Vietnamese Football Is Flattening Itself: The 'False No.10' Addiction and the Death of the Traditional Winger

Minute 63: a left winger receives the ball tight to the touchline, with nearly two metres of open space ahead of him. He should cross, or burst to the byline. Instead, he turns his back on the touchline, pushes the ball inside, and plays a sideways pass toward the central lane — where three opposing shirts are already waiting like three milestones. I replayed that frame five times. Not because it was beautiful. Because it repeated. The same movement, the same choice, the same outcome, across at least seven different matches I have watched over the past two months in the V.League. Freeze the frame, and the game truly begins. When the frame holds still long enough, you see a football nation flattening itself — not by its opponents, but by the instincts of the people who play it. And the most frightening part: none of them think they are doing anything wrong. CONTEXT: A DREAM THAT WAS REAL For nearly a decade, Vietnamese football lived inside a real dream. The golden generation — Nguyễn Quang Hải, Nguyễn Công Phượng, Đoàn Văn Hậu, Nguyễn Văn Toàn, names that emerged from the Hoàng Anh Gia Lai JMG academy — lifted the national team to the top of Southeast Asia twice, in 2026 and 2026. Fans learned to believe in a football of possession, short passing, and superior individual technique. Foreign coaches, from Park Hang-seo to Philippe Troussier and then Kim Sang-sik, brought different philosophies, yet all left a common fingerprint: absolute faith in the technical, small, skilful player. That faith seeped down to club level. Every V.League side, from Hà Nội FC, Công An Hà Nội and Viettel to Nam Định and Thanh Hóa, wants a ball-carrying number 10. Every academy teaches its children to cut inside. And in every match, somewhere on the pitch, a winger turns his back on the touchline. What is strange is that nobody calls this a problem. They call it modern. They call it identity. They call it the football that beat Thailand. And because results arrived, nobody dares ask what the price was. I will ask it. Because I have sat long enough in front of a screen, rewinding and replaying frames that most viewers watch once and forget. As a commentator who has covered football across five World Cups and more than four decades, I have learned one thing: identity is not something you declare, it is something you repeat until it becomes instinct. And the instinct of Vietnamese football right now is steering it in the wrong direction. CORE: THE DEATH OF WIDTH There is a paradox at the centre of Vietnamese football today. Teams control the ball more than ever, yet create fewer clear chances than they did five years ago. The ball travels through more feet, yet reaches fewer dangerous places. And the root cause lies in an area that seems small: the two flanks. When a winger cuts inside, he does not merely change his own direction. He changes the entire shape of the team. The width of the pitch, the most valuable asset the laws of football grant, is compressed. The opposing back line only has to funnel into the middle to seal every road. In the V.League, where the average defensive quality is not high, teams still score — but they score through individual moments, not through structure. A flash of brilliance from Nguyễn Quang Hải or a sudden finish from Nguyễn Tiến Linh can mask the poverty of the approach. But the frame does not lie. If you stop two seconds before every goal, you will see very few moves born of a deliberate attacking structure, and very many born of a lone effort. I have watched dozens of matches and logged a troubling pattern. When the ball reaches a winger near the touchline, the probability he cuts inside is several times higher than the probability he crosses or drives to the byline. That sounds harmless, even clever. But when an entire league does it, defending becomes strangely easy. The full-back knows. The midfielder knows. The goalkeeper knows. And a defence that already knows has solved half its work before the ball is kicked. Tactics do not live on the whiteboard; they live in the fear of each player. The greatest fear of a Vietnamese winger today is being called 'classic' — that is, being called outdated. Crossing is seen as a crude, unrefined act. Driving to the byline and pulling the ball back is seen as the choice of a player without technique. So an entire generation learns to cut inside, not because it is more effective, but because it looks more 'European'. They are playing to avoid criticism, not to win. That is a subtle but destructive inversion of purpose. People often say a modern winger must score. True. But nobody tells them that scoring from wide only works when the opposing defence is stretched by the very threat of width. If you never go to the byline, the opposing full-back never has to drop deep. If the full-back never drops deep, the centre-back never has to cover. If the centre-back never covers, the back line holds its shape. And when the back line holds its shape, your shot from the edge of the box is just a meaningless statistic. Width is not a means to cross; width is a means to create space in the middle. Cutting out width means sealing with your own hand the road you are trying to walk. A SYSTEM OF COPYING This is the point I believe few dare to say outright. Vietnamese football is not developing an identity of its own. It is copying a model that has already gone stale