The Hai Phong Plant and Vietnamese Football's Three-Year Disease

The Hai Phong Plant and Vietnamese Football's Three-Year Disease

At the CONTECH VIETNAM 2026 industrial trade fair, I stood for a long time in front of a small booth displaying a few cans of lubricant. A young salesman in a crisp white shirt patiently explained viscosity to me, explained friction, explained how a thin film of oil can save a shaft from scoring. I asked him something he probably did not expect: if you change the oil properly, how long does this machine run? He answered without hesitation. For decades, sir.

I thanked him, walked one more lap, and went outside. For the rest of that afternoon I had one thought in my head: Vietnamese football changes its oil every two and a half years. Sometimes faster. Sometimes a little slower, but never long enough to see the wear.

The sign above that booth carried the name of a Japanese energy group, ENEOS. Nearly thirty years ago they began selling oil into the Vietnamese market. In 2026 they commissioned a lubricant blending plant in Hai Phong. By 2026 they were still there, still renting the booth, still handing out leaflets, still paying young salesmen to explain viscosity to curious old men. Thirty years. One plant. One city.

In Moscow I learned to listen for the cracking of history before the match itself made a sound. That cracking rarely happens in the 90th minute. It happens in a contract, in an invoice, in an administrative decision nobody bothers to write into the scoreline.

At the same time, on the other side of the same industrial capital, ENEOS is a major shareholder in a Japanese club: JEF United Ichihara Chiba. The letters JEF stand for Japan Energy Football Club, the football team of that very energy company. The club won the Japanese League Cup in two consecutive years, 2026 and 2026, under Ivica Osim. Then in 2026 they were relegated. They have stayed in the second division ever since.

This deserves a pause. A corporation can raise a football club for three decades, travel through both summits and troughs, and still not sell the team, not rename it, not turn it into a seasonal marketing campaign. In Vietnam, how many sponsors can do the same?

V.League 1 currently has 14 clubs. Most of them carry a sponsor name in the official club name itself: Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, Becamex Binh Duong, SHB Da Nang, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Dong A Thanh Hoa. It is a habit that has become an identity. It is also a confession: most of the money that keeps Vietnamese professional football alive comes from companies that treat the team as a budget line item to be reviewed at the end of a season.

I am not criticising that model. In a market where broadcast rights cannot yet sustain a club, where gate receipts cannot cover wages, where the youth system has only a handful of genuinely serious centres, the corporation is the only lifebuoy. The problem lies elsewhere: the lifebuoy is tied with a short rope.

In twenty years of writing about football, I have witnessed enough farewells to recognise a rhythm. A company arrives, puts its name on the team, signs for two or three seasons, sets a medal target, and then runs into one of three things: the team is relegated, the company's leadership changes, or the economy tightens. All three end the same way. The team changes its name. The players change shirts. The fans change their faith.

The rhythm of a player is entirely different. A Vietnamese professional enters the game at 18, peaks between 24 and 27, and leaves the pitch at 32. Fourteen years. A football academy needs eight to ten years to produce one usable generation. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy on the JMG model began in 2026. The PVF centre broke ground in 2026. Those are projects measured in decades.

Put those two rhythms side by side and the arithmetic of Vietnamese football stops being about money. Vietnamese football lacks duration, not cash. A football economy can raise large sponsorships, but if every sponsorship lives only two and a half years, the whole system restarts from zero again and again, like an engine whose oil is replaced by people who do not believe in oil.

2026 shows both faces of this story. In January 2026 the Vietnam Under-23 team reached the final of the AFC U-23 Championship in Changzhou, playing in snow, and the whole country poured into the streets. At the end of that year the senior team won the AFF Cup. A wave of money entered Vietnamese football unlike anything before. When that wave receded, it receded on the rhythm of an event: the tournament ended, the media contracts ended, the advertising campaigns ended, and the money returned to its old level.

On 26 March 2026 Vietnam lost 0-3 to Indonesia at My Dinh, after a 0-1 defeat in Jakarta on 21 March. The Vietnam Football Federation terminated Philippe Troussier's contract that same day. A month later Kim Sang-sik took the chair. In January 2026 Vietnam won the ASEAN Championship. Eight months from floor to ceiling.

Everyone will tell you this is the greatness of Vietnamese resolve. I see something slightly different. Eight months is enough time to change a coach, change a formation, change the mood of a dressing room. Eight months is not enough to change a generation of players, to build an academy, to teach a 19-year-old centre-back how to read a situation. What Vietnamese football does best, and what it depends on most, is the speed of its restarts.

