The Traditional Winger and the Quiet Erasure in Vietnamese Football

Rain on the Workers' Park. A July night, and I returned to Hang Day — where ten years earlier I had written about a man who sat in row twelve for ninety minutes, wearing a torn rain hat, holding up a faded 2026 season banner. The stadium no longer carries the name Workers' Park, but the memory on that park is never dry. In that rain, I witnessed something I could not have imagined ten years before: a young player received the ball near the touchline, controlled it, turned — and instead of crossing into the box as his elders' generation did, he pushed the ball inside, cut into the central channel, and shot with his right foot.

There was no applause. There were no jeers. Only the silence of a stand that had grown entirely used to it. The traditional winger had left Vietnamese football without anyone organising a funeral for him.

The touchline used to be a profession

To understand why a position disappears, you must remember how it once existed.

Two decades ago, the winger in Vietnam was a trade with a narrow specialism but an unusually vivid life. They lived on the touchline. The work came down to three movements: receive the ball, face the full-back, cross. Fans remembered them by a single movement. A dribble past a man by the touchline, a curled cross with the inside of the boot, a driven ball across the edge of the box — that was their entire career, and also the entire joy of the crowd.

The stand rose not because they believed he would score — that probability was very low. They rose because they believed he would try. The tension lay in this: he was very far from goal, in a corner where every tactical explanation became meaningless, and the whole match depended on whether he could get past the man standing in front of him.

Nguyen Van Toan was once the embodiment of that player on the right. Phan Van Duc on the left. At their peak, both shared one thing: they did not try to become all-round players. They accepted that they were specialists in a narrow strip of space — and that very acceptance made them dangerous. An opposing full-back knew exactly what was coming, and still could not stop it.

It was a highly specialised trade, and in football, specialisation is often read as a sign of limitation. But I believe the opposite is true. A player who accepts doing one thing well — and doing it at the highest level — is usually worth more than a player who tries to do everything at an average level. The problem is that modern football has agreed on a narrow definition of perfection, and that definition has no room for the traditional winger.

But then Vietnamese football changed. Not with a declaration, but with a series of small adjustments, accumulating across many seasons. And the death of a position, like the death of a person, rarely comes from a single blow.

When the central channel became the promised land

The shift began in Europe, as most tactical shifts do.

The inverted winger model is not technically new, but it became the standard only in the last fifteen years. The core idea is simple: a left-footed player on the right, or the reverse, gains an advantage when cutting inside and shooting with his stronger foot. The opposing full-back is forced to choose: either follow him wide and expose the inside channel, or retreat inside and concede the touchline.

For Vietnamese football, the model arrived by two routes. The first was television: European matches broadcast live, and young coaches watching them as free lectures. The second was foreign coaches — men carrying curricula shaped in Europe or Japan, where control of the central channel is treated as the precondition for everything else.

When a foreign coach arrives in the V.League, the first thing he usually does is compress the distance between the lines. A team stretched horizontally — something Vietnamese football once did very well — is seen as waste. Instead, the wingers are asked to tuck inside, forming a crowded block in the middle where, in theory, the team controls more of the ball.

I do not deny that logic. Controlling the centre genuinely brings an advantage. But there is one thing foreign coaches often overlook when they arrive in Vietnam: they bring a model designed for players with a very different physical and technical baseline. An inverted winger in Europe can dribble past three men in tight space. An inverted winger in the V.League often loses the ball at the second man. And when you lose the ball in the centre, the consequence is far more serious than losing it on the touchline — because in the centre, the opponent is already in a counter-attacking posture the moment they win it.

That is the first blind spot. The model was imported, but the physical infrastructure to run it was not imported with it.

The second blind spot is subtler. The inverted winger model assumes the team keeps the ball long enough for the winger to cut inside and receive in the half-space. But in many V.League matches, average possession is far lower than in European leagues. That means Vietnamese wingers often receive the ball in transition, where cutting inside offers no advantage — it only carries the ball into the most crowded area.

In those moments, what the team needs is not a player who cuts inside. What the team needs is a player who can push the ball wide, beat his man, and cross before the defence organises. In other words, in the moments that matter most, Vietnamese football still needs exactly the kind of player it is now discarding.

What I counted

I rewatched the footage at least twice before writing these lines. Not to find a beautiful moment, but to count.

In a recent season, I tracked sixty V.League matches and logged two simple indicators: the number of crosses from wide areas, and the number of shots from the half-spaces. The result surprised me not because the figures differed, but because of how much they differed. Compared with a decade ago, the average number of crosses per match has fallen markedly, while shots from the half-spaces have risen correspondingly. Touches in the wide areas — where a traditional winger once lived — have also fallen.

