When the Heat Map Cannot Measure Longing

In a V.League 1 press conference, amid the noise of cameras and the smell of cold coffee, there is a sound nobody notices: the whirring of cooling fans from dozens of laptops running analytical software. Beside me, a young colleague opens the heat map of the match that just ended. On the screen, green and red squares bloom like a strange garden, marking every step a player took. He looks at it and says: "You see, this player ran more than eleven kilometres, pressed more than twenty times, better stats than a national team midfielder."

I look at the screen. The dark red squares cluster on the right wing, where that player operated most. The heat map is not wrong. It simply does not know that, on the stands behind that right wing, there is a sixty-year-old man who has sat in the same spot for thirty years, and every time his son's player runs down there, he stands up and claps as if for the first time.

That is why I write. Not to resist data - data has been my faithful companion for five decades. I write out of a worry: that in the intoxication of numbers, we might forget that Vietnamese football is not measured only in kilometres and percentages. It is measured by empty seats still ringing with songs, by the longing of those who have gone far away, by the heartbeat of a country for which every season is a hope.

Vietnamese football is at a crossroads. On one side is the road of data, of heat maps, of xG and PPDA indices embraced by younger clubs like scripture. On the other is the road of memory, of afternoons when whole families gathered around an old radio, of the roar when Van Quyen struck Thailand's net in 2026. These two roads are not opposites - they are two faces of the same medal, and a football writer at sixty-nine like me has the duty to connect them.

I was born in Vietnam, work in China, but my heart still beats to the rhythm of V.League every weekend. Over fifty-three years holding a pen, I have learned one thing: the pitch never betrays anyone, it is just that people often forget it also knows how to embrace. And to understand that embrace, sometimes we must put down the heat map, look up at the stands, and listen.

Context: A football nation redrawing its own map

Vietnamese football today is no longer the football I began reporting on in the seventies. The league system has completely changed in structure and scale. V.League 1 is now the top flight with a club count hovering around fourteen teams, each season played in a double round-robin format, alongside a strict promotion and relegation system with V.League 2 and the National Second Division. At the top of the pyramid are the men's and women's national teams, and beyond that an entire youth football system from U15, U17, U19 to U23 - rungs any player wanting to reach the top must climb.

What draws my attention most is not the number of clubs but how they operate. V.League carries a structural trait anyone analysing this football must remember: dependence on a small number of corporate sponsors. Most clubs in Vietnam are bound tightly to a specific group, bank, or state enterprise. Hoang Anh Gia Lai is tied to the real estate and agriculture group of the same name. Viettel is tied to the military telecommunications group. Hanoi FC is tied to an investment enterprise. Thanh Hoa, Song Lam Nghe An, Binh Duong - each has an economic entity behind it.

This model creates both strengths and weaknesses. The strength is more stable financing than living on broadcast revenue. The weakness is that when the parent group struggles, the football club becomes the first item cut. I have witnessed no fewer than three times in two decades a club dissolve or suspend operations after a single administrative decision from a boardroom meeting.

Broadcast revenue - the lifeblood of developed football nations - remains thin in Vietnam. Broadcasting contracts are typically modest by regional standards, meaning money distributed to each club is not enough to cover basic operating costs. As a result, clubs must live on sponsorship, on tickets sold at the stadium, and on the goodwill of their owners.

Player contracts in V.League also have their own characteristics. Contract lengths are generally shorter than European standards, commonly two to three years, sometimes just one. Salaries are clearly stratified: a small group of star players earns income comparable to regional peers, while the rest earn not much above the social average. This inequality creates a strong incentive for talented players to seek opportunities abroad as soon as possible.

To operate a club eligible for continental competition, Vietnamese teams must meet the Asian Football Confederation's club licensing system, with financial, sporting, infrastructure, and administrative criteria. This is an important legal framework, as it forces clubs to make their financial structures transparent to a certain degree. However, enforcement of these criteria in Vietnam still faces many challenges, and not every club meets all requirements perfectly.

Another hot topic in Vietnamese football's information space is the naturalisation of players and eligibility to play for the national team. This can directly affect the strength of the national team, but it also raises questions about identity, about opportunities for domestic youth players, and about the long-term impact on grassroots development. Vietnamese football must always balance the desire for immediate results with building a sustainable foundation for the future.

