The Forgotten Touchline: Why the V.League Teaches Vietnamese Wingers to Turn Inside

A late afternoon at a training centre on the outskirts of Hanoi, boots striking the turf sounded dry and even, like an old clock. I stood behind the touchline, my notebook yellowed by the humidity, and watched a young player repeat a single movement: receive on the flank, push the ball one beat, then drift inside. He did it seventeen times in half an hour. On the eighteenth, the coach called him over, said a few short words, and the player nodded — then kept turning inside.

On the training ground, I once came across a player crying over a misplaced pass. Not this time. This time it was another kind of silence: the silence of a movement repeated until it becomes instinct, and nobody remembers why it was ever different. People call this modernisation. I call it a heartbeat being slowly forgotten.

When the stands are empty, I hear the breathing of the match clearly. And that breathing, in Vietnamese football today, is shorter, faster, and squeezed into a small pocket of space in the middle of the pitch.

A football nation raised on the touchline

I came to Vietnamese football later than most. In 2026 I was only taking my first clumsy steps in the trade at a distant television station, while the Vietnamese national championship still carried different names, different formats, and packed terraces of standing fans. My memory of Vietnamese football is nonetheless vivid on one point: this was a game fed by the touchline.

For decades, the Vietnamese winger was a very particular type. Short, quick, supple, and possessing something that bigger football nations often undervalue: the ability to beat a man over short distances while keeping the torso stable. A good Vietnamese winger did not need height. He needed to know when to push the ball three metres to sprint, and when to pull it back half a metre to wait for the overlapping full-back.

The matches I watched in stadiums across the north and centre showed me a very specific rhythm. The ball went wide, the crowd stood up. The ball went central, the crowd sat down. That was a cultural reflex, and it reflected exactly how the teams played.

Nguyen Quang Hai was once the purest example of that kind of player in the early part of his career. Doan Van Hau was another, at left-back, with his ability to overlap and cross with his left foot. Nguyen Van Toan was the pure-speed winger, the man who made opposing defences drop half a step merely by being present.

Those players did not appear by accident. They were products of a development system that once placed great value on one-on-one ability on the flank. Academies such as Hoang Anh Gia Lai, PVF, Viettel and Nutifood all ran dedicated drills for wingers: beating a man, crossing from the byline, running diagonally behind the defensive line.

Then everything reversed. And I began to notice it through the eyes of a man standing on the touchline, not through a data table.

The movement inside, and its price

The movement inside is not bad. It is effective. It optimises space. It allows a left-footed player on the left wing to become a direct threat on goal, rather than only delivering into the box from outside. When a winger turns inside, he turns the touchline into empty space, and that space is handed to the overlapping full-back.

In theory, this is a perfect system. The full-back overlaps, the winger drifts in, the centre-forward stretches the defence, and a central midfielder pushes up to occupy the middle. Four players create five threats. That is how European teams have operated for more than a decade.

But Vietnamese football is not European football. And this is where I want to pause a little longer.

In the V.League, the quality of full-backs is uneven. Some teams have full-backs good enough to overlap and cross accurately. Many do not. When a winger drifts inside at a club whose full-back cannot overlap, what happens is very simple: the touchline becomes a dead zone. The ball no longer goes there. And the opponent simply funnels everyone into the middle.

I have stood in many stadiums and seen exactly that. A team controls 60-65% of the ball, moves it back and forth in the middle third, but has nobody wide to open up the width. The opposing defence contracts into a dense block, and every through-ball is cut out.

It is a style of football that looks very modern on the tactics board, because everyone drifts inside. But it does not work, because football is played on grass, not on a board.

I remember a match at Hang Day last season. A possession-dominant team, playing with two inverted wingers, repeatedly built through the middle. They had high possession, high pass numbers, and high shot numbers. But their goal tally was zero. The opponent needed only a well-organised back four and one intelligent holding midfielder.

On 70 minutes, the coach sent on a young winger of the old type: receive on the flank, face up, beat his man. Within ten minutes, that team had produced three crosses and one goal. Not because he was better than the others. But because he opened a dimension the whole team had forgotten.

The traditional winger was wrongly eradicated, not because he is obsolete, but because modern systems no longer know how to use him.

The rhythm of a winger

There is something I always watch for at the training ground, and it never appears on a data sheet: the running rhythm of a winger without the ball.

