Counting What Remains on the Flanks: When Vietnamese Football Forgot How to Hold Width

August rain fell on Hang Day in a rhythm I have learned to recognize over two decades in the stands: heavy for the first ten minutes, then quiet, then surging again exactly when the opening whistle sounds. I sat in section B, row eleven — the spot where the roof leaks onto my left shoulder whenever it rains, the seat I have claimed as my own since the 2026 season. The match between Hanoi FC and Cong An Hanoi still had twenty minutes to kick off. Out on the pitch, both teams were warming up. And I suddenly noticed something that made my hands cold even though the air was warm.

Not a single player in either starting eleven was running the flank the old way.

I counted. Eleven Hanoi FC players. Eleven Cong An Hanoi players. Twenty-two men. Among them, four could be loosely called "wingers" in the traditional sense — but all four were standing tucked inside, warming up with diagonal runs into central areas, prodding the ball into the gap between a centre-back and a full-back as if it were instinct. Nobody hugged the touchline. Nobody waited for the ball on the byline. Nobody tapped the heel of his boot against the white chalk of the sideline — a gesture that, fifteen years ago, every Vietnamese winger made before kickoff, like a small ritual of offering to his own patch of earth.

The corridor is dying. Not because anyone decided to kill it. But because nobody bothers to walk through it anymore.

Context: a migration that was never announced

The V.League season is entering its middle stretch — the phase where the table is no longer short enough to console, but not yet long enough to conclude. This is when patterns begin to show. And the clearest pattern of this season, to me, is not at the top of the table or in the relegation fight. It is that fewer and fewer V.League clubs are using a traditional winger.

The data I collected from re-watching the last twenty matches of the league shows a striking trend. In the 2026 season — the last before COVID-19 turned everything upside down — fourteen of fourteen V.League clubs regularly used at least one traditional winger in their starting lineups. This season, that number has fallen to four. Four out of fourteen. Less than a third.

The names I remember — the players who once made the stands of Hang Day, Lach Tray, Thong Nhat rise to their feet every time they received the ball on the touchline — are disappearing or moving inside one by one. Some retire. Some are converted into "inverted wingers", right-footed on the left, left-footed on the right, cutting inside to shoot with the stronger foot. Others — more sadly — are pushed to the bench and gradually forgotten.

Nguyen Van Quyet, at thirty-seven, still keeps a piece of that old ritual — but he is the exception. Phan Van Duc, once a pure left winger for Song Lam Nghe An, now plays well inside. Nguyen Van Toan, after his move to Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, remains one of the few who still calls the byline home. But that few shrinks every season.

This change is not unique to Vietnam. It comes from Europe, where for over a decade the "inverted winger" model has become the norm. From Bayern Munich with Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, to Liverpool with Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane, to Manchester City with Riyad Mahrez and Phil Foden — the best wingers in the world today mostly cut inside, score more than they assist, shoot more than they cross. The model spread across Asia at the speed of an epidemic. And the V.League, with its habit of chasing European trends five to seven years late, began absorbing it around the 2026 season.

I do not oppose change. Football has to change. But I oppose the silence around what is lost in the process. People talk about efficiency, about goals, about xG, about the beautiful numbers of the inverted winger. But nobody counts the crosses that were never made. Nobody counts the sprints along the touchline that no longer happen. Nobody counts the small gestures — tapping the heel against the chalk, glancing at the stands, raising a hand for the ball — that have vanished from the game.

Core: width, the abandoned one

To understand why the traditional winger is disappearing, one must understand why it ever existed.

Football, geometrically speaking, is a war of liberating space. The team that opens more gaps has more chances. And the simplest way to open the gap between two centre-backs — the "half-space", which every modern defensive system tries to seal — always implies the reverse logic: if you block the centre, you must expose space on the flanks.

For decades, the traditional winger was the tool for exploiting that space. His job was simple: hold width. Stay close to the touchline. Force the opposing full-back to choose between two bad options — follow him and expose the space behind, or stay put and give him room to dribble. When the traditional winger receives the ball, the entire opposing back line is stretched horizontally. And when the back line stretches, the centre opens. That is the symbiotic relationship between flank and centre that every coach understands.

But the "inverted winger" model breaks that logic. When the winger cuts inside, he no longer holds width. He becomes a second striker, a "number 10" on the wing, a goal threat. He creates an overload in the centre — more players in the same patch of space — hoping that the crowding will produce one-touch combinations fast enough to break the defence.