At a deeper level, there is another story unfolding that I want to tell you with my pen: the story of how Vietnamese football is redrawing the map of its own talent.

Core: When data meets people

When I began writing about Vietnamese football in the late seventies, data barely existed. A sports journalist then relied on eyesight, memory, and notebooks written by hand. We counted passes by... counting. We recorded player positions by drawing diagrams after matches, based on what the eye saw. No xG, no PPDA, no heat maps.

Today, everything has changed. Leading Vietnamese clubs all have data analysis departments, though on a much smaller scale than European teams. V.League matches are recorded from multiple camera angles, and player position data is collected for tactical analysis. Young coaches use xG - expected goals - to assess chance quality, and PPDA - passes allowed per defensive action - to measure pressing intensity.

This is a great step forward. But like any tool, it has limits, and those limits often lie in places the data table cannot reach.

Take the heat map. When you look at a midfielder's heat map, you see squares of varying intensity marking the areas he moved through most. You can see whether he ran more on the left wing or centrally, tended to drop deep or push high. But the heat map cannot tell you one of the most important things: why he ran there. It cannot tell you he ran to cover for a teammate out of position. It cannot tell you he ran there because the coach ordered it, or because he read a gap nobody else saw. It cannot tell you whether he ran when exhausted in the eightieth minute, or when the whole team was behind and morale had sunk.

In V.League, where many teams still build their game on physicality and collective spirit more than on complex European-style tactical systems, this limitation becomes even more pronounced. A player may have a beautiful heat map - lots of running, wide activity - yet be the one who constantly breaks team structure. Conversely, a player with a modest heat map may be the link keeping the whole system from collapsing.

I spent two months interviewing twenty local coaches to understand how they use data. One coach in the central region told me something I recorded verbatim: "I don't need a heat map to know how much that boy runs. I need to know what he runs for." He was right. Data answers the question "how much", but people answer the question "why".

Vietnamese football is in an interesting transition. A new generation of players, raised alongside the internet and international analytical platforms, receives data as a natural part of their career. They review their metrics after every match, compare themselves with peers in other leagues. This is good. But it also creates new pressure: pressure to have beautiful stats, impressive numbers, even when that does not serve the collective interest.

I once witnessed a young player, brought on in the seventieth minute, try to shoot from every possible position just to boost his personal metrics. His team lost, but his individual xG looked quite high. This is a phenomenon I call the "metrics trap" - when players play to serve the data table rather than the team.

And this is where the story becomes more complex.

Tactics as a cultural product

Living between two football cultures, Vietnam and China, I have learned that how a team presses, slows down, or takes risks is always the story of the land where they were born. Football does not exist in a vacuum. It grows from the soil, from the climate, from history, from the character of a people.

Vietnamese football carries the imprint of a tropical country, where heat and humidity make running continuously for ninety minutes a harsh physical challenge. This explains why many Vietnamese teams choose energy-saving styles: deep defensive blocks, waiting for opponent errors, and launching lightning counter-attacks. This is not tactical weakness. It is intelligent adaptation to real conditions.

When the Vietnamese national team under coach Park Hang-seo succeeded with a back-three and a counter-attacking style, it was a combination of Korean tactical knowledge and Southeast Asian player physique. Vietnamese players lacked advantages in height and physicality against Western opponents, but held advantages in agility, individual technique, and most importantly, fighting spirit. Park Hang-seo's tactics were not just a system - they were a cultural declaration: that Vietnamese football could compete on its own qualities.

But in the post-Park era, Vietnamese football faces a hard question: how to evolve from an effective counter-attacking team into one that can actively control matches? This is a painful process, because it demands change not only in tactical system but in the psychology of an entire generation of players.

I have watched many national team matches during this transition. There were games where the team dominated possession, created dozens of chances, yet lost to a set piece. There were games where the team defended tightly, waited for opportunities, and won. This oscillation reflects a football nation seeking a new identity, not yet fully comfortable with its new role.

High pressing is an interesting example. In theory, high pressing is a powerful weapon: it pressures the opponent, regains the ball in dangerous positions, and creates fast scoring chances. But for pressing to be effective, a team needs three elements: abundant stamina, synchronised movement, and a backline with enough speed to cover behind. Vietnamese football may have the first and second, but the third remains a challenge.

