Amid the V.League Transfer Window: Seventeen Uncounted Footsteps at Lach Tray Stadium

In the last three training sessions at Lach Tray, I counted seventeen people. Not seventeen names on an official squad list — the coaching staff had not yet posted that list. But seventeen real human beings, with seventeen different kinds of silence. Some were silent because they were waiting for a phone call from the north. Some were silent because they had just signed a contract and did not know whether to be glad or worried. Some were silent because no one had called them in two months.

Six past seven. Frost was still beading on the edge of the penalty area. A twenty-two-year-old player — I will call him H. — sat beside the goalpost, carefully re-lacing his boots. The same motion every morning: unlace, re-lace, tighten, pull. I asked him why he did it every day. He smiled: "So I know I am still here." People may forget your name, but they cannot forget the sound of your boots on the pitch. That morning, H.'s boots sounded like a man reminding himself not to leave.

What are those seventeen people to a season? They are the submerged part of the iceberg. While the news cycle floods with deals worth billions of dong, with foreign strikers who once scored thirty goals in some distant league, those seventeen at Lach Tray keep training. They are the forgotten ones of an annual season — men who never appear in highlight reels, who never show up on any transfer-value ranking, yet they are exactly the raw material every club must have to play thirty matches in seven months.

I do not go to the pitch to watch who scores. I go to watch who gets up after a missed shot. And in that third session, the man who got up the most was the one least mentioned.

Context: When the table begins to split

The V.League season has entered its middle phase, the stretch where teams have played enough to reveal their true nature but not enough to give up. This is when two things happen at once: the title race narrows to a handful of names, and the relegation fight doubles in size. Between those two pressure zones lies a grey area — teams with no title chance, not yet in danger, who must survive the rest of the season with a squad thinning through injury, suspensions and travel.

This is also when the mid-season transfer market opens. In the big leagues, people talk about hundred-million-euro deals. In the V.League, people talk about contracts whose real value lies elsewhere: a reserve goalkeeper promoted, a holding midfielder arriving on loan, a foreign centre-back whose deal expires and is extended by three months.

The telling numbers are not transfer fees. They are minutes played. Across recent seasons, most young players at V.League clubs have totalled fewer than one hundred first-team minutes — less than two full matches. A player trains for four years and plays less than two matches. That paradox is why I keep returning to the training ground every morning: I want to know where those four years went.

What I saw: The structure of a dry-season session

A session at Lach Tray in this phase has a clear structure, if you sit long enough to notice it. The first half hour is warm-up and short passing. The next half hour is group tactical work. The following forty minutes is full-pitch opposed play. The final thirty minutes is clean-up — and that is the part I care about most.

Clean-up is not a physical act. It is a social act. Who collects balls with whom, who stays to stretch with whom, who leaves alone and who gets a pat on the back — that is the real map of the dressing room, drawn in gestures no one records in the minutes.

In the third session, I noticed a twenty-seven-year-old central midfielder. In opposed play he operated at the base of midfield, almost as a holding player. Three times in forty minutes he received the ball within twenty metres of his own goal and turned out of pressure. Three times he played a long pass to the right flank. All three reached a teammate.

That is the profile no public data ever praises. He does not score, does not assist, does not dribble past anyone. But if you count how often his team keeps the ball after high pressure, the number is high. The real value of a holding midfielder is not what he creates, but what he prevents from happening — and that never shows up on any scoresheet.

I call it the silent law of Vietnamese football.

Analysis: The transfer market seen from the bottom of the table

When people talk about transfers, they usually look from the top. The champion buys a star, the press reports it, the fans get excited. But if you look from the bottom of the table — where clubs whose budget is a fraction of the leaders' operate — you see entirely different logic.

First logic: the truly valuable contract for a small club is not buying a good player, but extending an average one. A mid-table V.League club has a limited wage budget. If it loses three key players to contract expiry, it cannot replace them with three signings of equal quality. It must replace them with three youngsters or three players discarded by other clubs. Each time that happens, the squad drops a level, and three seasons later the club is relegated.

Second logic: the transfer arms race among the big clubs is largely a brand race. When a big club spends big on a name, it is buying two things at once — a player and a headline. The headline sells tickets, sells shirts, generates attention. Whether the player actually solves their tactical problem is another matter, usually revealed after ten matches.

Based on my experience following training sessions and matches at Lach Tray across many seasons, I have noticed something: the club that wins the transfer window in the papers is rarely the most stable club on the pitch. The most stable club is usually the one that changes least — the one that keeps its core, keeps its style, and adds only where needed.

