From Pune to the 2026 World Cup: Vietnam's women's football and the bills nobody has paid

On 6 February 2026, in Pune, India, Vietnam's women's national team beat Chinese Taipei 2-1 in the final play-off of the Asian qualifying campaign for the 2026 FIFA Women's World Cup. Huỳnh Như was on the scoresheet. When the final whistle went, the captain sank to the grass and covered her face with both hands. Vietnam's first Women's World Cup ticket was sealed in a match that no stand at home watched live and no commentator described in full.

I watched it alone, on an old laptop, in a small flat on Nguyễn Trãi Street in Saigon. Nobody called me. Three days later a sports paper ran a piece of praise with the word “historic” in bold in the headline. I read it to the end and then sat still for a long time. Huỳnh Như's first call once demolished the house of words I had built; this time she did not call.

Women's football in Vietnam grew up on the edge of everything. The national women's championship holds at around seven to eight teams, funded mostly by the parent businesses of the clubs: coal, power, banks, provincial authorities. Matches are usually played on secondary pitches, are not broadcast live, and draw a few dozen spectators. Players earn a monthly wage that just covers rent and food, many take second jobs outside training hours, and very few hold a contract longer than three years. A typical session runs about two hours, dominated by physical work, with the tactical portion mostly shadow play on a board.

In 2026, at fifty-four, I started the first women's sports podcast in Saigon, called Nửa Trái Bóng, or Half a Ball. It took me three months to persuade Huỳnh Như to sit in front of a microphone. Episode 12 was recorded at Thống Nhất Stadium, where she talked about selling lottery tickets as a child to buy football boots. That episode drew ten thousand listens and fifty-seven comments in its first week, a grain of sand next to any men's match, but enough for me to understand that everything I had written before was meaningless.

In July 2026, while the newsroom chased the World Cup in Russia, I secretly watched the U20 Women's World Cup final between Japan and Spain. The Japanese girls pressed high, covering 18.7 kilometres per match and winning nine recoveries in the opponent's final third. I filed the piece to the men's World Cup desk and it was rejected as off-topic. I posted it on my personal page. Head coach Mai Đức Chung shared it and wrote that this was what Vietnam's women's team needed to learn. It reached one million views in seventy-two hours. That rejected article is now the scar I treasure most.

In April 2026, the national women's championship was cancelled after round four. The pitches were so empty you could hear birds. I stopped writing for fifty-four days, locked my door and did not answer the phone. One evening Nguyễn Thị Thanh Nhã, then nineteen, a young forward at Hà Nội, video-called me. She was wearing a flour-dusted shirt and cheerfully showed me a hundred loaves of bread she had baked herself to sell and fund her passion. She made one video call, and it pulled me off the bottom. I took twenty million đồng from my retirement savings to set up the Sân Cỏ 2026 fund, supporting five women players in difficulty.

In July and August 2026, Vietnam played the Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Three group matches: a 0-3 loss to the United States, a 0-2 loss to Portugal, a 0-7 loss to the Netherlands. Much domestic commentary blamed physique. I sat through all three games twice, and what I saw was not height. What I saw was the number of decisions a Vietnamese player has to make in a minute: find a teammate when you have the ball, choose a position when you lose it, and almost every choice taken while already exhausted.

Vietnam defended in a low block in all three matches. The low block is the cheapest option in football: it demands discipline and organisation, not expensive physical infrastructure. Six years after I wrote about Japan's U20 pressing, Vietnam's women were still choosing the cheapest option on the biggest stage. The gap between Vietnam and the top eight nations in the world is not the height of the players; it is the number of years and the amount of money a football ecosystem is willing to invest in a twelve-year-old girl.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Nhã, born in 2026, is that problem in miniature. She came up to the senior national team from the U19 side, with pace and positional intelligence, but spent years training under conditions where every session depended on whether her club could afford pitch rental or catering. Between the national U19 tournament and the senior team there is no continuous ladder; players have to leap the gap themselves, and most cannot.

According to FIFA figures published before the 2026 Women's World Cup, the tournament prize pool was 152 million US dollars, and every group-stage team received at least 1.56 million US dollars. For Vietnam that is worth more than thirty billion đồng at 2026 exchange rates, larger than the entire operating budget of a season of the national women's championship, where clubs live on a few billion đồng in sponsorship and parent-company money. The first thing I check in any piece is: who benefits from their sweat. For the first time in the history of Vietnamese women's football, that question has a concrete answer to weigh against.

In August 2026, Huỳnh Như moved to Lank Vilaverdense in Portugal, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to play professional football abroad. The interesting part of the contract is not the salary. It is the structure: a Vietnamese women's club released a player for essentially nothing, with no training-compensation clause and no sell-on percentage. Small clubs developing semi-finished goods for others to cash in is a familiar model in the men's game; in the women's game it is harsher, because transfer values are so low that nobody bothers to write them into a contract. The most comfortable reading of the Pune ticket is that it proves progress. I read it differently.

One generation, Huỳnh Như and a handful of her contemporaries, paid the price themselves for a system that had not yet been built. After three weeks of noise, news about the women's team vanished from the papers exactly as the cycle dictates. The national women's championship still plays on secondary pitches, is still not regularly broadcast, still has no title sponsor stable enough for a club to sign a three-year contract with an eighteen-year-old. Most women players retire before thirty, without a pension, without a trade qualification, and with nobody having paid for the fifteen years they ran. People saw a match; I saw destinies passing the ball.

The 1.56 million dollars FIFA paid Vietnam at the 2026 Women's World Cup is not a reward for a miracle. It is the first time the market has priced Vietnamese women's football in real money. If that money flows into a national U15 girls' league, into semi-professional contracts with health insurance and into vocational training for retiring players, then the Pune ticket will truly be a starting point. In women's football I am not looking for victory, I am looking for liberation. And every time they score, a prejudice cracks, even when the final score is 0-7.