Football Tourism: When Foreign Stands Become Destinations for Vietnamese Fans

In the waiting hall of Noi Bai Airport, a group of more than twenty people in red shirts stood queuing for check-in. On their shoulders were red flags with a yellow star; in their hands were tickets to Bangkok. They had not booked a leisure tour. The purpose of the trip was singular: to be in the stands when Vietnam played its decisive match. One man in the group said he had spent nearly fifteen million dong on flights, hotel and match tickets, three times the cost of an ordinary holiday of the same length.

I have followed Vietnamese football through numbers for years, from possession rates to expected goals. Only when witnessing trips like this did I recognise a data stream that the stat sheet usually omits: the money of fans moving across borders. Football has become an organised form of tourism, with its own itineraries, budgets and risks.

Vietnamese fans travelling abroad to watch football is nothing new. Since the early 2000s, supporter groups have flown to Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore whenever the national team played a regional tournament. But the scale has shifted markedly over the past decade. As average incomes rose and low-cost carriers added routes, geography ceased to be a barrier. A three-day trip to Bangkok now costs the equivalent of one month's wage for an ordinary worker, rather than an entire year as before.

What stands out is the structure of spending. Flights and hotels take up most of the budget, but the fastest-growing portion sits in ancillary services: shirts, banners, stadium tours, and even all-in packages that travel companies design specifically for individual matches. This is the intersection of two industries rarely placed side by side in financial reports: sport and tourism.

European clubs spotted this long ago. A stadium is no longer purely a place of competition; it is also a tourist attraction. Barcelona, Manchester United and Real Madrid all run stadium tours as a standalone business line, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. That model is gradually appearing in Southeast Asia, where federations are starting to consider how to monetise the commercial value of their home grounds.

Read through the data, the picture is far clearer than the usual impression. In a major national-team match away from home, the number of Vietnamese supporters present typically ranges from a few thousand to more than ten thousand, depending on capacity and the match's importance. A few thousand sounds small next to tens of thousands of home fans, but multiplied by average spending per person, the total can reach tens of billions of dong for a single match.

I tried to reconstruct the calculation for a regional final staged abroad. Assume around eight thousand Vietnamese supporters travel, each spending an average of ten million dong on flights, hotel, food and match tickets. Total spending lands near eighty billion dong, before incidental purchases. Most of that money flows into the host country's economy, not Vietnam's. Every number tells a story. The story is not inside the number.

That is the crux that planners rarely confront directly: every away match is an export of services that Vietnam pays for, while the commercial value of the national team is created elsewhere. Conversely, when Vietnam hosts, the money flows the other way. Matches at My Dinh Stadium, with a capacity of about forty thousand, fill the stands and pull in demand for hotels, transport and dining across Hanoi for several days.

Compared with regional football nations, Vietnam has the advantage of population and intensity, but lacks the accompanying commercial infrastructure. Thailand has turned international fixtures into organised tourism products, with combo packages sold to foreign visitors. Japan and South Korea exploit the reverse direction too: Asian fans fly to Europe to watch their idols play, and travel companies capture that demand quickly.

One point about method must be made clear. The figures above are consolidated estimates, not official numbers released by the federation. I cross-checked across sources: tournament organiser reports, airline information, and small surveys of the people travelling themselves. The gap between sources can reach thirty per cent. That is why I always say football data, especially commercial data, must be read with more caution than data from the pitch.

But there is a counter-intuitive angle few want to hear. Football tourism is not always a profitable investment. Most fans who travel to an away match do not come back. They do not become repeat visitors to that city. The economic value is therefore one-off, tied tightly to the result of one specific match. When the team loses, negative emotion can wipe out any goodwill to return.

I witnessed this during the period when stadiums stood empty because of the pandemic. Empty stadiums taught me that noise is data. Without spectators, the commercial value of a match collapses almost entirely, regardless of the technical quality on show. That shows most of the value lies in the collective experience, not in the match itself. And a collective experience cannot be packaged and resold.

That is also why the transfer market is where impatience gets priced. Clubs sometimes pay for a player simply to hold on to the crowd coming through the gates, not necessarily because he upgrades the team tactically. The money of football tourism and the money of the transfer market share the same root: the emotion of the fans.

Looking beyond a single match, the issue is not how much Vietnamese fans spend, but how much of it can be retained in the economy. A federation that knows how to turn emotion into durable commercial infrastructure will gain more than a handful of isolated wins. Data does not erase emotion. It explains why emotion exists.