When you press high without sufficiently fast defenders, you create deadly space behind. I have seen this happen too many times. A failed press not only drains the energy of two or three players, it opens a vast space for the opponent to counter. This is why many Vietnamese coaches choose moderate, selective pressing - pressing when the opponent is in an unfavourable situation, and retreating when the opponent can escape easily.

Another aspect of Vietnamese football culture I want to mention is the relationship between individual and collective. Vietnamese football has a tradition of championing collective spirit, and this is clearly reflected in playing style. Players tend to share the ball, seek teammates in better positions, rather than trying to solve situations alone. This is a precious quality, but sometimes it also means players lack the individual boldness needed to make the difference in big matches.

I will never forget a goal by a young player in an important match. Instead of passing to a teammate in a more open position, he decided to shoot from a narrow angle. The ball flew into the net. After the match, he told me: "I knew I should pass, but I felt I had to shoot. Instinct told me." That was a moment when the individual rose above the collective, and instinct above data.

The empty seats still ring with song

In 2026, the pandemic made every stadium in Vietnam silent. The stands that were once packed became empty and chilling. I remember sitting in the stands of a stadium in the north, counting fewer than fifty people in a venue with a capacity of tens of thousands. Cicadas replaced the drums of supporters. That atmosphere made me realise something I had long known but never written clearly: football is not just a game on grass. It is community. It is memory. It is people sitting together, holding their breath together, erupting together.

During the pandemic, I carried out a project I called "Green Balcony". I video-called fifty veteran supporters across Vietnam, recording their stories of days standing waiting for the ball to roll before old loudspeakers, of afternoons when whole families gathered around an old radio to hear live commentary, of walking dozens of kilometres to watch their city's team play.

Three hundred minutes of recordings. I kept them all.

An old man in the central region told me about a final in which his team won. He said: "That day nobody in my village slept. We lit fires, beat drums, sang all night. Afterwards, when it dispersed, I walked home and cried. Not from joy. Because I knew there would never again be a night like that."

I could find no statistic in any table to measure that old man's tears. The heat map has no square for it.

That is when I began to understand the true limit of data. Data is a powerful tool - it helps us see patterns the naked eye misses, gaps intuition fails to notice. But data cannot replace people. It cannot replace the sigh of a supporter when his beloved team is relegated. It cannot replace the roar of a group of young friends when they see their idol score.

In an era when every action on the pitch can be quantified, we need to remember that some of the most important things cannot be measured.

Empty seats and longing as a form of supporter

Vietnamese football has a strange tradition I have not seen elsewhere: empty seats still ringing with song. When a supporter passes away, his family and friends often leave a seat in the stands, as if his spirit is still there, still following the team he loved his whole life. I have seen such seats in many stadiums across Vietnam. Each seat is a story.

Longing is a form of supporter. It does not appear on the scoreboard. It has no xG. But it is present in every match, every moment, seeping into every heartbeat of those still sitting in the stands.

At sixty-nine, I have learned that the world still runs faster than me, but longing always stands still. The players I once admired are now coaches, or retired, or gone further. The stadiums I once sat in have been rebuilt. The teams I once followed have changed names, owners, or ceased to exist. But the memory of those football afternoons remains intact, like a slow-motion film that never ends.

I write slowly, because football is not in a hurry - it only waits for those patient enough to understand. And after five decades writing about football, I am still learning patience.

Contrarian: The blind spot of collective memory

There is something I rarely dare to say, but I believe it is time: Vietnamese football is haunted by the past in an unhealthy way.

I am not talking about treasuring memory. I am talking about using the past as an absolute yardstick to judge the present. "In our time players played better." "In the old days fans were more passionate." "Football now is just business." These phrases repeat so often they have become a kind of background noise in Vietnamese football's information space.

The problem with this thinking is not that it is wrong. The problem is that it is useless. It turns the past into a court to judge the present, instead of a treasury to learn from. And while we are busy comparing this era with another, we miss the more important question: what can we learn from the past to build the future?

The collective longing of Vietnamese football supporters has a trait I call "the perfect match syndrome". We tend to remember the big matches, the resounding victories, the glorious moments - and forget the ordinary matches, the painful defeats, the silences between shining moments. This creates a distorted collective memory, in which the past becomes a golden age the present can never reach.

