Asiad 20: Two Matches Before the Opening Ceremony, Vietnam Still Doesn't Know Where to Watch Football

On the night of September 13, close to midnight, a group of young friends were still gathered around a television in a familiar Hanoi coffee shop. One of them opened the schedule on his phone and read aloud: the Vietnam women's team faces Chinese Taipei at 2 p.m. on September 14, Group E. The Vietnam U23 team meets Kuwait at 5 p.m. on September 15, Group C. Both matches take place before the opening ceremony of Asiad 20, scheduled for September 19 in Japan.

Then a young woman in the group asked: "So which channel do we watch on?" No one could answer. The television was still on, but no one yet knew what it would broadcast.

Asiad 20 brings together 45 countries and territories, with more than 11,000 athletes competing in 469 events across 43 sports. Within that vast picture, football is among the most anticipated sports in Vietnam, with both the women's team and the U23 side taking part. Organizers scheduled the group-stage football matches to begin several days before the opening ceremony, following the convention of multi-sport games held across many venues. That means Vietnamese fans will have to follow their teams before the flame of the Games is lit.

As of the morning of September 14, no broadcaster in Vietnam had announced it held the rights to air Asiad 20. According to initial information, an entity in Vietnam had reportedly come very close to completing a rights purchase more than a week earlier, but no official announcement has followed. The reason behind the delay remains unclear.

What makes the story notable is the regional comparison. Five other Southeast Asian nations — Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines — have each announced they secured the rights. Vietnam stands as the only exception among the six leading football nations of Southeast Asia, with no party holding broadcast rights, precisely as both national teams prepare to take the field.

The story has the shape of a last-minute rights negotiation: one side came very close to a deal, then went silent, and that silence has stretched to the brink of kickoff. In media economics, a rights deal is normally recouped through three channels: advertising, subscription via packages or digital platforms, and sponsorship. When the signing is pushed close to the opening date, the window to sell advertising is compressed, making the profit equation more fragile. The buyer loses leverage; the seller loses position too. That delay, whatever its cause, usually revolves around three possibilities: a disagreement over price, financial or procedural friction, or hesitation over payment guarantees.

Over many years of following youth squads, I learned one simple thing. A scout's voice must touch the heart before it touches the data. A 17-year-old running on the pitch does not only need to be recognized by speed metrics or accurate passes. He needs to be seen. And for most Vietnamese viewers, being "seen" means something very concrete: the match must be on air.

Based on my experience watching matches, I have noticed something rarely said in sports reports. When a match has no broadcast, the loss does not stop at fans missing 90 minutes of play. It severs a collective ritual. In a country where football seeps into every alley, a national team match is an occasion for a whole neighborhood to gather, for strangers to sit side by side, for a child to see a role model in a red shirt for the first time. When that signal is absent, an entire generation's shared memory is left blank.

Matches that are never broadcast resemble forgotten notebook pages. The information is intact, the events still happen, but no one opens the book to read. Every young player is a layer of sediment, and I am the one who excavates. But sediment only has value when seen under the right light. A talent who plays well in a tournament with no media coverage will quietly pass by without leaving a trace in the collective memory of the national game.

There is a small but telling detail. Domestic media repeatedly mention that Vietnam's teams are placed in the "upper tier" on the continental stage, with a first-ever top-seed status achieved at the previous Games. Yet the very same reports add a note: despite the seeding, the team is not highly rated.

That tension deserves scrutiny, because it exposes a blind spot in how we tell our own story. Seeding is an administrative concept, calculated from historical results and ranking. It decides the draw, not true strength. A team can be seeded thanks to accumulated points across many tournaments while its current form is below the expectation that status suggests. The gap between administrative position and actual strength is where upsets arise, and where fan trust is most easily wounded.

When a football nation simultaneously calls itself "upper tier" and notes that it is not highly rated, its audience is handed two contradictory messages at once. Expectation is triggered but not anchored to any solid foundation. In that context, being unable to watch the match becomes a double cut: fans lose the right to judge for themselves where their team truly stands.

The thought worth pondering lies in another asymmetry, not on the pitch. Vietnamese football's sporting ambition is moving faster than the commercialization capacity that comes with it. A national team built to go deep on the continental stage still has no domestic broadcaster stepping forward to bring its image to home audiences. That gap is not the story of a single rights deal. It reflects a loose link in the operating chain of the national game.

Looking at five neighboring nations that closed their rights deals, a common pattern emerges. They did not wait until the brink of kickoff. They negotiated in bundles, shared risk with digital platforms, and treated bringing the team's image to the people as part of the ecosystem's responsibility rather than purely a business opportunity. That one of the region's most passionate football nations lags in preparation shows the problem is not audience demand. Demand is there, clear and large. The problem lies in how resources are organized.

There is another, less-mentioned way to see the value of broadcasting. For a young player pulling on the national shirt for the first time at a continental tournament, that match is an irreplaceable milestone. It is not merely 90 minutes of play. It is the moment the family sits before the screen, the moment neighbors call across windows, the moment another child in a far province looks up and believes his dream is real. When the match is not broadcast, that milestone is stripped of much of its social meaning.

The transfer market is like geological strata: those who know how to look will find minerals. A rights market works the same way. It only pays off when someone is willing to dig. The hesitation of domestic entities ahead of a Games where the national team features in two categories says more about the readiness of the parties than about the appeal of the tournament itself.

Back to that night of September 13. The young friends in the coffee shop eventually left, carrying a question without an answer. The next day, the Vietnam women's team steps out at 2 p.m. A day later, it is U23 Vietnam's turn. The outcome of the rights deal can still change hour by hour. A late agreement could turn the "total darkness" story into "we have signal," while a prolonged silence will push fans toward sources outside the border.

What is worth watching is not only whether a contract exists, but its shape. A free-to-air deal on national television will tell a very different story from a paid deal on a digital platform. How the deal is concluded will say a great deal about the maturity of the domestic sports rights market, and about how the game's operators view the relationship between the national team and the public.

When a child is seen on national television for the first time, what he receives is not just recognition. It is a ticket for his dream to become part of a generation's memory. And perhaps, how a football nation treats its own matches on air will shape how the next generation treats that football nation in turn.