These numbers appear in no official report. They are what I counted myself, logged myself, from hundreds of matches I have followed over more than twenty years. I do not present them as scientific proof; I present them as a witness. And this witness matches what my eyes saw from the stand: the touchline is being abandoned.

There is one small detail I want to pause on. In a match I rewatched three times, the home side took the lead in the eighth minute through a counter-attack. The scorer started from the left, cut inside, and finished with his right foot. It was a beautiful goal, and I do not mean to deny it. But in the eightieth minute, when that team needed one more goal to win, they had four players standing in the box — and not one of them could cross. All four were inverted wingers, on the opposite flank to their stronger foot. That team had the means to unlock the match, but no tool to break down a packed defence.

That is the tragedy of homogenisation. When every attacking player shares the same skill set, the team loses the ability to change its method of attack. They become predictable — not because they play badly, but because they all play identically.

I also logged another detail few notice. From corner kicks, the number of Vietnamese players capable of delivering an accurate cross from outside the box is falling. It sounds small, but it reflects something larger: the cross — a basic skill of the traditional winger — is becoming rare. When a skill becomes rare, it becomes valuable. And when it becomes valuable, the team that owns it gains an edge. It is a paradox few V.League coaches recognise: in discarding the traditional winger, they are discarding a competitive advantage along with him.

The contract and the resale value

There is an economic reason rarely discussed, and I think it matters more than the tactical one.

V.League clubs increasingly depend on selling players abroad to balance their finances. And when a European or Japanese scout comes to Vietnam looking for talent, he looks for a specific profile: an inverted winger, able to play multiple positions, capable of shooting with both feet. A pure traditional winger — one who only crosses — is far harder to sell. He has no resale value in the scouts' eyes, even if he may be more important to the current team.

This is where I see a deep contradiction. Every contract is a farewell written in advance. When a club signs a young player, it is already thinking of the day he leaves. And because it thinks of the day he leaves, it trains him the way the foreign market wants, not the way the V.League needs. The result is that clubs produce players who can be sold — and then are sold — while domestic football increasingly lacks the tools to solve its own problems.

I have written about this in another guise: the signing fee for a free agent. A club signs a free agent, pays him a large cash sum, and that sum never appears on the balance sheet as a transfer fee. It slips past the monitoring system. With wingers, the same logic operates: value is shaped by the external market, not by internal need. And when the external market converges on a single player profile, Vietnamese football will produce a single player profile.

There is a second consequence I want to stress. When a player's value is decided by the foreign market, V.League clubs lose their autonomy in developing players. They no longer train to win the V.League; they train to sell. That is a fundamental shift in the purpose of a football academy, and it explains why many V.League clubs now play a brand of football unsuited to their own squads. They play the way the scouts want to see, not the way the league demands.

The academies and the children taught to cut inside

If you want to know how Vietnamese football will play in ten years, look at the youth academies today.

I have visited a few academies in recent years, and I noticed a recurring pattern: children who play wide are taught to cut inside from a very young age. The coach places two cones on either side of the box and asks them to dribble into the middle. There is no drill for crossing. There is no session for facing a full-back on the touchline and beating him with pace.

This is not wrong as holistic development. A young player needs to know how to cut inside, needs to shoot with his weaker foot, needs to play multiple positions. But there is a difference between teaching a winger to cut inside as an additional skill and teaching him to cut inside as his only skill.

When a traditional winger matures, he owns something no tactical model can teach: patience on the touchline. He knows he may not receive the ball for ten minutes, but when he does, he must make a difference in three seconds. He knows a good cross is worth as much as a goal, even though it is never written into the record. He knows his job is to create chances, not to score. And in a football culture where every young player dreams of scoring, learning to create is a sacrifice.

Our academies are producing players who want to shine. They are not producing players who want to serve. And when an entire generation is trained to shine, no one is left to serve.

I think of one generation from a famous academy in the Central Highlands — names once seen as the future of Vietnamese football. They were trained to play a technical, short-passing, attractive game. But when they entered the V.League, they met tightly organised defences, teams willing to sit deep and concede the initiative. And they had no tool to break down those defences, because no one had taught them how to cross from the touchline, how to face a full-back in tight space, how to create chaos in the box. They were taught to play beautifully, but not taught to win.

That is not their fault. It is the fault of a system that has homogenised the very concept of talent.

The national team and the price of homogeneity

The consequences of this shift do not stop at club level. They reach the national team.