I ask myself many times: is our collective memory of Vietnamese football a kind of heat map - a simplified representation of a much more complex reality? We remember the hot spots, the crimson moments, and ignore the grey zones of small defeats, unrewarded efforts, players who never shone. Our collective memory has its limits, like any heat map.

When Messi at thirty-five touched the ball for the last time at the World Cup, I suddenly realised that we too are growing old alongside the fans I recorded in the Green Balcony project. Yesterday's young supporters have become today's veteran supporters. And a new generation of supporters is growing up, with new memories, new matches. Football is constantly reborn - each generation has its own heroes.

This is what I want to stress: longing is a form of supporter, but it can become a form of shackle if we let it dominate entirely how we see the present and future.

So what should we do with memory? We should keep it, but not let it imprison us. We should treasure it, but not let it stop us from seeing new things. We should learn from it, but not repeat it. The question is not which era is better, but how to bring the spirit of this era into a new era.

The "in our time" trap

I must tell you this. At sixty-nine, I am one of those most prone to the "in our time" trap. I have witnessed matches you can only read about in books. I have sat in stadiums now gone. I have talked with players you have never heard of. But that does not mean my memory of the past is more accurate than your memory of the present.

The rule I set for myself is: every time I write "in the old days it was harder", I must attach an objective number. Every time I write "players in the old days were more skilful", I must remember that the old days had fewer players, less pressure, less competition. Comparing eras in football is not a fully scientific exercise, because circumstances change in ways that cannot be compared directly.

The pitch never betrays anyone, it is just that people often forget it also knows how to embrace. And if I want to hand the pen to the younger generation, I must learn not to impose my memory on them. I must learn to let them write their own story, with their own characters, in their own era.

The embrace of the pitch

In December 2026, Argentina defeated France on penalties to win the World Cup in Qatar. Messi, thirty-five, touched the ball for the last time like a farewell to a generation. I, sixty-five at the time, suddenly realised that I too was growing old alongside the fans I had recorded in the Green Balcony project. I wrote a prose poem I titled "The Embrace of the Pitch", about how matches pass and return like loops of memory.

That poem was translated into six languages, and I received more than a thousand thank-you letters from fans around the world. Many were much younger than me. They told me they cried reading it, even though they knew nothing of Vietnamese football. They said they recognised in it their own longing, for their own team, their own city, their own people who had gone far away.

That is when I understood that longing has no borders. It has no nationality. It has no skin colour. It is part of being human, anywhere, in any culture.

Handing over the pen

As the oldest person in the press room, I no longer write to prove I am right. I write to hand over. Each of my articles is a way of saying to the younger generation: "I was here. I saw what I saw. And now it is your turn."

I believe the future of Vietnamese football lies not in remembering the past or dreaming of the future, but in what we do in the present. We need to build a sustainable football, where clubs can live on their own revenue, where young players are properly trained, where supporters are respected, and where memory is preserved as part of identity.

But I also believe no system is perfect. Vietnamese football will continue to have ups and downs. There will be disappointing seasons, heartbreaking matches, talented players who never reach their potential. That is the nature of football. What matters is what we learn from those ups and downs.

A progressive thought instead of a conclusion

At sixty-nine, I know I do not have much time left. But I also know Vietnamese football has plenty of time. Each new generation of supporters brings a new breath, a new love, a new longing. And though I may no longer sit in the stands to witness those moments, I believe they will happen.

What I want to say to young writers - those who will receive the pen from my hand - is to write with both heart and mind. Use data, but do not let data use you. Learn from the past, but do not live in the past. Remember that every number in a statistics table represents a person, a story, a dream.

And when you sit in the press room, hearing the cooling fans of dozens of laptops running analytical software, remember that outside, in the stands, there are empty seats still ringing with song. Remember that football is not a problem to solve, but a story to tell. And that story, in whatever language, with whatever tool, is always a story about people.

The pitch never betrays anyone, it is just that people often forget it also knows how to embrace. And in that embrace, we find each other - across every generation, every distance, every longing.

I came to football through the ear, but I stayed for heartbeats I cannot explain. And perhaps, that is the most beautiful thing football can teach us.