Round 1 of the 2026-2027 Vietnamese First Division: Cong An Nhan Dan Returns, and the Fates Left Off the Scoreboard

In Incheon, autumn arrives earlier than I expect. On the morning of September 8, 2026, I sat by the window of my apartment overlooking the port, holding a cup of coffee that had long gone cold, and opened the fixture list for Round 1 of the Vietnamese First Division. Three days. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of September. Fourteen clubs. Two promotion places. Two relegation places. A list so tidy it could be printed on a single sheet of A4 and taped to the wall of the editing room.

I have lived here for seven years. My trade is writing documentary screenplays, and my trade is also seeing what other people do not see. The day I understood I was no longer young enough to wait for another World Cup, I began to pay attention to competitions that no international camera crews visit. The Vietnamese First Division is one of them. There are no floodlights pointed at it, no commentary in ten languages, no slow-motion replays designed to sell tickets. There is only the fixture list, and inside that fixture list, every line is a life.

I opened the list and read it slowly. Cong An Nhan Dan. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City. Van Hien University. Thep Can Tho. Names that, if you asked an ordinary Korean, would draw a shake of the head. But to me, every name is an applause that once rang out in a stadium I have never set foot in.

There is a line I wrote in a screenplay years ago and still keep in my notebook: "The stadium is empty, but memory is crowded." Round 1 of a second division is the most crowded moment of memory, because nobody has won yet, nobody has lost yet, and everything is still intact.

Context: a league people remember only when a club leaves

The 2026-2027 Vietnamese First Division begins between September 11 and September 13, 2026. It is the second-highest tier in Vietnam's professional football system, below V-League 1. Fourteen clubs compete this season. The top two clubs earn promotion to V-League 1 for the following season. The bottom two are relegated to the Second Division.

Those four figures — fourteen, two, two, and three days — are all a reader of the fixture list needs to know. But they say nothing about what will happen inside.

The most notable feature of this season, based on the club list I have followed, is the presence of Cong An Nhan Dan. The club has just been relegated from V-League 1 and enters the First Division with a very clear declaration: determination to return. In football, such declarations are usually read in two ways. The first is as a promise. The second is as a confession — that the club knows where it is, and knows what it fears.

I have filmed relegated clubs. I know what the first season after relegation is like. It is not a football season. It is a psychological season. Players sit in the dressing room and ask themselves whether they are part of the accident. The head coach reads the newspapers every morning to see who is calling him the man responsible. The board meets behind closed doors and talks about the budget. And the supporters, the most loyal ones, arrive at the ground with a strange feeling: they have come to watch their club play in a place they never imagined they would have to go.

Cong An Nhan Dan was once known as PVF-CAND. What that change of name says about the nature of the club I would not presume to claim, because I have never sat in their meeting room. But I know one thing about clubs that change their names: they are trying to become something other than what they were. And in football, becoming something other than what you were usually begins with accepting that the old thing no longer worked.

Beside Cong An Nhan Dan, there is another name that made me pause longer than usual. Thep Can Tho. This club is the result of a relocation — from Quang Ninh to Can Tho. In Vietnamese football, a club moving province is not unprecedented. It is like a family moving house for work. But for a club, moving house is not merely changing address. It is moving an entire community of supporters who were attached to the old name. The people of Quang Ninh who used to come to the ground every weekend will no longer have their club to watch. And the people of Can Tho will have to learn to love a new club, with a history they were never part of.

I have thought a great deal about relocated clubs. I once filmed a club in Europe that had moved city, and what I remember most is not the match. What I remember most is an old man standing in front of the old stadium, holding a faded scarf, who said something I copied word for word into my notebook: "My club stayed here. It's just a new club somewhere else."

Then there is the Ho Chi Minh City derby, between Van Hien University and Becamex Ho Chi Minh City. In football, derby is a word used a little too freely. But the Ho Chi Minh City derby in the First Division carries a particular meaning. It is the meeting of two clubs that share a metropolis of more than ten million people, share one atmosphere, and share one truth: that football in this city has never truly belonged to anyone. That derby will be broadcast live on HTV1, according to the schedule I read. Which means at least one national broadcaster believes this match deserves a prime-time slot.

