The Abandoned Corridor: How the Traditional Winger Disappeared from V.League

Minute 71, the 19/8 Stadium

The June sun in Nha Trang is not harsh. The heat here sits underfoot, rising from the grass through the soles of your boots, running up the ankle before it reaches the head. I was in the broadcaster's technical area, one earpiece not yet in, holding a notepad gone soft with sweat. The score was 1-1. Sanna Khanh Hoa against Hoang Anh Gia Lai, round 14 of V.League, 2026.

Nguyen Van Toan received the ball in the right channel, maybe a stride from the touchline. Number 14. He did not accelerate. He laid the inside of his left boot on the ball and let it roll slowly past his marker, the way a man opens the door for a guest before stepping in himself. Stand H stopped breathing. Not fell silent. Stopped breathing. That particular kind of quiet, which I learned to distinguish over the years: the crowd does not stop singing, it stops breathing.

The ball ran out of play. No goal. No assist. Nothing to enter into the columns.

That night the editor cut my entire commentary block. He kept the scoreline. I did not argue. I understood the rule of the trade: a draw earns one line. But I watched the tape four times, and I did not rewind to the move. I rewound to Stand H — to find the face of a man in the fourth row who had opened his mouth and then closed it.

The silence at the 19/8 Stadium was not empty. It was dense, like a confession that never gets said.

I started writing from there. Not about the match. About what the match leaves behind after the lights go off.

Years later, having sat long enough in the corridors of enough grounds, I understood that the moment in minute 71 was not a beautiful move that went unrecorded. It was the trace of a much larger disappearance. The traditional winger — the man who lives and dies on the touchline, the man who makes a living out of going past people, the man whose every touch forces the stand to hold its breath — those men are leaving V.League.

Not with a statement. Not with a decision. With a very quiet kind of forgetting.

Context: a corridor that used to be inhabited

To understand why the touchlines of V.League are emptying, it helps to remember that they were once crowded.

In the early years of the national championship, when Vietnamese football was still organised around ministry clubs — The Cong, Cang Sai Gon, Cong An Ha Noi, Military Region Thu Do — the dominant style was long balls and duels. But even inside that rough foundation there was room for a winger. Long balls need someone to chase them, and the best chaser of a long ball is always the fastest man on either flank.

Then came the first golden generation of professional Vietnamese football. Nguyen Vu Phong at Binh Duong — a pure right winger, pace, get to the byline and cross, no need to know who was inside. Thach Bao Khanh at The Cong — left footed, dribbling down the left flank, the kind of run that lifts people out of their seats. Nguyen Trong Hoang at Song Lam Nghe An — a winger who later became a full-back, a positional migration that in itself tells the story of this position's fate.

Those names belong to a time when the width of the pitch was still treated as a resource. When stretching the opponent horizontally was a way of scoring. When a team could win by making the opposing defence run more, not by making it think more.

When the Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy opened and its first cohort matured, V.League gained a new generation on the flanks. Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Van Toan, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Vu Van Thanh, Nguyen Phong Hong Duy. In them, the touchline instinct survived, but something else had been added: close-quarters technical skill, the ability to turn inside a tight space. That was the hinge moment. Because once a winger becomes good at turning in tight spaces, people will soon ask: why not just put him inside?

Asked often enough, that question becomes a tactical instruction. And once it is an instruction, it becomes a default. And once it is a default, it becomes the thing nobody sees anymore — like nobody sees their own nose.

I followed this process season by season, not through data but by sitting in the same corner of the same stand. For years I chose a seat level with the right touchline, a place from which I could watch how an opposing full-back set the heel of his boot on the chalk line. Based on my experience of watching hundreds of matches from that angle, one thing changed that no data table records: the number of times a right-back turned his head to look behind him dropped sharply. They no longer fear the space behind their own back. Because behind their back, fewer and fewer people stand.

From the touchline into the palm of the hand

Inverting wingers is not a new invention.

In the 1990s in Europe, teams began moving left-footed wingers to the right and right-footed wingers to the left. The original purpose was simple: when an inverted winger receives the ball, his body is already facing goal, his stronger foot is on the inside, and the shot becomes a natural act rather than an effort. That benefit is real.