A traditional winger has a very particular rhythm. He runs along the touchline, not to receive the ball, but to create a permanent threat. He forces the opposing full-back to choose: follow him, or leave him. When he runs, he stretches the defence horizontally. And when the defence is stretched horizontally, the middle opens.

An inverted winger does not have that rhythm. He runs diagonally inside, seeking space between full-back and centre-back. He creates a threat, but that threat overlaps the threat of the central midfielder. He does not stretch the defence. He compresses it.

Everyone speaks quickly these days, but football needs people who listen slowly. And what I hear at Vietnamese training grounds is a compression. Teams are playing in an ever-narrower space, with ever more players, and ever shorter sequences.

It is no coincidence that many V.League matches end with low scorelines. Not because Vietnamese defences are so good. But because Vietnamese attacks are locking themselves into too small a space.

I rewatched dozens of matches looking for a specific number, but I realised that what I needed was not in the number. It was in the empty right flank of a team, where nobody ran for the whole first half. That space was wide enough for a person in the stands to see clearly. And it stayed empty for 45 minutes, because no winger was permitted to run there.

The modernisation misunderstanding

There is a very common misunderstanding in Vietnamese football, and it has taken root in both the coaching and the media worlds: the belief that a winger drifting inside is a sign of progress, while a winger running down the touchline is a sign of backwardness.

This misunderstanding stems from a confusion about origins. Europe's top teams moved to inverted wingers because they have full-backs who can play like midfielders. They have central midfielders who can read the game at high speed. They have centre-forwards who can hold the ball while teammates push up.

When a Vietnamese team copies that model without the corresponding people, the result is a hollow system. The full-back cannot overlap. The central midfielder cannot read the game. And the inverted winger is simply standing in a more crowded place.

What is sad is that during this transition, a generation of Vietnamese wingers was taught to forget its core skills. The skill of facing a man one-on-one. The skill of pushing the ball past him. The skill of crossing from the byline. The skill of running across the defender to receive behind the line.

I am not saying those skills have vanished entirely. Nguyen Van Toan still plays that way. But he is the exception, and exceptions do not build a football culture. Doan Van Hau still overlaps with his left foot, but he is a full-back, not a winger.

A generation of young Vietnamese wingers is being trained to play in a very different way. They are taught to receive between the lines, to move the ball quickly, and to make the safe pass. They are taught that beating a man is a risk, that losing the ball on the flank is a tactical error.

And that, in my view, is a waste. A football nation with no wingers willing to beat a man on the flank is a football nation with nobody to open up a match when everything is stuck.

Signals from the training ground

Back to that late afternoon in Hanoi. After the session ended, I approached the coach and asked why he had told the young player to drift inside. He smiled and said, briefly, that this is how modern football works.

I did not argue with him. I only wrote one line in my notebook. And that line is what I want to leave with the reader of this piece.

Modern football is not a fixed set of rules. It is a set of tools. And the traditional winger is a tool that still holds value, still capable of making the difference in matches where every central space has been sealed shut.

The screens flicker constantly, but the ball still rolls to the old rhythm. That old rhythm is the rhythm of a winger running down the touchline, pushing the ball past his man, and delivering into the box. It is a rhythm Vietnamese football once did very well. And it is a rhythm Vietnamese football is slowly forgetting.

I am nearly sixty, but the kick-off whistle makes me young again for ninety minutes. In those ninety minutes, I still want to see a Vietnamese winger standing on the touchline, facing his opposing full-back, and deciding that he will beat him.

The question I leave behind is not whether the inverted winger is wrong. The question is whether Vietnamese football still has the courage to keep half of its touchline, and the patience to teach a generation of young players that space on the flank is not a tactical error, but an unused opportunity.

There is one thing I always carry in my notebook, and it is not a number. It is a line I wrote in 2026, when I first entered the trade: a team is signed by the rhythm of its feet, not by a piece of paper. And that rhythm, in Vietnam, was once counted along the touchline. I believe it is still there, simply waiting for a coach brave enough to start counting again. If next V.League season gives its teams one touchline-hugging winger on each flank, the fans will soon realise that what they thought was obsolete is what makes the stands rise fastest. That is the signal I will be tracking from the touchline all season.