An empty stadium does not take away the shouting, it only lets us hear the sigh of the coaching bench more clearly. And when I look at the last decade of the Vietnam national team's coaching chair, I hear a great many sighs: one long Park Hang-seo tenure of nearly five years, then Troussier cut off mid-road after about a year, then Kim Sang-sik. The question for Vietnamese football is not who comes next. It is how many years the next contract is signed for, and whether anyone has the nerve not to tear it up after two straight defeats.

Based on my experience watching matches across V.League, youth tournaments and national team trips, I have noticed one very recognisable signal at clubs with a real project: they talk about the third season before they talk about tomorrow's match. At clubs that only have a budget, people talk about tomorrow's match first, and never mention the third season, because nobody is sure they will still be there by then.

Academies are the great exception in this picture, and also the proof that patience is not a national trait but a governance decision. Hoang Anh Gia Lai began its first JMG intake in 2026 with a group of boys playing football in Pleiku. Ten years later, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan and their generation entered V.League. A decade traded for a generation. That is how a plant operates.

But here is the reverse side. An academy can produce one exceptional generation, and then the domestic transfer market absorbs it and no equivalent second generation follows. Cong Phuong went to Mito Hollyhock in Japan's second division in 2026, then Incheon United in Korea, then Sint-Truiden in Belgium. Doan Van Hau went to SC Heerenveen in the Netherlands the same year. Nguyen Quang Hai went to Pau FC in France's Ligue 2 in 2026. Three players, three countries, three journeys, and none lasting more than two seasons.

Every one of those journeys is a small project, and every small project is judged on short-term output. A Vietnamese player moving to Europe needs at least one season to adapt to the intensity, one season to win a place, and the third season is the one that can actually be assessed. Loan contracts usually run for one season. The error sits exactly there, and it is the same error as a V.League sponsor signing a two-year deal for a ten-year project.

It took me thirty years to understand that the golden boy does not rise up; the layer of our expectations simply begins to crack. In Vietnam that paint is thick and it is repainted very quickly, after every SEA Games, every AFF Cup, every heavy friendly win. The worrying thing is not the fresh paint. The worrying thing is that we repaint before anyone has had time to see the wall underneath.

Now I have to say the hardest part, the part a 66-year-old man writing in a city that is not his hometown has to say to himself.

I may be wrong. Perhaps Vietnamese short-termism is the weapon. A club that changes coach mid-season can revive within three weeks. A national team that changes its leader can win a title within eight months. In many football nations such a decision takes two years of boardroom debate. Vietnam decides in two days. That speed delivered the trophy in January 2026, and that speed is real.

And Japanese-style patience has its own ceiling. JEF United Ichihara Chiba has been so patient that it has stayed in the second division for more than fifteen years. The stability of corporate ownership protects a club from death, but it also protects the club from the pressure to change. No shock, no purge, nobody sacked for fifteen years of not being promoted. Patience, once it becomes the default, turns into organised complacency.

So the right answer is probably not a choice between short term and long term. It is the ability to sort which decisions may be fast and which must be slow. Changing a coach is a decision that may be fast. Building a training centre is a decision that must be slow. Negotiating broadcast rights is a decision that must be slow. Choosing a penalty taker is a decision that may be fast. Vietnamese football is doing the opposite: slow where it must be fast, and fast where it must be slow.

One more thing has troubled me for years, and I offer it as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. Vietnamese football has a source of capital that never appears on the balance sheet: emotional capital. At Lach Tray stadium I once watched a packed stand scream itself hoarse in a match where the home side no longer had any chance of the title. No company can buy that with sponsorship money. But emotional capital is the only capital that can be drained without anyone noticing, and it is drained at exactly the three-year rhythm of changed names, changed shirts, changed people.

There is no great prophecy, only an old man calloused enough to see the crack the crowd chooses to ignore. The crack here is simple: a football economy cannot demand lifelong loyalty from its supporters while its own contracts last one third of a player's career.

If I must set a testable proposition for the next two seasons, it is this. The club that wins the next V.League title will be the club with the longest-serving coaching and technical staff, not the club that spends the most. If the opposite happens, if a club that changes coach twice in a season and buys three new foreigners still wins the title, then I will admit that duration matters less than speed, and I will rewrite this entire argument.

And if I am right, then the problem of Vietnamese football cannot be solved by a bigger sponsor. It can only be solved by one small clause in the contract: the clause about duration.

Thirty years. One plant. One city. That can of oil in Hai Phong does not promise to make the machine run faster. It only promises that the machine will still be there tomorrow. Vietnamese football already has enough evenings to remember. What it lacks is one morning to believe that everything will still be intact.