But there was a cost that took more than twenty years to notice: when every winger inverts, nobody holds the touchline. The horizontal space compresses. And when the horizontal space compresses, the opposing defence only has to defend vertically.

In Europe, that cost is absorbed by the full-backs. Trent Alexander-Arnold, Andrew Robertson, Alphonso Davies, Achraf Hakimi — they run distances that seem impossible along the flanks, carrying the width that the wingers abandoned. But to do that, a full-back needs pace, needs the engine to sustain ninety minutes at high intensity, and needs to play inside a pressing system where teammates cover for him every time he advances.

Vietnamese football imported the idea of inversion. It did not import the infrastructure that comes with it.

That is how I explain this disappearance. It is not that Vietnamese coaches were wrong to invert their wingers. It is that they inverted their wingers in a league where full-backs lack the engine to cover the ground, where central midfielders lack the ability to screen, and where pitches are not flat enough for accurate long switches of play.

The result is a strange-looking game. Teams funnel the ball into the middle, where seven or eight players stand inside thirty square metres. Moves become cramped. Passes become short and safe. The tempo drops. And the crowd, up in the stands, cannot understand why the match looks so exhausting when nobody is running much.

The pitch breathes through the whistle, through boot leather, through the silence that follows a broken move.

In many recent V.League matches, that silence lasts longer than it used to. And I believe it lasts longer because there are no longer footsteps on the touchline.

The zeros that never make the minutes

There is a paradox I needed years to name.

The traditional winger is the poorest statistical position on the pitch. They do not score many goals. They do not record many assists under a strict definition — because their cross, once headed in, is credited to the header, or to whoever touched the ball last before it. They do not make many tackles. They do not touch the ball often if their team plays long.

The only thing they create is space, and space is not a metric.

I once sat with a data analyst at a V.League club. He said one sentence that I copied down word for word: "What a winger does best cannot be measured. What can be measured, he does badly." We sat in silence for a moment. He poured more tea. I asked nothing further, because I knew he had just said something the whole industry tries to avoid.

The consequence of that paradox is concrete. When a club decides on a contract renewal, it looks at the sheet. When a coach picks a starting eleven, he looks at the sheet. When a scout recommends a player, he sends the sheet. And the sheet always says the same thing: the traditional winger contributes nothing.

Nobody cut them with a decision. They were forgotten by a spreadsheet.

There is one small detail I have observed many times in training sessions. The traditional winger is usually the last one to leave the pitch. Not because he works harder. Because he has to practise something nobody practises with him: looking up. He has to train the movement of lifting his head while the ball is travelling at speed, while a defender is closing, while sweat runs into his eyes. It is a skill that appears in no syllabus and no scorecard.

My notes do not keep players. They keep the moments when those players forget that somebody is watching.

And the moment a player forgets that somebody is watching is usually the moment he is most honest.

When the whole league inverts together

There is a phenomenon I only noticed after watching four V.League matches on four consecutive days at four different grounds.

In all four, both teams attacked the same kind of space. The ball went into the inside channel, where the attacking midfielder and the striker stood beside each other. The ball rarely went to the outside. And in all four, the full-backs on both sides had a great deal of free time — enough to step forward a few metres, stand there, look inside, and wait.

That is the clearest sign of a league that has been homogenised.

This homogenisation did not come from some brilliant coach who persuaded the whole league. It came from somewhere else: from the fact that young players are now trained identically. An eighteen-year-old winger in Vietnam today is taught to invert, taught to recycle possession, taught to press. He is not taught how to go past a man on the touchline, because nobody considers that a necessary skill any longer.

A skill that is no longer taught disappears within one generation.

I once watched a youth training session. The coach ran a three-man combination drill through the middle. There was one boy, clearly the fastest in the squad, who after every repetition automatically drifted wide. The coach called him over: "Come inside, come inside, don't stand out wide." The boy obeyed. From the next repetition he stood inside. And the corridor he had just vacated would be filled by nobody.

I do not blame that coach. He was teaching exactly what the league requires. But I still wrote that session into my notebook, because I knew I was watching a skill die.

