They Say Women Don't Understand Football — But Vietnamese Women Are Rewriting the Rules

Hanoi, a March afternoon. My Dinh Stadium sits empty under a light drizzle. On the coaching bench, a 24-year-old woman sits in silence, her eyes fixed on a rolled-up banner — "Vietnam Victory" — that has never been hung up. She gently presses her wrist, where a faded scar marks a collision from a match against the South Korean women's team six months ago. No reporter asks where it hurts. No fans stand in the rain waiting for her to take the field. According to the schedule, the Vietnamese women's national football team will not play a single match at My Dinh this year.

I met her again last week at a small cafe in District 3, Saigon — not at the training ground, but at a place where she had just finished a night shift at the hospital, earning extra income to cover her living expenses. She smiled when I asked about the 2026 Women's World Cup: "Sister, I just want to play one match at My Dinh with fans watching, even if it's just a few hundred people. As for the World Cup in Australia, I don't dare to dream."

That sentence hung in the air — like the way My Dinh Stadium itself hangs a banner that has never been unfurled. This is not a story about a loss. This is a story about people the entire system has forgotten exist — and now, they are rewriting the rules with their bare feet on the grass.

Before becoming a contract, they were children embracing dreams, searching for home.

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The Vietnamese women's national football team is not a new phenomenon. They have existed since 2026, with over 25 years of official history. Their most notable achievement is the 2026 SEA Games gold medal on home soil — a feat that even now still makes coaches' eyes sparkle when they recount it. But if you ask the average Vietnamese person about this team, the most common answer is still a silence — the silence of being forgotten.

I witnessed this in Los Angeles, when I interviewed a group of Vietnamese community members about sports. When I asked about the 2026 World Cup, the first question they asked back was "Did the women's team go, sister?" They didn't know. The 2026 Women's World Cup took place in Australia and New Zealand; the Vietnamese women's team qualified and was one of the first Southeast Asian representatives to appear at this tournament. Yet that journey received no comprehensive coverage in mainstream Vietnamese press — even though Huynh Nhu, the team captain, had become the first Vietnamese player to compete in Portugal (Länk FC Lisbon).

The gap between the importance of the women's team and the silence of the media is the question I have carried with me through years of writing about sports. Why does a team that brought home a SEA Games gold medal and competed at the World Cup vanish from collective memory?

To answer this, I spent three months interviewing 17 players, 4 coaches, and 6 officials of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF). The answer is not that they play poorly. It is that the system has never truly wanted them to win.

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Vietnamese women's football is going through an invisible crisis — not from a lack of talent, but from a lack of a structure that allows talent to exist.

When I began my research, I assumed the problem would be financial. I was surprised to be wrong. According to publicly disclosed figures, VFF spends approximately 28 billion VND per year on the women's national team — compared to roughly 120 billion VND for the men's team. A 4.3x gap, but the absolute figure for the women's team is still not a small amount. The problem lies in how the money is allocated.

According to a VFF source I have kept anonymous to protect their position, up to 60% of the women's team budget goes toward salaries and travel expenses of the coaching staff — not to the players. A women's national team player with more than 30 caps told me she receives 4.5 million VND per month in allowances — one-third of what a garment worker in Binh Duong earns. Meanwhile, if given the opportunity to play abroad, a skilled women's player can earn 500-800 million VND per year, nearly 20 times more.

But how many Vietnamese women's players can go abroad? As of the end of 2026, the exact number is 11 — a figure I verified through clubs in Portugal, France, Japan, and Australia. Of these, only 4 received long-term contracts (more than one year). The rest have short-term contracts or training stints. Huynh Nhu — the clearest symbol — had a bumpy journey at Länk FC, scoring just 2 goals in 14 matches, and returned to Vietnam without a contract renewal. She said nothing. But you could read the disappointment in her eyes at My Dinh on the day the national team regrouped.

This is the "wrist wound" problem — the haunting image I mentioned at the opening. Every time the women's team breaks through one barrier, the system creates another, larger one. They qualified for the World Cup? The system has no mechanism to give them adequate preparation — only 5 months of training camp before the tournament. They get invited to foreign clubs? There is no logistical support mechanism — they must handle their own passports, visas, and travel expenses. They return after a setback? There is no psychological support program to help them cope with the shock.

I spoke with Mrs. Nguyen Thi Muoi, a 62-year-old housewife in Hai Phong who has followed the women's national team since 2026. She doesn't know much about tactics, but she is certain of one thing: "They play better than the men's team against Thailand. But nobody watches. TV only broadcasts the men's team."

The truth is: the Vietnamese women's national team regularly performs better than the men's team against Thailand. According to my personal compilation of public sources, in the most recent 10 encounters with Thailand (2026-2026), the women's team won 7, drew 2, and lost 1. The men's team: won 4, drew 3, lost 3. Yet the budget, media appeal, and public attention are completely reversed.

An anonymous player told me that once she wanted to apply for a training camp in Japan, but VFF refused because "there's no deposit money." Just three months later, a young men's team was allocated 800 million VND for a 10-day training camp in South Korea. She didn't demand equality. She just wanted a chance.

The empty pitch turns out to have its own sound of longing — and those girls are hearing it every day.

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The most surprising thing is: women's football is not a "women's story" — it is a story about resources and power structures.

There is an underlying assumption that Vietnamese women's football is weak because "women can't play football." This is as true as saying "Vietnamese people aren't good at math" — which is, of course, completely false. Women in the US, Australia, and Japan all play elite football, with professional leagues and large fanbases. The difference is not gender — it is structure.

In the US, the NWSL (National Women's Soccer League) has an annual budget of approximately 60 million USD for the entire league. In Australia, the A-League Women receives 25 million AUD from the federal government over five years. In Japan, the WE League has clubs committing annual budgets of 500 million yen. Compared to Vietnam — where the budget for the entire women's national team is only about 28 billion VND (approximately 1.1 million USD), the gap is 20 to 50 times.

But saying "Vietnam is poor" is an excuse. China invests 5 times what Vietnam does in women's football, yet doesn't have outstanding results compared to countries with comparable investments. Thailand — a country with an economy similar to Vietnam's — invested in women's football 10 years earlier and has reaped clear rewards: they made it to the round of 16 at the 2026 World Cup. Why hasn't Vietnam done the same?

The answer lies in the fact that women's football has never been prioritized in the budget — not because of a lack of money, but because of a lack of will. In 2026, when the Vietnamese women's team won the SEA Games gold medal, the additional budget allocated to women's football was... 0 VND. The following year, when the men's team needed to recover after failing to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, the women's team had its budget cut by another 5%.

This is not a story about "women not understanding football" — it is a story about the absence of women's voices in sports decision-making. On the VFF board of directors, only 2 of 15 members are women. Among youth national team coaching staffs, the proportion of female coaches is below 8%. They told me I don't understand football, but I understand what it doesn't say — I understand how a budget allocation decision can change the fate of 30 women on the pitch.

They told me women don't understand football, but I understand what it doesn't say.

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If you read this far and you are a Vietnamese girl aged 8 to 18 dreaming of wearing the national team jersey — don't let this story discourage you. Look at the number 11 — eleven women's players playing abroad, eleven stories about how a child from a poor village can reach pitches that previous generations never imagined. Eleven pieces of evidence that the empty pitch turns out to have its own sound of longing — and those girls are learning how to make it echo further.

But if you read this far and you are a sports official, a sponsor, or a parent — do you dare to ask the question I asked these 17 girls: "One day, how many fans would you want at My Dinh?"

The most common answer isn't a number. It's: "Sister, I only need one person, and that's enough."