A concrete example. A club must play around thirty matches in a season, including the national cup. At that pace, and given the physical conditions of Vietnamese football, every position needs at least two players capable of starting. A squad needs twenty-five players to rotate. If that club has only eighteen players of adequate level and the rest are untested youngsters, then by the fourth month of the season it will collapse. This is a physical cause, not a tactical one, and it never makes a headline.

Contrarian angle: The hero is not the goalscorer

In football, people remember the goalscorer. They glorify the keeper who saves a penalty. They gossip about the expensive striker. But if you look at the ball-handling metrics of the V.League — specifically PPDA, the pressing-intensity measure, and recoveries in the opponent's third — you see an entirely different group of players.

Teams with low PPDA — that is, heavy pressing — usually do not have the league's best striker. They have a hard-running midfield. What makes the difference for mid-table V.League clubs is not the quality of the finisher, but the kilometres the midfield is willing to run without the ball.

This is the point outside analysis usually misses. When a team loses, people blame the striker for missing chances or the defender for an error. When a team wins, people praise the goalscorer. But matches are decided between the two penalty areas — where a holding midfielder recovers the ball, a winger tracks back to block a pass, a centre-back steps up to intercept.

There is a very common misreading of Vietnamese football: that weak teams lose because they lack technique. The reality is often the opposite. Weak teams lose because they do not have enough runners. The individual technique of Vietnamese players is not poor. The problem is that the system does not create enough space for that technique to express itself, and fitness does not allow the intensity to be sustained for ninety minutes.

And here is the truly counter-intuitive point: while big clubs spend money to buy goalscorers, the solution for small clubs lies in keeping the runners. A tireless midfielder is worth more than a striker who scores ten but does not defend. But the tireless midfielder is not advertised, has no high market value, and is often sold in the next transfer window to balance the books.

Every transfer window is a farewell. Those who stay are quieter than those who leave.

The dressing room: Where the truth does not lie

I have sat in the dressing room of a V.League club after many sessions. I have learned that the dressing room does not lie. It is only silent long enough for you to hear the truth.

First truth: players know who will be sold before the coaching staff announces it. They know from small signs — that man trains alone now, that man is no longer picked for the main opposed unit, that man has suddenly been given Saturday off. Those signs never appear in the papers, but in the dressing room they are clear as daylight.

Second truth: when a club is in crisis, silence is the loudest sound. No one shouts, no one argues, only boots on the floor and the hiss of the shower. That silence lasts until someone speaks — usually the captain, usually a short sentence, usually unrelated to tactics.

Third truth: young players and old players do not speak the same language. The young talk about playing time. The old talk about money and the future. Between them is a gap the coaching staff must bridge every day, and usually fails to.

I remember a rainy afternoon at Lach Tray, after the team had lost at home. The whole squad sat in silence in the dressing room for nearly forty minutes. No one showered. Finally, a thirty-four-year-old centre-back stood up, walked to the corner of the room, and sat down beside a nineteen-year-old who had made a mistake in the match. He said nothing. He just sat there. Five minutes later, the youngster got up and went to shower. That was the entire psychological recovery meeting that evening, and perhaps it worked better than any speech.

The economics of forgetting

Why do players like H. exist? Why does a man who trains four years, plays less than two matches, keep re-lacing his boots every morning?

The answer is partly economic. Vietnamese football operates on a structure I call the inverted pyramid: many young players at the base, a few stars at the top, and a vast void in the middle. Academies produce hundreds of players a year. Professional clubs need only a fraction. Where does the rest go?

Some drop to the First Division. Some go to amateur clubs. Some become youth coaches. Some leave football entirely. And some — like H. — stay, training each morning, waiting for a chance that may never come.

From the perspective of nineteen years in sports journalism, I see this inverted pyramid as the biggest structural problem in Vietnamese football, bigger than club finances or refereeing controversies. It means a large-scale waste of human resources. It means a player with the potential of a starting star, who is never placed in a position to show it.

And it means that in some corner of Lach Tray, there is always someone re-lacing his boots.

Seen from Hai Phong: Football is the story of those who stay

I was born in Hai Phong, where there is sea wind and where Lach Tray stands. I once went to Moscow in the summer of 2026, when that city had no snow but had a sixty-three-year-old man from Kien An, carrying a flag from 2026, who had walked hundreds of kilometres to cheer for the national team.

