moves into the half-space, who arrives as the third man to break an organised defensive line. Teaching attacking at student level is harder than at professional level, because young players lack automatic habits. A professional coach adjusts. A student-level coach builds from zero.

The defending phase is a lesson about distances. A deep block stays compact only if the spacing between lines is correct. That spacing cannot be lectured into players. To make them understand it, a coach must design drills where poor spacing punishes itself with a conceded goal. Knowledge is transmitted through constraints, not commands.

The counter-attacking phase is where modern football has changed fastest in fifteen years. The first six seconds after winning the ball decide most scoring chances. If a team fails to switch state within that window, the opponent recovers and the chance evaporates. Teaching counter-attacking means teaching a collective habit: win the ball here, the nearest player does this, the farthest player runs there.

These three themes are foundational, not innovative – equivalent to the standard AFC A License curriculum. But foundations are the hardest things to teach, because they produce no highlight. Tactics are poetry; but a goal is the universe exhaling.

The man who knows how to score, and the man who teaches scoring

This is the most elegant paradox of coaching, and the one Cong Vinh now faces at 40.

An elite striker owns what is called embodied knowledge. He knows when to start his run, which angle is the blind spot, when a touch needs to be a beat slower. He knows without explaining. The problem: embodied knowledge cannot be transferred by talking. Talking produces a manual, not a reflex.

Coaching offers one tool to cross that gap: drill design. To teach a student the timing of a run into the box, the coach does not teach the run. He builds an exercise where starting early means offside and starting late means being blocked. After dozens of repetitions, the right timing becomes automatic.

Look closely at the three chosen themes at Hokuriku and a structural detail appears: the man with 51 international goals is required to practise coaching both defending and counter-attacking – the two phases he experienced for twenty years as a reactor, never as an organiser. A striker experiences defending as obstruction. A coach must understand defending as structure. That leap is far bigger than learning to coach attacking.

Nobody says this in the news copy, but it is the most substantive part of the ten days in Kanazawa.

The report nobody photographs

One object in this story is almost never mentioned: the coaching report to be submitted to JFA instructors.

This deserves emphasis. For twenty years, Cong Vinh was measured by goals, trophies, caps. From September 2026, for the first time in his professional life, his football thinking is judged by a different instrument: a written document read and graded by an instructor.

A coaching report is not a diary. It records session themes, tactical objectives, drill organisation, player responses, what went to plan and what did not. A coach who writes a good report is a coach who can see the gap between what he intended to teach and what players actually learned. That gap is the profession.

In effect, the report is the only element of this internship that can be right or wrong. Three sessions prove nothing about coaching ability. A report reveals whether the writer can observe.

No objective data exists on session quality: no durations, no drill types, no player feedback. We cannot evaluate a coach through three sessions. What can be tracked is the output of those sessions – the report, the Phase 3 result, and where he works next.

The environment: university football as a real tier

In Vietnam the gap between university football and professional football remains wide. A standout student player rarely walks straight into V.League. In Japan the boundary is far thinner: the university club system functions as a genuine development layer, with licensed coaches, periodised plans and competitive targets.

Hokuriku University reaching a national final places Cong Vinh in an environment where his students have real competitive motivation. That changes the nature of an internship entirely. Coaching a team with no objective means coaching air. Coaching a team that just lost a final means coaching people.

Worth noting in the wider context: this internship was arranged through a Japanese VFF Technical Director. It sits inside a technical cooperation current between the two football nations that has existed for years. A former star walking this path is not a random event; it is the product of a relationship built earlier.

The blind spot: we praise the destination and forget the goal

Ten days with a university team is a procedural step in a licensing pathway. It is enough to complete Phase 2 and nowhere near enough to make a coach. Coaches are forged across seasons, across losing runs, across the work of convincing a substitute that he still matters. No tactical drill teaches that.

We tend to tell this as an inspiring story: a legend goes back to school. Read only that image and you misread the substance. That a former national team star has to travel to Japan to find a quality course says something about the domestic education system, not only about him.

More precisely: Vietnam's coaching problem is not a shortage of licensed people. It is that licensed people have nowhere to practise continuously. A football nation with only so many assistant and analyst roles, and only so many academies paying a living wage, will see its certificates drift away from practice. Certification is necessary. A place to practise is sufficient.

The second, subtler risk: the Japan story easily reads as an implicit claim that domestic courses are inferior. That may hold in some respects – instructor numbers, curriculum currency – but it is not absolutely true, and it becomes harmful if it turns into a default assumption. A football nation improves when many people study in many places and bring knowledge home, not when everyone believes there is only one good destination.

The biggest risk of the Kanazawa days is not failing the internship. It is expectation misplaced. Public opinion can turn a routine career step into a promise, then come to collect that promise the day he takes his first coaching job. For a man still in Phase 2 of the A License, that kind of expectation does not help. It narrows his road.

An empty stadium is not silence; it is applause with nobody to receive it.

I wrote that line about matches played without crowds. It applies to a whiteboard in Kanazawa. Three words were written there and nobody will applaud them. No stand exists for a training session. Yet every session is a coach betting on something invisible: that a student will understand.

What to watch next

The report to JFA instructors is the first marker. It will show how far he can observe, not how well he can coach.

The A License, expected in April 2027, is the second. A certificate is always good news, but it only opens doors. What matters is which door opens.

The third marker matters most and is easiest to miss: how many other Vietnamese former players choose a similar route. If Cong Vinh goes first and clears a path, the value of ten days in Kanazawa multiplies. If he goes alone and stops there, it becomes one nice line about a diligent man.

I have followed Vietnamese football for years, long enough to know that this country loves the game with a feeling that resists explanation – a feeling that keeps a 2026 AFF Cup final alive in 2026, while the man who scored in it stands on a training pitch in Ishikawa learning from the beginning.

We do not remember the scoreline; we remember how sweat fell on grass.

Ten days do not make a coach. But ten days can make a man begin to understand why he has to ask hard questions. And for a football nation more accustomed to living by emotion than by systems, perhaps the question worth asking is not how good a coach Cong Vinh will become, but how many people he will find walking the same road.