Fitness, climate, and the price of running the flank

Here I need to say something I believe is the root of the whole story, and it has more to do with climate than with tactics.

V.League is played in tropical conditions. The season generally runs from early in the year to late in the year, and most rounds are played in the late afternoon, when the pitch still holds heat. Humidity is high. Sweat does not evaporate; it runs.

In those conditions, the physical cost of running the flank is far higher than the cost of running through the middle.

A traditional winger must cover long distances, in straight lines, at high speed, then stop abruptly, then turn back, then run again. Each of those is a loss of fluid, a load on the muscle, a jolt through the knee. In Europe this is manageable because average season temperatures are lower, pitches are better maintained, sports medicine is deeper, and fixture schedules can be distributed more sensibly.

In Vietnam, an old-fashioned winger who runs enough across a congested season will run out of gas around the seventh month. And when he runs out of gas, he loses his starting place. And when he loses his starting place, he loses his value. And when he loses his value, his agent will tell him the sentence every professional eventually hears: "Change the way you play."

A position does not die from tactics. It dies when the operating environment makes it a risky choice.

I think this is the most overlooked part of tactical debate in Vietnam. People argue about formations, about ideas, about philosophy, while the problem sits much lower down: a heart-rate monitor, an ice bath, a physiotherapist, a shorter flight.

Noise in the corridor: agents and a distorted price sheet

There is a group of people who sit very close to this story and are almost never mentioned in tactical analysis.

Player agents.

This is where I have to say something plainly that I have believed for a long time: the largest hidden cost layer in Vietnamese football is not transfer fees and not player wages. It is the gap between what a player is genuinely worth and what the market believes he is worth. And that gap is largely manufactured by noise.

Noise takes many forms. A rumour released at the right moment. An interview arranged in the right week. A line about "a foreign club asking" delivered to the right person. These things do not create players. They create prices.

And when a price is created by noise, what gets distorted is not just one contract. What gets distorted is the entire frame of reference.

I once sat in a stadium corridor and listened to two men talk about a player. One said: "He plays wide and he can dribble — none of the kids dribble anymore." The other replied: "Why dribble? Does dribbling raise your price?" Then both laughed. I sat quietly, finished my tea, and wrote the line down.

The answer to that question is: dribbling does not raise your price, because dribbling appears in no column of the valuation sheet. But if an entire generation of wingers stops dribbling, what disappears is not only a skill. What disappears is a kind of spectator.

Because people come to the ground, mostly, not to watch a system. They come to watch one person do something another person cannot do.

Names and memory

I have mispronounced a player's name on air twice. The first time was in 2026, in a knockout match at the World Cup, during extra time. I said the name Luka Modric incorrectly three times in a row, in a pronunciation I invented out of sheer tension. After the match I kept the apology at the top of the recording, because I wanted to remind myself that this trade allows no haste to be hidden.

That night, rewatching the tape, I discovered I had missed a moment. Minute 116. Modric had just missed a penalty. He retreated towards his own half, stood still for four seconds, then went back to take hold of the game. He did not raise a hand to apologise. He apologised with his whole body — by standing in the right position, by running back, by starting again.

I tell this story here not to talk about Modric. I tell it to point at something: people only remember the name of the man who scored. The name of the man who ran before the goal was scored is forgotten by half-time.

In Vietnamese football, that memory mechanism is even harsher. A winger can play well for ten consecutive rounds and nobody writes about him. He scores one goal and there are three articles. He scores none all season and is considered underdeveloped, even though every round he made the opposing full-back run two extra kilometres.

Number 14 does not run towards the goal. He runs towards the people who still remember.

That may sound like pessimism. I do not think it is. The crowd's memory is the only asset football cannot take away from a player. The scoreboard can erase a career. But one specific memory — the inside of the boot, the moment Stand H stopped breathing — cannot be erased by anyone, because it does not live in the data.

A contrary view: we were wrong to erase the traditional winger

Here I have to state what I believe, even though it runs against most of what is preached in tactical seminars.

The disappearance of the traditional winger from V.League is not an evolution. It is an act of imitation without the conditions for it.