In the period when Vietnamese football achieved its best results — runners-up at the 2026 AFC U-23 Championship, a quarter-final at the 2026 Asian Cup, a first-ever place in the third round of World Cup qualifying — the national team played a model that can be summed up in one word: counter-attack. And counter-attacking, to work, needs wingers capable of switching state in an instant — from defence to attack, from the touchline into the box, within seconds.

That model did not require wingers to dribble past three men. It required them to run fast, decide fast, and cross accurately when needed. That is precisely the skill set of the traditional winger.

When the national team shifted to a possession model under a different coach, it needed wingers who could cut inside, join the central combinations, and create a spark in the half-space. But Vietnamese players at that stage had not been trained to do so at a high level. The result was a half-formed football: possession not good enough to impose, and counter-attack no longer sharp enough to punish opponents.

I do not blame any coach. A coach must play the way his players allow. But there is a question few ask: should we change an entire football nation to fit a philosophy, or choose a philosophy to fit what we have? And if we choose to change the entire football nation, are we ready to pay the price of a mediocre decade to do so?

That question is not merely tactical. It is about identity. Vietnamese football was once known for its skill, its agility, and its lightning counter-attacks. That was our identity, built over generations. When we try to become a possession team, we do not just change how we play; we change who we are. And I am not sure we are prepared to pay that price.

Looking at the regional leagues

To understand this homogenisation more clearly, look at our neighbours.

Southeast Asian football shares a common feature: regional leagues are often seen as a springboard for players to move abroad. That means clubs in the region are under pressure to train players the way the international market wants, not the way the domestic league needs. And as a result, in many Southeast Asian nations, traditional wingers are disappearing in the same way.

It is a regional phenomenon, not a Vietnamese one alone. But one thing sets Vietnam apart: we have a tradition of producing excellent wingers. For decades, Vietnamese wingers were known for their pace and decisiveness. We produced players who could change a match with a single moment on the touchline. And now we are actively abandoning that tradition to chase a model that was not designed for us.

I am not saying we should close the door on the world. I am saying we should learn selectively. A tactical model is not a religion; it is a tool. And a tool is only useful when it fits the job. When we use a tool designed for a different job, we do not become more modern; we only become less effective.

A contrarian view: the traditional winger is not dead

Here, I must say what I believe, even though it runs against the prevailing current.

The traditional winger is not obsolete. He has merely been abandoned.

There is a logical error in how most of us think about tactical evolution. We assume a new model appears because it is better than the old one, and therefore the old one must be discarded. But in football, the opposite is often true: a model becomes widespread not because it is better, but because it fits a particular context better — and when that context is copied everywhere, the model is copied with it, even where it no longer fits.

The inverted winger model was designed for European football, where players have the individual technique to operate in tight space, and where teams have the possession capacity to sustain pressure in the centre. In Vietnam, both conditions hold only partly. Yet we applied the model as though both held fully.

This does not mean we must return to the past. It means we must recognise that the touchline is not an obsolete zone. It is an abandoned zone — and abandoned zones are always where smart teams find an edge.

Imagine a V.League team with a genuine traditional winger: right-footed, on the right, able to cross, able to beat his full-back, able to run into the space behind the defensive line. In a league where every full-back is used to facing players who cut inside, having to defend against a player who goes outside is a completely new problem. That full-back will have to relearn how to play — and while he learns, the other team has scored.

That is the value of non-homogeneity. A league where every team plays the same way is a predictable league. A league with many different methods of attack is a hard league to play in. And Vietnamese football, in its effort to become modern, is becoming more predictable.

I am not asking coaches to abandon the inverted winger. I am asking them to diversify. A team can own both an inverted winger and a traditional winger. That combination is not only feasible; it is a tactical advantage. But to have that combination, the academies must start retraining the skills they have forgotten.

I count the seconds the Japanese way — not counting down, but counting what remains. And what remains on the touchline of Vietnamese football is steadily less.

What remains after the rain

The match at Hang Day ended goalless. I left the stand while the rain was still falling. On the way home, I thought about the young player who cut inside in the thirtieth minute. He had done exactly what he was taught. He made no mistake at all. And that is precisely the problem.

A football nation does not collapse because of individual errors. It collapses because the right things are done too uniformly. When every player does the right thing, no one does enough of a different thing. When every team plays the right way, no team plays differently enough.

The stadium is empty, but I can still hear the applause of those at home — those who still remember a curled cross with the inside of the boot, a dribble past a man by the touchline, an afternoon when the whole stand rose simply because they believed their player would try. Those people do not need football to be modern. They need football to have many ways to score.

The traditional winger does not need our pity. He needs us to remember that he once existed — and that his existence once made Vietnamese football harder to predict. A football story never begins in the first minute; it begins on the touchline, where a player receives the ball, lifts his head, and decides that he will not cut inside.