The broadcast platforms, and what a list really means

The Round 1 broadcast list spans four platforms: FPT Play, TV360, HTV and MyTV. This is the detail I read most carefully, because it sits at the intersection of sport and money. A second division in a developing country being carried on four different platforms, two of them pure digital services — that is not a small signal.

I have followed how second divisions around the world are broadcast. In many countries, the second tier is a zone of silence. People broadcast only the derby, only the match involving a promotion-chasing club, only when there is news big enough to pull viewers. For a Vietnamese First Division to have its rights sold to multiple platforms, including OTT services, suggests that somebody sat down, opened a spreadsheet, and calculated that enough people care about this league to pay.

That is a positive sign, but I do not want to read it as a victory. Because I once filmed a second-division match in Europe with only four hundred spectators, a hundred of them away fans, and the match was still broadcast live. Broadcast money does not automatically become transfer money. Broadcast money does not automatically become player wages. Broadcast money guarantees only one thing: that someone will sit in front of a screen, and therefore, that what happens on the pitch will be remembered.

Sometimes, being remembered is all a second-division player needs.

I have spent many years making football documentaries, and I learned one thing I want to state here: most professional footballers in the world do not play in the top division. They play in the second, third, fourth tiers. They train six days a week, eat to a regimen, live away from their families, and earn a salary that, compared with a Premier League player, looks like loose change. But they still play. They still play because it is the only thing they know how to do, or because it is the only thing they want to do, or because of both.

Round 1 of the 2026-2027 First Division is the festival of those people. Across the three days of September 11, 12 and 13, there will be twenty-two-year-olds starting a professional match for the first time. There will be thirty-four-year-olds who know this may be their last season. There will be substitute goalkeepers sitting on the bench, wearing number twelve, singing the national anthem, and not touching the ball once in ninety minutes.

I know that, because I once counted them.

"Substitute goalkeepers — poets who are never published."

The memory of a man who counted

In 2026, I went to Russia at the age of forty-four, as a screenwriter for a World Cup documentary. I followed the Iran national team for their match against Spain in Kazan. It was an evening I remember vividly, not because of the score, but because of one man. Iran's substitute goalkeeper, wearing number twelve. He stood on the touchline for the full ninety minutes, sang the anthem with every ounce of strength in his chest, slapped his own thigh every time his team defended successfully, and did not come on for a single second. When the final whistle blew, he knelt, bowed his head, and wept.

After that tournament, I sat down and counted. There were ninety-six substitute goalkeepers across the thirty-two teams at the 2026 World Cup. Ninety-six men. Most of them did not play a single minute. And when their teams were eliminated, they cried as if they themselves had missed the last penalty.

I tell this story not to make you sad. I tell it to pose a question about Round 1 of the 2026-2027 Vietnamese First Division: among the two hundred and thirty-six players registered across the fourteen clubs this round, how many will not touch the ball? How many will sit on the bench and watch their teammates fight? How many will go home on Sunday evening with the feeling that they have just lived through a week nobody knew they lived?

I have no answer. But I know those people exist. They exist in every competition, in every country, at every level. They are the ones who keep football running, and they are the last to be mentioned.

"They do not touch the ball, but they hold the whole world."

The structure of a second division: two up, two down, and ten in between

Now I want to talk about the numbers. Not in the personifying way — I have no intention of writing that "two promotion places are a dream" or anything of the sort. I want to talk about numbers as structure.

Fourteen clubs. Two places up. Two places down. That means ten clubs in the middle will neither go up nor go down. Ten clubs will play twenty-six rounds, forty-two matches each if home and away are counted, and finish the season in a position nobody writes about. That is the fate of most second-division clubs in the world. They play to survive.