The prevailing argument is this: modern football demands that every player can defend, demands positional flexibility, demands that nobody does only one job. That is true in a football culture with enough technical density for flexibility to create value. But when it is imported into a league where pitch quality, player fitness and refereeing standards vary widely from match to match, flexibility turns into blandness.

A traditional winger has something other profiles do not: unpredictability at a fixed point on the pitch.

The opponent knows he will be wide. They still cannot deal with it, because out wide the difference lies in pace and in the ability to keep the ball. It is a game played with cards face up, and football always needs at least one player with his cards face up, to force the opponent to decide one beat earlier.

I think this has a larger implication for Vietnamese football specifically and for smaller football nations generally. When a football culture has few physical advantages and few infrastructure advantages, the only thing it can do better is specificity. A national team can spring a surprise if it has one player who does something the opponent has not prepared for. A national team that plays a model identical to that of stronger teams, but at lower quality in every position, has had its result decided before the ball rolls.

Here I want to mention a paradox of resources. Vietnamese football has a rare advantage: a generation of players whose close-quarters technique is above the Asian average. That advantage was produced by a culture of playing in small spaces — dust pitches, narrow alleys, schoolyards. That advantage is exactly suited to wingers, because the flank is a position that demands close-quarters technique inside a narrow corridor. And we are choosing to remove the very position that exploits it.

I am not saying V.League clubs must go back to long-ball football down the flanks. I am saying the disappearance of the traditional winger is a calculable loss, and that loss goes unrecorded because it never appears in the scoreline.

There is one more detail I have tracked for years: attendance. No data allows me to assert a causal link between losing wingers and losing spectators. But I have a subjective observation, and I offer it as an observation, not a conclusion: in many matches I have sat through, the loudest sounds did not come from goals. They came from dribbles past a man in the corridor.

What would keep the corridor open

I do not believe in going back. Football does not go back, and I do not want it to.

But I believe in keeping a place for things at risk of disappearing.

There are three things I consider necessary, and all three are smaller than what people usually discuss.

The first is teaching a specific skill again. Not "a philosophy of wing play", but a movement: receive the ball in the channel, open the body towards goal, and decide within about a second. This can be taught. It used to be taught. It was dropped because people decided it was unnecessary, not because it was unteachable.

The second is fixing the measurement. If a V.League club added to its evaluation criteria an indicator that measures how often a winger drags an opposing defender out of position, or creates space for a central teammate, the market would respond. Nothing changes a system's behaviour faster than changing what the system rewards.

The third is reducing noise. If a winger's price were set by what he does on the pitch rather than by how often his name appears in corridor conversations, more players would choose to stay in their position. This is the hardest of the three, because noise has beneficiaries, and beneficiaries always speak louder than the unbenefited.

And finally, there is one thing I can only say by telling a story.

In the summer of 2026, when the whole league stopped because of the pandemic, I lost my contract with the local broadcaster after a seven-minute video call. I nodded, said "I understand", and hung up. That night I put on the 2026 World Cup final, muted the commentary, and let the match run in silence. I watched Ronaldo run towards the stands after his second goal, in a stadium where nobody answered, and I asked myself: if all that remains of a career is one moment nobody remembers, is that moment still true?

I wrote a piece of about fourteen hundred words from that question. It was shared more than two thousand times. Nobody shared it because it analysed a match. They shared it because they recognised something about themselves.

And I think that is the truest thing I can say about the traditional winger.

A good commentator is not the one who says the right thing. He is the one who hears it before anyone else does.

I heard the empty corridor at the 19/8 Stadium in 2026, when the whole stand was still holding its breath over a dribble. At the time I thought I was hearing a good move. Now I know I was hearing a goodbye.

I still sit there, in the row level with the right touchline, every round. I still take notes. And occasionally, when a young player receives the ball right on the chalk and has a moment of hesitation — that moment when he does not know whether to invert or go straight down the line — I hear the stand hold its breath again.

The match ends, the pitch keeps breathing. And I am still sitting there, listening.

The question I leave behind is not for the coaches. It is for the people in the stands: if nobody runs the touchline anymore, what will we remember about this season in ten years?