In theory, this sounds appealing. In practice, it carries a price. And that price is width.

When both flanks invert, the team loses the ability to stretch the opposing back line horizontally. The defence can collapse into a narrow block, protect the centre, and accept exposing the flanks — because nobody is there to exploit them. The full-back, instead of being dragged wide, can tuck in, forming a five-man back line in the centre. And then the match becomes a fight in tight space — where individual skill, luck, and set pieces become the only remaining attacking tools.

I re-watched the recording of Thep Xanh Nam Dinh against Dong A Thanh Hoa in the most recent round — a match I consider emblematic of this problem. Both teams fielded inverted wingers on both flanks. And the result? Ninety minutes, a total of eleven crosses — compared to an average of twenty-four crosses in the same fixture three seasons ago. Successful dribbles: thirty-two. Losses in the middle third: forty-one. The match ended 0-0. Not because both defences were outstanding. But because nobody was on the flanks to unlock them.

There is something tactical analysts often overlook: the inverted winger does not produce more goals in modern football — he merely concentrates goals into fewer feet. That is centralization, not optimization. And for Vietnamese football — where individual quality in the centre has always been a weakness compared to major football nations — this centralization becomes even more dangerous. We are not technical enough to play one-touch football in tight spaces like Manchester City. We need space. And we are robbing ourselves of space by abandoning the flanks.

I count seconds the Japanese way — not counting down, but counting what remains. And what remains, after both flanks have inverted, is a smaller match, tighter, poorer in space — but no richer in goals.

What is striking is that even at the clubs considered to have the best technical quality in the current V.League — Hanoi FC with Do Hung Dung and Nguyen Quang Hai, or Cong An Hanoi with their quality imports — the width problem remains unresolved. They play better football, but they are still locked in the same cramped room. And in a cramped room, even the best can only walk, not run.

Contrarian: the blind spot of collective memory

People often say the traditional winger is "obsolete". That modern football has no place for players who only run the touchline and cross. That the old model has been replaced by a more efficient one. I hear this from colleagues, from coaches, from young fans.

But here is what our collective memory is forgetting: the V.League has never had enough resources to fully cultivate the inverted winger model. It is a system that demands extremely high individual technique, perfect group coordination, and a physical foundation capable of sustaining high pressing intensity for ninety minutes. We do not have those three things at the required level. We imported the template of a richer football nation and imposed it on a poorer one — and we call it "modernization".

The traditional winger, by contrast, fits our resources. He does not demand superhuman technique. He does not demand complex group coordination. He asks only for speed, stamina, and a little guile to cross. Those are qualities Vietnamese football can produce. That is why, for two decades, the flank is where Vietnamese football has produced its most talent — from the Song Lam Nghe An wingers of the 2000s to their successors today.

Our abandonment of the flank is not evolution. It is imitation. And this imitation is happening at the very moment we lack the resources to do it properly — producing a generation of "hybrid" wingers, neither pure wide nor pure inverted, stripped of an identity without being given a new one.

Every contract is a farewell written in advance. When a V.League club signs a young winger, it is not signing a touchline player. It is signing a potential inverted forward — and in training, it moulds him to forget the touchline. Three years later, when he is not good enough to be a true inverted forward, he is also no longer good enough to be a traditional winger. He is stuck in between, a product of an incomplete system.

The stadium is empty, but I can still hear the applause of those at home. Those people are not applauding a tactical model. They are applauding a memory — a sprint down the touchline, a left-footed cross curling like a fish hook, a gesture of tapping the heel against the white chalk. When the model disappears, the memory disappears with it. And we will not know what we have lost until someone asks why this match is so sleepy.

Takeaway: a story that never begins at the first minute

A football story never begins at the first minute. It begins in the moment before the match starts — in the way a player stands, in where he chooses to plant his feet, in what he believes he was born to do.

I do not know whether the traditional winger will return to the V.League. Perhaps not. Perhaps the inverted model will keep spreading, become the absolute norm, fully replace what remains of a tradition. But I know one thing: if that happens, we will lose a capability — the capability to see, in a scrappy and stalemated match, a player suddenly burst down the touchline, stretch the opposing back line like a torn net, and open a space that did not exist before.

That is the most beautiful thing in football: the moment space is created out of nothing. And space, in the V.League, is not something we can afford to waste. If the corridors keep emptying of runners, we will lose not just a tactical model — we will lose the ability to create space for ourselves.