But wait. I do not want to say that surviving is a trivial thing. I once made a film about a second-division club in Italy, and I learned that in second-division football, surviving is not a modest goal. It is a victory. Because in the second tier, budgets are thin, contracts are short, and players are constantly taken away by clubs from higher divisions. Holding a stable squad through a season is an achievement of management, not only of coaching.

For Cong An Nhan Dan, this season carries a different meaning. They are not playing to survive. They are playing to return. And that creates a particular pressure, because when a recently relegated club declares that it is determined to return, it places itself in a position where any outcome short of promotion will be counted as failure.

I have witnessed this. I once filmed an Asian club that had been relegated and declared it would return within a season. They won four of their first five matches. Then they drew three in a row. Then their head coach was sacked after round twelve, because the board felt the club was drifting from its objective. That is how a promise becomes a sentence.

I am not saying that will happen to Cong An Nhan Dan. I am saying it can happen to any club that sets too clear an objective at the start of a season. Football does not operate on a schedule. It operates on a chain of events nobody controls.

Round 1: three days, and what is actually decided

People often say Round 1 decides nothing. I disagree. Round 1 does not decide the standings, but it decides the mental state of an entire season.

I once made a film about a Scandinavian club. My cameraman, a man who has worked with me for twenty-one years, has a line he repeats whenever we begin a new film: "The first match doesn't tell you how good the team is. It tells you what the team believes in."

That is what I think about when I look at the Round 1 schedule. Cong An Nhan Dan take the field. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City take the field. Thep Can Tho take the field in new colours, in a new city, before a new stand. Van Hien University prepare for the Ho Chi Minh City derby. Each of the fourteen clubs enters this round with some belief about itself. And across ninety minutes, that belief will be tested.

There is a detail I always watch in opening rounds: the expression of the head coach when the referee blows the final whistle. If his team has won, and he claps, eyes lifted to the stand — that is a coach building something. If his team has won, and he bows his head, hands in his pockets, walking quickly to the tunnel — that is a coach who knows this win is only part of a longer task. If his team has lost, and he stands motionless on the touchline longer than necessary — that is a coach asking himself where he went wrong.

In the second tier, these coaches rarely have much time. Short contracts. Tight budgets. High expectations. It is a combination I have seen crush many good men.

The counter-intuitive angle: collective memory does not remember those in the middle

Now I want to talk about what I call the blind spot of collective memory.

When a second-division season ends, people remember the two promoted clubs and the two relegated clubs. That is four clubs. The remaining ten vanish from collective memory as if they never existed. Nobody writes a book about the seventh-placed club. Nobody makes a film about the ninth-placed club. But the seventh-placed and ninth-placed clubs are where most footballers live their lives. They play there, raise children there, buy houses there, and retire there.

I used to think this invisibility was an injustice. Now I think differently. I think this invisibility is a condition of professional football. Not every competition can be a story. But precisely for that reason, a documentary maker like me has work to do: to tell the stories nobody asks for.

What I want to say to you about Round 1 of the 2026-2027 First Division is this: this round does not matter because it decides something. It matters because it is the beginning of a nine-month chain in which around two hundred players will live the most important days of their careers without anyone recording them.

And among those two hundred, someone will score a ninetieth-minute goal nobody remembers. Someone will make an eighty-seventh-minute save nobody mentions. Someone will play the last match of his career on an April Sunday, under light rain, before a half-empty stand, and walk into the tunnel to no applause.

"Applause nobody hears is still applause."

What I learned from a player who never reached Paris

In 2026, the Euros and the Paris Olympics fell in the same year. I followed a twenty-one-year-old Korean player who was on his way to signing for a lower-division French club. I idealised that story. I wrote it in my head like a stoppage-time free kick: young player, big chance, the moment a life changes.

Then the deal collapsed. A secret clause in the contract with his agent. He returned to Seoul in silence. I stayed in Paris three more days, walking along the Seine alone, feeling as if I had written a screenplay life refused to perform.