in the very place it was born. What is that model? It is the football of inverted wingers, of two attacking full-backs pushed high to compensate for width, of a lone holding midfielder screening behind. This model dominated Europe from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s. But by now, even the leading European clubs have recognised its limits. When every team plays the same way, the tactical edge disappears. The gap between teams is decided only by individual quality. In the V.League, individual quality is distributed extremely unevenly. Hà Nội FC, Công An Hà Nội and Viettel have the money to buy the best players. Nam Định, Thanh Hóa and Hải Phòng must make do with more limited resources. When every team plays the same system, the richer team wins more — not because it understands tactics better, but simply because it has better players inside the same framework. A uniform system turns football into an arms race in which the wealthiest always finish first. This is why the 'small town beats the giant' story that Vietnamese media loves hides an uncomfortable truth. The rare shocks do not come from superior tactics. They come from luck, from individual error, or from a strong team having an off day. The financial gap between the leading group and the rest of the V.League keeps widening, and having every team play alike only makes that gap clearer in the table. The fairy tale we tell each other about a tiny club felling a giant is a beautiful story, but it usually lasts one matchday. A season lasts thirty, and across thirty matchdays, money always wins. CONSEQUENCES AT NATIONAL-TEAM LEVEL At club level, uniformity may only cause boredom. At national-team level, it causes defeat. In the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, Vietnam faced opponents who were markedly stronger in physique, fitness and organisation. There, a football built on individual moments and short passing was no longer enough. You cannot pass your way through a midfield that is both strong and disciplined with nothing but short balls. You need a fallback. You need the ability to stretch opponents with width, then attack the space that opens. You need a winger who dares to reach the byline and deliver from a narrow angle. But a national team cannot produce a player type that the club development system stopped manufacturing years earlier. When the V.League no longer teaches wingers to cross, the national team has no one to cross. When academies no longer teach strikers to win aerial duels, the national team has no one to duel in the air. Tactical poverty at club level does not stay at club level. It escalates. It follows players up to the national side, and there it is punished by opponents who show no mercy. I once watched another Southeast Asian national team fall into exactly this trap for years. They controlled the ball beautifully in the group stage, then collapsed against physically stronger teams in the knockout rounds, because they had no plan B. They had built a beautiful but fragile identity. And I fear Vietnam is walking precisely that road. WHERE I COULD BE WRONG Before you throw your glass at the screen, let me argue against myself. I could be wrong here. There is a strong counter-argument: given V.League pitch conditions, with surfaces often poor and the ball bouncing unpredictably, cutting inside and playing short passes really is a more sensible choice than crossing. A cross on a bad surface is very hard to control, whereas a short pass into a teammate's feet is safer. If so, the cutting-inside addiction is not a disease but an adaptation to the environment. And adapting to the environment is a sign of intelligence, not laziness. A second counter-argument: perhaps the traditional winger never existed in Vietnam at a high level. Perhaps I am nostalgic for something that never was. Looking at history, Vietnamese football is famous for technical, small players, not for crossing specialists. If so, cutting inside is merely a continuation of identity, not a betrayal of it. And if that is identity, then my demand for change may be an outsider imposing his view on a football culture he does not fully belong to. I accept both points. But they do not refute the central problem. Whether the cause is pitches or identity, the result is a football short of width and short of a fallback. And when it steps onto the continental stage or meets national teams with better physique and organisation, that shortfall will be punished. Adapting to home soil can be an advantage at home. But football is not played at home forever. CONCLUSION: A TESTABLE PREDICTION I do not watch the match; I watch how they collapse. And I foresee a season in which Vietnamese football must face itself. My prediction: within two years, one of two things will happen. Either the V.League will see the return of the traditional winger — the one who dares to reach the byline and cross — as an undervalued tactical edge, and the club that recognises it first will gain a competitive advantage. Or Vietnamese football will keep sliding down its possession addiction, until a painful defeat on the international stage forces change. I bet on the second happening first. Because in football, as in life, we usually change only when it is already too late to change comfortably. But I reserve the right to be wrong. And if I am wrong — if Vietnamese football finds a third path I cannot see — then that will be the best thing I have ever been wrong about.