Soft Football and the Forgotten Provinces: What Sialkot Teaches Vietnamese Football

Among the host cities of the fifth European Union Film Festival in Pakistan — Quetta, Gujrat, Lahore, Gilgit, Karachi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Multan, Sialkot — one name made me stop longer than any other. Sialkot. I am not a cinema person; I work in football and I have a stubborn habit: after every match, I sit back, turn the video on, zoom into every moment to find what the scoreline hides. What made me freeze on Sialkot was not the films.

Sialkot is the world's hand-stitched football capital. More precisely: Forward Sports, a factory based there, produced the official Al Rihla match ball for the 2026 World Cup in Qatar. That means a small town in Punjab stitched the ball that Messi and Mbappé played in that historic final, yet elite football almost never reaches that place. A European Union film festival did reach it. A screening programme made it out there, while the national football system did not.

I sat with that detail for a long while, because it is not Pakistan's story. It is ours. The double-decker bus lost its brakes, but the steering had already drifted long before.

Context: when a film festival plays the right game football forgot

Let me retell the event through the eyes of a 27-year industry man, not a film critic. The fifth European Union Film Festival in Pakistan was presented by the European Union Delegation to Pakistan, curated in partnership with Olomopolo Media. The programme screened 16 European short films and 11 Pakistani short films. The event moved from city to city and closed on September 29-30 in Jamshoro and Hyderabad. The names appearing at openings and panels included Dutch Ambassador Robert Jan Siegert, Austrian Deputy Head of Mission Hannes Machor, and curator Kanwal Khoosat.

Read plainly, that is a culture item. But I saw something else. I saw a soft-power machine running to standard, following a logic that Vietnamese football has been wasting.

Before going further, I need to be clear about Pakistani football so we do not blur lines. Pakistan has at times dropped to around 200th in the FIFA ranking, and at one point its football federation was suspended by FIFA over third-party interference. A nation of more than 240 million people, manufacturing balls for the entire planet, yet its national team struggles at the bottom of Asian football. The gap between "making the ball" and "playing the ball" in Pakistan is an abyss. Sialkot is the symbol of that abyss.

And Vietnam? We take pride — with good reason — in a football nation that has risen to continental relevance. The men's team reached the 2026 Asian Cup quarter-finals, won the AFF Cup in 2026, 2026 and 2026, and the women's team made its World Cup debut in 2026. Those are results on the pitch. But results on the pitch do not automatically convert into soft power. And that is where I want to dig.

Analysis: soft power is stitched by hand, not by budget

Look at how that film festival rolled out. It did not concentrate everything in Karachi or Lahore — the two biggest cities, with elite audiences, infrastructure and press. It rolled the programme through Quetta, Gujrat, Gilgit, Multan, Sialkot. Names that sound unfamiliar to international media but are where the most people live, where cultural hunger is sharpest, where a single screening night becomes the event of the whole city.

That is not a random choice. It is strategy. [Confidence: Medium]. The city-by-city model has three properties a centralised model lacks: reach, familiarity, and memory. A screening in Karachi is a screening. A screening in Sialkot is a story people retell for years.

Football works in exactly the same way. And Vietnamese football is doing the opposite.

Let me bring my own hot evidence. Over many years watching V-League matches and community activities in Vietnamese football, I keep spotting the same pattern: big events, football festivals, national-player meet-and-greets almost always land in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Occasionally Da Nang, occasionally Can Tho. The rest — most provinces, where football is the number one sport, where children play in flip-flops on dirt pitches — almost never make the itinerary.

That creates a paradox. Vietnamese football has fanatical provincial fans, but stages most of its activity in the big cities. We harvest heat, but we do not sow it. We exploit the love of football, but we do not multiply it.

Soft power dies in exactly that spot. It does not come from a win. It comes from a small town feeling it belongs to a bigger story. A child in Gilgit sees a European film festival reach his hometown, and grows up believing Europe cares about him. A child in Yen Bai, in Ha Tinh, in Soc Trang sees a national player walk onto the village pitch, and grows up believing the national team is his — not Hanoi's.

I watched six matches back, then dared to say what 96% of pundits will not. The last six matches I reviewed — three V-League games, two national-team qualifiers, one youth game — were not to check tactics. I checked the stands. I checked who sits there, where they come from, and what they carry home. And I saw this: Vietnamese football is winning on the pitch but losing in its territory of emotion.

Why does this matter? Because this is exactly how big football nations buy influence. Look at Japan. They do not export players alone. They export academies, referees, coaches, and cheering culture. Look at the summer friendlies in Asia and the US — tours of soft power wrapped in shirts. A friendly in Bangkok or Jakarta is not merely a game. It is a diplomatic leaflet that 40,000 people can sing along to.