That story changed how I read lists. When I read the list of fourteen clubs in the 2026-2027 First Division, I do not read it as a list of clubs. I read it as a list of unrealised chances, deals that never happened, contracts never signed. Every club on that list is a collection of people who almost went somewhere else. And Round 1 is the day they accept that they are here.

That is not a sad thing. Sometimes, accepting that you are here is the first condition for moving forward.

Thep Can Tho: one club, two cities

In the Round 1 list, Thep Can Tho is the name I thought about most that evening.

Can Tho is the largest city in the Mekong Delta. It is a commercial centre, a cultural centre, and from this season, the home of a professional club relocated from Quang Ninh. Quang Ninh is a northern province, known for coal and for Ha Long Bay. The two places are more than one thousand eight hundred kilometres apart.

I once filmed a club in a small town. When that club nearly moved to another city, I sat in a café and listened to an old man talk about it for two hours. He talked about the ground, about his seat, about the ticket seller whose name he knew, about the friends he met in the stand every two weeks. That club did not move. But I still remember that afternoon, because it taught me that a club is not only a club. It is a collective habit, an appointment, a way for a community to tell itself that it exists.

When Thep Can Tho enter Round 1, they will carry two histories. The history of Quang Ninh, where they were born. And the history of Can Tho, where they will be written onward. I do not know how they will be received. I only know that in their first match in Can Tho, there will be people in the stand wondering whether this is their club. And the answer will not be decided by any match. It will be decided by time.

The Ho Chi Minh City derby: two clubs, one metropolis

The derby between Van Hien University and Becamex Ho Chi Minh City is the most anticipated match of Round 1, based on the broadcast schedule I read. It airs on HTV1, a local city channel.

In football, derby is a ritual of geography. It is not merely two clubs meeting. It is two ways of seeing one city meeting. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City carries a link to the Becamex group, one of the largest corporations in Binh Duong province, a province adjacent to Ho Chi Minh City with its own football tradition. Van Hien University is a club tied to a university, a model I find interesting because it places an educational institution at the centre of a professional sporting project.

I once filmed a derby in a European city. Before the match, I stood on a street corner and watched two streams of people heading in two different directions. They said nothing to each other. They just walked. And I understood that football does not only create joy. It creates division.

For Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of more than ten million, a First Division derby carries a particular meaning. It is a reminder that football in this city has never truly belonged to anyone. Clubs come and go. Names change. But the derby remains, because wherever two clubs share one city, there will be a match people cannot ignore.

On the broadcast platforms and the future of the second tier

Back to the four platforms: FPT Play, TV360, HTV, MyTV.

I want to say one thing about the strategic meaning of this. Over the past two decades, the way people watch football has changed completely. In many countries, digital platforms have become the primary channel for lower-division football, because they can serve a small but loyal audience at lower cost than traditional broadcast television. A second-division match with five thousand online viewers is still a match with five thousand viewers. And five thousand viewers is five thousand reasons to sell an advertising package.

The presence of the Vietnamese First Division across all four platforms for Round 1 suggests the market is being seen as an opportunity. I do not want to exaggerate. I have seen too many Asian second divisions broadcast on digital platforms and then disappear after two seasons for lack of viewers. But I have also seen competitions start from zero and become an important part of local sporting culture.

What decides the outcome is not technology. It is whether someone is patient enough to invest in these clubs for ten years.

Cong An Nhan Dan and the problem of returning

I want to devote this section to Cong An Nhan Dan, the club that is probably the focus of this season based on what I read.

A relegated club has a psychological characteristic I have observed in many places: it plays with two objectives at once. The first is to win the match. The second is to prove it does not belong here.

The second objective is dangerous, because it cannot be achieved by winning a match. It can only be achieved by finishing the season in a promotion place. And when a club plays with an objective that can only be confirmed in May, it will spend nine months in a state of waiting.

A head coach once told me something I wrote down and have kept: "When you have just been relegated, the most important thing is not tactics. The most important thing is making the players believe they are still good players."

