The Ball Rolls in Nagoya, the Screen Stays Dark in Hanoi

On the afternoon of September 14, at a Japanese city whose full name I still can't quite remember, the Vietnam women's team will step onto the pitch against Chinese Taipei. Two in the afternoon, local time. Then, exactly twenty-four hours later, in another city, U23 Vietnam will face Kuwait at five. The ball will roll. The referee will blow the whistle. The grass will be torn up by boots. The stands will have voices in them. But in Hanoi, in Da Nang, in some riverside cafe in the Mekong Delta, the television will still be black. I write these lines sitting in my small apartment in Tokyo, remote in hand, flipping between dozens of Japanese sports channels. Here, people already have a broadcast schedule. Here, there are commentators, graphics, an entire crew prepared weeks in advance. Back home, as of the morning of September 14, not a single station had stepped forward to claim it would air that match. A football match with no audience at home. That is the largest silence I have touched in many years in this trade. An empty stadium, yet memories line up along the stands. And this time, even that stand has not been built. To be clear, we are talking about Asiad 20 — the twentieth Asian Games, held in Aichi and Nagoya, Japan. The opening ceremony is scheduled for September 19, 2026. But football, as usual at major multi-sport events, must run ahead to fit group stages for dozens of teams. The Vietnam women's team sits in Group E, opening on the afternoon of September 14. U23 Vietnam sits in Group C, beginning on the evening of September 15. This is an enormous edition in scale. Four hundred sixty-nine events. Forty-three sports. More than eleven thousand athletes from forty-five countries and territories. But for Vietnamese fans, most of those numbers exist only on paper. What they want is not a spreadsheet. What they want is to see the red flag with the gold star running down the touchline, to hear the shout of the girls behind their jerseys, to catch a burst of speed from a U23 striker they have followed since qualifying. What they want is to sit before a screen and believe they are there, even from half a world away. The problem lies in something so simple it is hard to believe: nobody is broadcasting those matches for them. More than a week ago, there were reports that a Vietnamese entity had come very close to finalizing a purchase of the broadcast rights for this Asiad. Then silence. No deal was announced. No reason was given. Only a quiet that stretched on until the morning of the opening match. Meanwhile, five of our neighbors in Southeast Asia — Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines — have all secured broadcasters. In Bangkok, in Kuala Lumpur, in Jakarta, people already know which channel they will watch tonight. In Vietnam, they do not. I spent years sitting at the edge of pitches, filming the scenes nobody bothered to film. I learned one thing: silence is not emptiness. It is something with weight, with its own mass, with a gravity that presses down on people's shoulders. And right now, here, a silence hangs over Vietnamese fans — the silence of a screen that has not yet switched on. I must tell you one thing plainly, so we do not fool ourselves: this is not a story about tactics. You will not find a formation diagram, not an expected-goals figure, not a pressing or defensive-block analysis in these lines about the women's match against Chinese Taipei or U23 against Kuwait. And I will not invent them to fill a page. What we face is another story, drier but just as heavy: the story of the right to watch. Broadcast rights for an event like the Asian Games are an asset. They are sold by the rights holder — here, the Olympic Council of Asia together with the host organizing committee — by territory. The football portion of the package is usually sub-licensed through the continental federation. Vietnam territory is a unit of sale. And that unit, so far, has not found a public buyer. What does that mean? It means no law compels a Vietnamese broadcaster to air this event for domestic audiences. No mandatory events list has been invoked to protect the public's access. If there is no buyer, there will be no signal. And if there is no signal, there will be no viewers. It is a cold, sealed chain of links with no room for emotion. Here, I must mention something that analysts of rights economics like to call by a very technical name: timing risk. When a deal is negotiated right up against the opening whistle, the balance between buyer and seller shifts. The buyer loses time as leverage, but the seller is also cornered — either sell cheap or lose everything. The report that an entity had been very close more than a week ago and then went quiet is the familiar signal of a negotiation stuck somewhere: on price, on exclusivity terms, or on a snag over payment and guarantees. I wonder: if this deal closes at the last minute, how will fans get to watch? A last-minute agreement usually comes with tight conditions — digital-platform exclusivity, a subscription, or a new paid channel. In other words, the most likely scenario is that Vietnamese football at the Asiad airs on a restricted platform, not on free-to-air television open to everyone. And the worst-case scenario — entirely possible — is total silence. No signal. No picture. The two most important Vietnam football matches of the first half of the Games playing out with nobody at home able to watch. Try to picture it. A twenty-year-old girl, training for years, wearing the national shirt for the first time at a continental Games. She runs onto the pitch beneath the lights of a Japanese city. She plays the match of her life. In the stands, a few dozen overseas Vietnamese cheer. But at home, her mother sits before the TV and sees nothing. Her old coach in a district school, the man who taught her the first passes, also sees nothing. The moment an entire