Three Days in Can Tho and the Age-Ten Gap in Vietnamese Women's Football

Can Tho rain does not fall in drops. It comes down as a single wet mass, clinging to skin, to school shirts, to the corrugated roofs of a primary school beside a small canal. That morning I stood under the eaves and watched children of seven or eight kicking a plastic ball on a concrete yard still slick with water. No goal. No referee. No scoreline. Only laughter and the thud of the ball against a wall, steady as a drumbeat nobody had named.

A few kilometres away, a hall was preparing for the opening of the 2026 community football instructor training course, organised by the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) together with the Can Tho Football Federation and supported by UEFA and the AFC. Three days, from 23 to 25 October. It ends with a VFF certificate of completion.

The child on the concrete and the course in the hall are two ends of the same story. Between them lies a gap no press release can measure.

Across a decade of watching football, I have learned one simple thing: the same event can be read as an administrative formality, or as a piece of an entire system. I choose the second reading.

According to the organisers, the programme targets girls aged six to nine. The course is for the people who will coach them directly: physical education teachers, community workers, local volunteers. The content covers community coaching principles, two frameworks abbreviated SMILES and STEPS, plus sessions on the barriers that keep girls out of football, how to plan a football festival, and task assignments after the course.

It is called an instructor training course. Look closely at its structure, though, and it does not aim to produce coaches in the professional sense. It aims to produce adults who know how to keep a six-year-old from being afraid of the ball.

In the world of youth football there is a model called Long-Term Athlete Development, or LTAD. It divides a player's growth into stages. The six-to-nine bracket sits in the stage called FUNdamentals, where everything revolves around movement literacy and enjoyment rather than competitive results. The programme's explicit refusal to emphasise results at this age, its focus on positive and happy experiences and the gradual development of movement and basic football skills, is not a novel stance. It is the orthodox position of modern youth football, codified by FIFA, UEFA and the AFC in their own standards.

What stands out is not whether the programme is right or wrong, but that it chooses correctly. A three-day course cannot create experts, yet setting the right direction for the people who teach six-to-nine-year-olds matters more than any tactical drill.

I once sat in the Maracanã on days when not a single soul was present, listening to an old security guard recount Zico's debut in 2026. He remembered it precisely, without notes. A person's football memory does not come from numbers; it comes from a moment recalled long enough. That is how youth football works too. A child does not remember whether she won or lost at seven. She remembers the feeling of touching the ball, of laughing, of someone patting her shoulder in praise.

Two frameworks named in the course release, STEPS and SMILES, deserve separate attention. STEPS is a common mnemonic in European coach education, usually used to remind coaches to adapt sessions along variables: Space, Task, Equipment, People and Speed. If that is the version taught in Can Tho, trainees are being handed a tool for flexibility rather than a fixed set of drills. That matters in the Mekong Delta, where pitches, equipment and weather shift constantly between schools.

SMILES I cannot analyse. Its six components are not stated in any material I could access. Judging from the surrounding text on positive experiences and a non-competitive approach, it is plausibly a mnemonic for child-centred coaching behaviour. But guessing is not analysis. If there is one thing I would ask the organisers, it is this: what letters make up your SMILES?

A three-day course ending in a certificate of completion sets a low competence ceiling. Compared with an AFC-licensed coaching certificate, a community course completion certificate is a different thing in kind. The programme is not designed to produce professional coaches. It is designed to activate a network of adults who can guide children at the grassroots level.

In that model, the value of the whole programme lies in what is called the cascade model. A group of instructors is trained, they return to their localities, and each of them then guides dozens or hundreds of girls. If each instructor reaches thirty children, a few dozen instructors can reach thousands of children in a year.

That is a beautiful logic on paper. But a cascade is a structure of loss. Each time a message passes through a layer, it dilutes a little more, like a story retold through many mouths. The first layer may grasp the importance of not applying competitive pressure. The third layer may have forgotten half the story and remember only the drills.

The problem is not the goodwill of the learners. It is that the programme publishes no monitoring mechanism after the course. No trainee count, no coach-to-child ratio, no contact hours, no assessment method. There is no way to know whether, six months later, those trained are still guiding children.