That is psychological work, not tactical work. And in the second tier, where the gap in quality between clubs is often not large, psychological work usually decides more than tactical work.

I do not know how Cong An Nhan Dan will play in Round 1. I do not have enough information about their squad, their style, or the changes they made over the summer. That is a truth I must acknowledge: a fixture list tells you nothing about how a club will play. It only tells you when and where they will play.

But sometimes, knowing when and where is enough to begin.

What will be remembered after Round 1

I sat by the window and thought about this question: after Round 1 ends, what will be remembered?

There will be beautiful goals, and they will be replayed a few times on sports channels. There will be refereeing mistakes, and they will be discussed on social media for two days. A few coaches will be criticised, a few players praised. Then Round 2 will arrive, and Round 1 will become a faint memory.

But there is one thing that will not be remembered, and that is what I want to speak about last. It is the moment before the match begins.

Before the referee blows the whistle, there is a span of time when all the players stand still. They stand in a line, or scattered across the pitch, or in a circle at the centre. In that moment, they are not players of any club. They are men aged between eighteen and thirty-five, standing in a stadium, waiting for a whistle to start their work.

I have filmed that moment many times. I have an entire hard drive containing only these scenes. A goalkeeper standing alone in his goal, gloves on, looking down at the grass. A defender bending to tie his lace. A forward placing his hand on his chest as the anthem plays. A substitute sitting on the bench, hands on his thighs, eyes straight ahead.

Those are the moments football never records in the match report. But they are the moments I remember most. Because in that moment, everything is still possible.

On people who do my job

I have worked as a documentary screenwriter for more than thirty years. I began with small films, about small people, in small places. I never became famous. But I filmed things I believed deserved to be filmed.

In recent years, I have realised my way of working has changed. I film more slowly. I write more slowly. I spend more time sitting still before pressing record. My cameraman, who has worked with me for twenty-one years, sometimes tells me I have become more difficult. I do not know whether that is a compliment or a complaint. Probably both.

I think about that as I read the Round 1 fixture list of the 2026-2027 First Division. I think about the fact that I am fifty-two, living in a city that is not my home, writing about a football league in a country I left. There is a distance in that. But I do not feel that distance as a loss. I feel it as a condition of the work.

People often say a writer must be close to his subject. I do not believe that. I believe a writer must be close enough to understand, and far enough to see. Distance is not the enemy of understanding. Sometimes it is the condition of understanding.

On the season and on what has not yet happened

The 2026-2027 Vietnamese First Division season will run from September 2026 to around May or June 2027, depending on the official schedule. In that time, fourteen clubs will play hundreds of matches. Two will be promoted. Two will be relegated. Ten will stay.

I will not watch all of those matches. I live in Incheon, I have work, and I cannot devote all my time to a league in another country. But I will follow. I will read results. I will watch short clips. And occasionally, on a Sunday morning, I will sit in front of a screen and watch a match involving a club whose name I had never heard a few years ago.

That is how I keep a connection to a part of the world I left behind.

What I want to leave behind

If there is one thing I want you to carry after reading this, it is this: when you look at a fixture list, you are looking at a map of lives.

Every line in the fixture list is a match. Every match is twenty-two players on the pitch and a number of players on the bench. Every player is a person with a family, a childhood, a reason to play. Every one of them will have a moment this season they will remember for the rest of their lives, and most of those moments will not be recorded by anyone.

That is why I write. Not to predict who will win. But to record that there were people who played.

Round 1 of the 2026-2027 First Division begins on September 11, 2026, and ends on September 13, 2026. Over those three days, matches will be broadcast on FPT Play, TV360, HTV and MyTV. There will be a Ho Chi Minh City derby on HTV1. There will be a recently relegated club taking the field with the aim of returning. There will be a club that has just moved home taking the field in new colours, in a new city.

And there will be men sitting on the bench, wearing number twelve, who will not touch the ball once.

They will not appear on the scoreboard. But they will be there. And that, to me, is enough for a season to begin.