life has been compressed toward slips by in silence, like a film reel that never screens. That is what keeps me from sitting still. Not the fear of a loss, but the fact that even a win can be missed. Let me go against what most people are thinking. When the news of no broadcaster broke, the first reaction from fans was usually anger. Anger at stations for not buying. Anger at the federation for not arranging it. Anger at some invisible someone who left them before a black screen without knowing where to watch. But that anger, I think, is aimed at the wrong target. This is a market failure, not a moral sin. A broadcaster buys rights only when it believes the ad revenue, subscription revenue, or brand value will exceed the outlay. If it hesitates, it may simply be because the math isn't attractive enough — or because the price the rights holder set doesn't match expectations. That is market arithmetic, not indifference to fans. Here I think again of a habit of mine in this trade: I am always drawn to what people consider boring. An unfinished negotiation, an ellipsis in a news bulletin, an unnamed source line — that is where the real story lives. And the real story here is likely this: Vietnamese football is moving faster than its own commercial capacity. We take pride in our seeding. We tell each other that the women's team was once the top seed, for the first time in history. But alongside that pride, these very reports admit something cruel: the team is still not rated highly, despite being placed in the upper band. Seeding is an administrative decision, not a verdict on strength. And a football nation that calls itself top tier yet cannot secure even a single rights deal so its people can watch it play — that is a mismatch between ambition on the pitch and execution off it. People talk endlessly about reaching continental heights, but forget that reaching begins with letting your own people see you. Years ago, I sat in an empty stand in Kanazawa, filming a boy barely over one meter fifty-eight tall. He scored in the eighty-eighth minute. I understood then that a beautiful moment does not need a large crowd to become legend. But it needs one viewer — even just one — for it to be told again. Football does not die when the stands are empty. It dies when nobody sees it. One meter fifty-eight cannot touch the crossbar, but it can touch the heart of a whole city — provided someone is there to capture the moment. I want to tell you about a situation I have witnessed. At major tournaments, when rights land in a country's hands, more than viewers benefit. An entire ecosystem moves with it. Sponsors of the delegation look at viewership numbers to decide whether to pour money in. A beer brand, a soft-drink maker, a telecom carrier — they buy ad slots based on projected audiences. If a match is not broadcast, an entire value chain breaks: sponsors have nowhere to appear, ads have no viewers, brands have no reach. That affects not just a few hours of airtime, but the credibility of an entire sporting nation in the eyes of its commercial partners. Then there are the athletes themselves. When football is not broadcast, their individual value goes unmeasured. A player who shines while nobody watches draws no endorsements, no calls from bigger clubs, no memory attached to the name. Silence on the broadcast, in an indirect but cruel way, is also silence about the fate of individual people. I once filmed in Rostov, after a defeat the whole of Japan remembers. I did not film the score. I filmed the candy wrappers picked up, a sink wiped clean, a small note written in two Russian words of thanks. In defeat, dignity is the only thing left. And to capture that dignity, someone had to be there, with a camera, and a place to send it out. What I fear at this Asiad is not a loss. What I fear is something else: an entire Games that nobody records, nobody broadcasts, nobody remembers. A Games missed not because the teams played badly, but because nobody opened a path for it to reach its audience. If you lose, you still have memory. If you are never seen, memory has nothing to hold onto. There is a line I often think of on sleepless nights: an unsigned contract has already told an entire life story. That line is true of a player, and this time it is true of a whole Games. A deal not yet signed, a missing signature, a handshake that never happened — and behind it, millions of people waiting in silence. I sit here, in Tokyo, among Japanese channels ready for the festival. I know I will catch those matches somehow — perhaps I will have to go there myself, sit in the stands, hear the ball bounce in a space of only a few hundred people. In that silent arena, I will hear my own keyboard like a heartbeat as I type line after line about what I see, to send home. But I cannot forget that my homeland stands before a black screen. One thing more than twenty years in this trade has taught me: people do not remember the score, they remember how a pair of boots marked the grass. On the fourteenth and fifteenth of September, the boots of Vietnamese girls and boys will mark Japanese grass. The only remaining question is whether anyone at home will see those marks. And I ask this, not as a reproach, but as an open question for each person to answer themselves: if football was born to be seen, then a match nobody watches — did it truly take place? And if we let it pass in silence, then tomorrow, when the team rises to a new height, will anyone still remember the day everything was reduced to an ellipsis in the news? Perhaps it is time we demand not only victories on the pitch, but a road for those victories to travel all the way home — through every screen, every cafe, every small room in every corner of the country. Because a moment not seen is like a story not told: it still exists, but no one remembers it anymore. And the cruelest thing about collective memory is that it keeps only what it was ever allowed to see.