There is another troubling structure, and it relates directly to why the programme exists. It is designed for girls aged six to nine. No announcement mentions a bridge for them from age ten onward, into organised school football, into youth competitions, or into a pathway leading to a club. When an entry-level programme ends without an exit, it becomes a beautiful moment that dissolves.

The most common failure mode of entry-level girls' football programmes worldwide is not a lack of joy, but joy in full and an empty road ahead. Girls stay with the ball until they turn ten, then have nowhere to go.

This is exactly the gap I have observed in many places, from community tournaments in São Paulo to small pitches back home. Vietnamese women's football has gone further than most in the region: the women's national team reached its first FIFA Women's World Cup in 2026, a milestone few Southeast Asian sides have achieved. But that achievement was built on a narrow base. The number of provinces that genuinely produce women's internationals is small, mostly concentrated in the north. The team's success has outpaced the participation base beneath it. That is the pattern of a small denominator performing above its weight.

Widening the denominator is the right move. Can Tho is a sensible but historically thin choice. The Mekong Delta is absent from the women's football talent map compared with northern provinces. Hosting a course here signals an intent to broaden the region. But intent alone does not create a pathway.

There is one more thing anyone concerned with youth football must pause on. The programme targets girls aged six to nine, meaning minors are involved. Yet child safeguarding is entirely absent from the release. FIFA's safeguarding framework, known as FIFA Guardians, is a mandatory standard for any programme with participants under eighteen. Parental consent, insurance, safety measures all sit inside that framework. The release says nothing about them.

I do not believe they are ignored in practice. I believe they are unmentioned in the messaging. And in child safeguarding, silence is not a neutral choice. It is a gap that needs to be stated.

On finances, every field is blank. No budget, no cost, no participant figure, no specific funding source. The phrase used in the release, supported by UEFA and the AFC, is a skilful diplomatic construction. It is compatible with two possibilities: a cash grant, or technical support covering curriculum and a modest portion of costs. Typically, in Southeast Asian grassroots programmes, it leans toward the second.

From the perspective of a taxpayer or a sponsor, the key question is not how much the programme costs, but how many children the money reaches, and for how long. The release provides one side of that ratio, and neither side of the other.

There is one bright point I want to record, and it concerns timing. The programme is called the 2026 training course, yet this session took place in October of the preceding year. That signals a funded work-plan cycle spanning the year boundary. People prepare before deployment rather than announcing on the day. But it also implies the funding commitment may end with the 2026 cycle.

If that happens, there is a consequence few notice. A six-year-old entering the programme in 2026 turns ten in 2030, exactly when she leaves the target age band. If support is renewed only on short cycles, the programme cannot accompany a generation through to the 10 to 13 development stage, where retention is actually won or lost.

At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together. The children on that rainy concrete yard in Can Tho — I do not know any of their names. Perhaps in a few years one of them will step onto a real pitch, with a real goal, with real cheering. But perhaps at ten she will have nowhere left to play.

People chase the trophy, but really they chase a story about themselves. Vietnamese women's football has touched a big story at the 2026 World Cup. The next story does not lie in a tournament, but on some concrete yard in the Delta, where a girl needs to be kept with the ball for a few more years.

What is precious about the Can Tho course is that it exists. It speaks correctly about how to teach young children. It carries an internationally backed curriculum. The most durable asset it leaves behind is not the certificate, but the method lodged in the minds of a few dozen local people. That method can be reused, repeated and re-run cheaply.

But a three-day course in a single province is not a national strategy. It is a brick, laid in the right place, in a wall still missing many other bricks.

A loop does not exist for us to endure, but for us to catch sight of ourselves in time. Looking at Can Tho, I see a familiar loop of Vietnamese football: beautiful beginnings, polished press releases, and an old question left open after every opening ceremony. Who will walk with these children to the year they turn ten?

Perhaps the answer does not lie in three days. It lies in the next three years, and in whether those who sat in that hall decide to renew. Until there is an answer, the children on the concrete will keep playing among themselves, in the rain, with no goal, no scoreline, and no one measuring what is being lost.