A Shared Rhythm from Busan to Hanoi: Vietnamese Football in Korean Memory

On a late-October afternoon in Busan, the training ground of a K League 2 club was so quiet that I could hear the ball bounce on the grass. I stood at the corner of the pitch, two notebooks in my jacket pocket—one for tactics, one for things that have nothing to do with football. A Korean colleague walked past and handed me his phone, showing a clip from a Vietnam national team match played years ago. He asked, half-joking, half-serious: "Do you really believe you can do it?"

I did not answer right away. There were no spectators in the stands, but I could still hear the heartbeat of the match.

I have heard that question more than a dozen times in seven years of living in Korea. It does not stop at tactics. It reaches for trust. And trust, in football, is the hardest thing to measure.

In 2026, when Park Hang-seo arrived in Hanoi, few people in Korea knew who he was. He had sat beside Guus Hiddink during the 2026 World Cup run, but his coaching career had never carried a major mark. Vietnamese football at the time was searching for a direction after years of stagnation.

Then, in January 2026, in Changzhou, Vietnam’s U23 team reached the final of the AFC U23 Asian Cup in falling snow. All of Vietnam stayed awake. In Busan, I sat in a small restaurant surrounded by Koreans, and for the first time in my life I saw them cheer for a Southeast Asian team. An older man sitting next to me turned and asked for the name of the player who had scored. I wrote the name on a slip of paper. He folded it and tucked it into his wallet, as if it were something worth keeping.

Six months later, in Kazan, I stood in the mixed zone as South Korea beat Germany 2-0. I watched Kim Young-gwon score in stoppage time, and I was among the first to hear the head coach’s words after the match: "We won because the players trusted each other." I wrote that sentence down verbatim and underlined it twice.

Late in 2026, at My Dinh, Vietnam won the AFF Cup after ten years of waiting. I watched from Busan on a flickering stream. When the final whistle blew, I heard cheers coming through the wall from the apartment next door. My neighbours were a Korean family. They were not watching the match. They simply heard me shouting.

Then I flew straight to Jakarta to follow Park Hang-seo and Vietnam’s U23 team for two weeks. I recorded how he shifted the 3-4-3 shape depending on the opponent, how he placed his trust in players few people noticed. Those two events, placed side by side, taught me something the scoreboard never says.

In 2026, Vietnam reached the third round of World Cup qualifying for the first time. It was a milestone. But what I remember most is not the result, but how the players walked into matches against Japan, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. They were not afraid. They knew they were weaker, but they were not afraid.

In 2026, Kim Sang-sik took over the Vietnam national team. He arrived with a different task: not to rebuild trust, but to sustain it. That is a far harder problem.

The thread linking Korean and Vietnamese football lies not in tactical systems, but in trust built from the smallest things. I realised this while comparing the two defensive philosophies I have followed for years.

Korean football is known for running intensity and collective discipline. Vietnamese football, in its golden era under Park Hang-seo, also ran a great deal, but in a different way. Vietnamese players did not run to impose. They ran to wait. They waited for the opponent to err, then countered with short, quick, few-touch passes. It was a different rhythm—quiet, but patient.

While watching training sessions, I noticed a detail television never shows: after each tactical drill, Park Hang-seo would stop and speak privately with individual players. Not to scold. Not to add tactical instructions. He asked how they felt. He asked how their families were. With a young player, he asked about sleep. It is what a Korean coach does, but it sits in no coaching manual.

In the V.League, I noticed clubs gradually learning to build physical foundations to Korean standards. Youth academies such as Hoang Anh Gia Lai, PVF, and Viettel began investing in sports science. Young players were measured, monitored for recovery, fed by calculated menus. But the biggest change was not physical. It was mental.

Before 2026, Vietnamese players often trembled in big matches. After 2026, they stopped trembling. I asked a player who had worn the national shirt about that shift. He said: "We used to fear losing. Now we fear not giving everything." That is a shift in mental rhythm, not in tactics.

A Korean crying for Vietnamese football. That is a shared rhythm.

In recent years, more and more Vietnamese players have sought opportunities abroad. Some went to Japan, some to Korea, some tested themselves in Europe. Not all succeeded. But every such trip brought back a lesson. When they returned to the V.League, they carried a new rhythm, a new way of thinking about the profession.

In the V.League, that rhythm is even clearer. Matches are played in stadiums of varying capacity, from small grounds in the central region to large ones in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Not every match has spectators. But every match has someone keeping the rhythm. It might be an assistant referee running the touchline under 35-degree heat. It might be a medic sitting beside the ice box. It might be a photographer like me, waiting for the exact moment.

Away trips are the least-discussed part of Vietnamese football. A V.League club may travel thousands of kilometres for a single match, along routes where flying is not always an option. On the bus, players sleep, listen to music, or stay silent. It is on those trips that camaraderie forms—something no tactical drill can create.

Every player has his own rhythm. I only look for where it begins.

Outsiders often look at Vietnamese football and draw conclusions from metrics: FIFA ranking position, goals scored, points won. They assume progress comes from hiring foreign coaches, from sponsorship money, from expensive contracts. That explanation sounds reasonable, but it misses most of the story.

What I observed from the training ground does not match that explanation. Vietnam’s progress did not come from one big contract. It came from thousands of small sessions, where a coach patiently rebuilt trust in each player. It came from a still-poor football nation choosing to go slowly but steadily, rather than burning money to buy short-term results.

There are things that never appear on the scoreboard, yet they decide everything.

The 2026 season taught me that silence can also be a form of support. When stadiums had no spectators, football continued. But it continued differently. Players could hear each other call. Coaches did not need to shout. And I, from the corner of the pitch, realised that noise is not what makes a match. Rhythm is what makes it.

One more thing outsiders often misread: they think VAR and new technologies will make football fairer. From what I have witnessed, VAR does not make controversy disappear. It simply moves controversy from the pitch into the review room, where the law still holds grey zones no camera can illuminate. Football has not become simpler because of technology. It has only become more transparent in the places where people have agreed transparency is needed.

Nor do I trust metrics such as expected goals. They may look fine on a statistics sheet, but they cannot explain why a player misses at minute 88, or why a referee blows the whistle at the exact decisive moment. What decides a match usually lies beyond every measurement.

Busan is not the stage lights, but it taught me how to keep the rhythm.

I do not know whether Vietnamese football can reach a World Cup. But I know one thing: the rhythm has been kept. And when a rhythm is kept long enough, it finds its way to larger stages on its own.

What I am waiting for is not a specific victory. I am waiting for the moment a child in Busan, or in Hanoi, or anywhere, asks their parents why people cry over a football match. When that child speaks up, football will have finished its work.

From Busan to the World Cup, I learned that football does not lie.