Moscow has snow, Hai Phong has sea wind. Football brings both into the same story. And in that story, the protagonist is not the man who scores in the final. The protagonist is the man who walked an entire road just to be present.

Wherever a ball rolls, there is a beat keeper. I am only the listener. But after many years of listening, I have realised that the beat keeper is not the man in the centre circle. The beat keeper is the man who stays after training, collects the balls, and tells his younger teammates to come in early tomorrow.

The tactical blind spot outsiders cannot see

There is one thing pure tactical analysis misses entirely: squad continuity.

When analysts compare squads, they compare player quality. But player quality only expresses itself when those players have played together long enough to understand one another. A back four of average ability who have played twenty matches together will be better than a back four of excellent players assembled for the first time.

The most important metric for a mid-table V.League club is not player quality but the number of consecutive matches in which the core unit stays intact — and this is a metric no outside analyst tracks, because it does not appear in any public data set.

I track this metric by going to the pitch. I count how many times the starting eleven repeats in consecutive matches. At a stable mid-table club, this number is often higher than at the league leaders. The leaders buy stars, rotate the squad, and sometimes pay for it with a lack of understanding in big matches.

This is football's paradox: the strongest team on paper is not the strongest on the pitch. The strongest on the pitch is the team that understands each other best.

The journeys: When the away ground reveals true nature

An annual V.League season is also a series of journeys. Each club plays around fifteen away matches a season, out of thirty. Those journeys — long bus rides, hotels, unfamiliar stadiums — are where a club's true nature shows most clearly.

I often follow a team on a few journeys to observe. What I find is this: at home, a club can hide its weaknesses behind crowd support. Away, there is nothing to hide. If the midfield does not run, it shows in the first thirty minutes. If the centre-back does not communicate, it shows at the first conceded goal. If the captain cannot speak in the dressing room, it shows in the second half.

Journeys also taught me that team spirit is not built by words. It is built by habits. A club that is punctual, eats together, sits in the same seats on the bus, usually plays well. A club that splits into small groups on the bus usually plays disjointedly.

Internal signals to watch

After many years going to the pitch, I have drawn out a set of internal signals I track to predict which clubs will rise and which will fall in the remaining part of the season. These signals are absent from analytical reports, but present with high frequency.

First, how many stay after training. At a healthy club, five to seven players usually stay for extra work after the session. At a struggling club, the pitch is empty within five minutes.

Second, laughter during opposed drills. A happy club laughs when it makes mistakes. A tense club goes quiet when it makes mistakes.

Third, how the captain interacts with young players. If the captain plays alongside and instructs youngsters in opposed drills, the club has a stable structure. If the captain only plays with his own group, the club is splitting.

Fourth, the number of lineup changes across consecutive matches — the metric I mentioned earlier. Continuity beats change.

Fifth, how the club copes with suspensions and injuries. Good clubs have replacement plans. Weak clubs do not.

Betting on the future

When I sit in the stands at Lach Tray on a dry-season morning and count seventeen people training, I am looking at the future of a season — maybe this one, maybe the next. The people training today, among them H. with his boots re-laced every morning, will decide where this club stands when the season ends.

There is something Vietnamese fans often do not see: behind every goal on the scoreboard are hundreds of sessions no one watches. Behind every mistake by a young player are years of small signals that he is not good enough. Behind every transfer contract is a man packing his belongings and saying goodbye to his teammates.

Football is an industry of constant motion, but what remains is often still. It stands still in the way a man packs his boots, in the way a captain sits beside a youngster, in the way a goalkeeper waits for the ball in an empty goal.

Lach Tray is empty, but the goal still holds the shadow of a goalkeeper sitting and waiting. That is the image I have carried for years. And it is the answer to the question I keep asking myself: why do I still go to the pitch at six in the morning, when there is no match, when no one scores, when there is no result to report.

Because the season is decided there.

An open thought

If you follow Vietnamese football and believe the transfer market is where a club's fate is shaped, try something else. Go to a training ground on a mid-season morning, sit long enough to count the people, and watch who stays after the session. You will see what I see: a club is not made of the names on contracts, but of the habits repeated every day.

And if one day H. plays an official match, a full match, I will be in the stands — not to report the result, but to record the sound of his boots on the grass. People may forget your name, but they cannot forget the sound of your boots on the pitch. That is the one thing football can never take from a man: the way he walks onto the pitch.