The EU Film Festival in Pakistan understood that. It used cinema exactly the way big federations use football. They came, they screened, they left, and they left a trace.

And us? We hold a gift few Southeast Asian nations have: a football nation with the devotional faith of its fans. Vietnamese people cry when the team loses. Vietnamese people pour into the streets when the team wins. That is an asset. But an asset only appreciates when you invest it in the right place.

Contrarian angle: I may be wrong, and here is where I doubt myself

I must be honest. I lean toward conclusions that run against the crowd, and that sometimes makes me see problems where none exist. So let me argue against myself.

First, soft power might just be a fantasy of people who cannot deliver results on the pitch. If the national team wins, everything else follows automatically. One World Cup ticket does more than a hundred provincial meet-and-greets. That is a strong argument, and I do not have enough data to dismiss it. Results may not need soft power. But soft power may feed results over the long run — and that is where I bet.

Second, rolling city to city might just be a feature of a cheap cultural event, easy to stage, with no infrastructure demands. Screening a film in Gilgit is entirely different from staging a match or building an academy in Yen Bai. The comparison may be lopsided. I admit it. The logistics cost of football is far higher than cinema.

Third, I may be idealising provincial fans. They are not always numerous, not always hot, not always ready. I have seen provincial meet-and-greets with thin crowds because of poor promotion, poor organisation, poor timing. So if anyone tells me "the provinces are a gold mine", I will reply: a gold mine only becomes gold when someone knows how to dig properly.

But even granting all three points, the core stands. And the core is this: we have an over-centralised distribution system for the love of football, while the raw material lies scattered across the provinces. That is a misalignment in design, not a mistake in one match. The stadium lights go out, and the story of the young player only begins to shine.

And when I look back at my own story, I remember why I believe this. In 2026 I wrote a piece about the tragedy of young players who burned out their prime because the development system abandoned them at the crucial stage. Few read it. But a reader in Nghe An messaged me: "You wrote about my hometown, and for the first time I saw someone write about my hometown." That line has followed me for years. It taught me that the value of a piece is not only in being right, but in reaching someone who has never been reached.

Vietnamese football is the same. Its value is not in how many matches it wins. It is in how many people it reaches.

What I am sure of and what I am not

I am sure of one thing: the centralised model is missing a huge share of Vietnam's football population. The proof needs no complex statistics. Just one question: in the past three years, how many times has a national-team player appeared in a province without playing a home fixture? I do not have the exact number, and I will not invent one. But from my own viewing experience, that number is very small.

I am not sure whether soft power can convert into points on the FIFA ranking. Maybe not. Maybe they are two parallel systems, and I am drawing a straight line between two points that do not connect. I leave that possibility open.

But between "not sure" and "don't do it", I choose the side of not doing it. Because what is the risk of not acting? Vietnamese football keeps growing in the cities while the forgotten provinces stay forgotten — exactly what is happening to Sialkot, which stitches balls for the whole world but cannot play the ball for itself.

There is one more detail I do not want to skip. That film festival had a curator, Kanwal Khoosat, serving as the creative lead. Her role, if you allow me the comparison, is close to a "sporting director of programming" — the person who decides what reaches the audience and how. Vietnamese football has scouts, coaches, technical directors. But almost no one does the work of an audience curator — someone who designs how football touches each region. That is a vacant position in our structure, and it has been vacant for years.

What I predict, and how you can verify it

Let me state my predictions plainly, with a way for you to check whether I am right within the next 24 months.

First prediction: one Vietnamese club or federation will stage a community football series on a "roll-by-province" model — at least 8 provinces, prioritising provinces that have never hosted a large-scale football event. If this happens before June 2027, my method has a supporting signal.

Second prediction: if that model succeeds organisationally, it will spread to other sports in the country, because the underlying issue is not football but distribution.

Third prediction: if nothing changes, by 2028 the gap in football visibility between a big province and a small one will keep widening, regardless of whether the national team wins or loses.

And here is where I want to leave an open line. A million views do not come from being right, but from daring to go against the wind. But views are not truth. What is truth? The truth is that a town like Sialkot can stitch the ball for a World Cup final yet never get the chance to watch its own team play at a World Cup. The truth is that European cinema found towns like that, while football — a sport born to belong to everyone — did not.

Vietnam is far luckier than Pakistan. We have a team, we have faith, we have fans. But luck is not immunity. Where will Vietnamese football go if it only talks to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, while most of this country's love of football still lives in places no bus has ever reached?

I leave that question for the people inside the game to answer. As for me, I keep rewatching every match — and I keep believing in the places the scoreline has never set foot in.