Vietnamese Football and the Localisation Rate: When the Pitch Also Needs a Supply Chain

A youth football academy in Hưng Yên, on a morning in October, frost still clinging to the grass. A group of seventeen-year-olds line up in two rows, passing the ball to the rhythm of their coach's count. No stands, no cheering. Only the steady sound of the ball meeting the ground, like a clock. I stood there a long while, listening to the sound I have heard across fifty-one years in this trade: the sound of a football nation building its own foundations.

A few days earlier, I read a report that had nothing to do with football. A large Vietnamese industrial group announced it would hold its second supplier conference on 16 October 2026 at an international convention centre in Hanoi, aiming to raise the localisation rate in its production chain. The report contained not a single word about a ball. But when I folded the paper away, I realised it was describing exactly what Vietnamese football still lacks.

In this country, people are used to measuring a team by its foreign players. Every V.League season, clubs register three or four overseas players, most of them strikers. They score, they are celebrated, then two years later they leave and a forward line stands empty. Meanwhile, a nineteen-year-old sits on the bench for eighteen rounds just to play the last seven minutes. I have watched this hundreds of times, at grounds from Hàng Đẫy to Thống Nhất, and each time I ask myself: are we importing goals, or importing laziness?

The localisation rate — a factory concept — turns out to measure a football nation too. Imagine each club as an assembly plant. The input is players trained at home, from academies such as PVF, HAGL, Viettel, or smaller centres scattered across the provinces. The output is a starting eleven. If most of the components in that eleven come from abroad, where does the added value remain? It stays with the seller, not the buyer. And when the supply of foreign players breaks — because of a pandemic, because of cost, because of some crisis somewhere — the whole line stops.

What troubles me is not the number of foreign players. It is that we have never published a single localisation figure. In industry, when a corporation says it will raise the localisation rate, it at least knows where it stands and where it wants to go. On the pitch, nobody knows. What percentage of a V.League club's starting eleven was developed by that club itself? There is no data. How many senior starters has an academy produced? Nobody compiles it. We talk about youth football through inspiration, through slogans, through signing ceremonies, but almost never through numbers.

A football nation that cannot measure its own localisation rate can never raise it, because no one improves what they refuse to count.

My memory is dyed the colour of grass, and that colour does not fade with time. I remember the Vietnamese generations who made history with their own feet, and I also remember the seasons when clubs raced to buy foreign strikers like a luxury good, only to find that the good fed no one but itself. Supporters change shirts from era to era, but the chant stays the same tune. What changed is belief: they began to believe goals had to be imported, that they could not be grown at home.

Yet I do not want to fall into the opposite trap. But closing the door entirely will lead us into a stagnant pond. A football nation that feeds only itself is one that dies slowly inside that pond. High-quality foreign players remain necessary: they raise training standards, they teach young players how to hold position, how to bear pressure, how to finish a move without trembling. The problem is not the importing itself, but that we import to fill a gap instead of to learn a trade.

The blind spot lies here: we see foreign players as a short-term fix for results, when we should see them as an investment in skill transfer. A smart club is one that uses its foreigners to pull the whole domestic line upward, the way a large factory pulls its small suppliers through a quality test. A lazy club simply pays the money and waits for goals to fall, season after season, until its resources run dry.

I have followed V.League matches for many years, and what gives me most faith is not the beautiful goals, but the twenty-year-olds who demand the ball in the ninetieth minute. Their number is growing, slowly but truly. At a few clubs, coaching staffs have begun to treat young players as assets rather than as a fallback option. That is the seed of a genuine domestic supply chain: not one glamorous academy, but a network of hundreds of small ones, each producing a few components the team needs.

Our task, we who sit by the touchline, is to stop asking how many foreigners a team has and start asking what percentage of itself a team produces. Football gives us a moment, then takes a lifetime to regret. But if we are willing to bend down and count, to name the young players, to write the numbers down, then one day that localisation rate will no longer be a slogan on a noticeboard, but a living line on the scoreboard.

The ground is empty, but I still hear the stands weeping through memory. I hope that in ten years those tears will turn into song — the song of a football nation that knows what it is made of, and is proud of it.