2026-2027 National Cup: Four V-League Clubs Fall and the Forgotten Strata of Vietnamese Football

On the Quy Nhon pitch, in the 90th plus fourth minute, a penalty cut the score to 2-3. Nobody erupted in the stands. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai players walked back to the centre circle, shoulders down, eyes fixed on the grass. Two hundred kilometres away, Pleiku Stadium — the place they call home — is having its surface rebuilt, the old soil dug up to fix drainage that clogs whenever heavy rain drags on. A club that lost its home ground at the exact moment it lost its form. The coincidence was nobody's design, yet it says a great deal about this season. That same weekend, in Hai Phong, a striker who had joined the club only days earlier, Thaileon, scored the only goal inside the first half, sending the hosts down 0-1 to Thep Can Tho. In Thanh Hoa, the home side lost 0-2 to Becamex Ho Chi Minh City, a club just relegated. In Phu Tho, Hong Linh Ha Tinh collapsed on penalties after ninety goalless minutes. Each match is a separate tile. Laid side by side, they build a larger picture: four of eight V-League representatives fell to first-division clubs inside two weekend days, three of them losing at home. I have followed Vietnamese football long enough not to be startled by results like these. But weekends like this still make me pause longer than usual. Not because of the shock. But because something old and buried gets dug up, and people are forced to see it. The 2026-2027 National Cup qualifying round took place over two weekend days, with eight V-League clubs involved. The final scoreboard made plenty of people read it twice. Bac Ninh were the only exception. They won 3-2 away at first-division Long An — an away win that was anything but comfortable, but at least it preserved some dignity for the stronger tier. The other four representatives fell one after another. Thanh Hoa lost 0-2 at home to Becamex Ho Chi Minh City, a club just relegated and now seen as a strong candidate to climb back. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City's squad was in no way inferior to the hosts'. The difference was that they played with more resolve, and that was enough for a win that was not especially difficult. Hoang Anh Gia Lai lost 2-3 to Hung Yen at Quy Nhon — the mountain club's temporary home, because Pleiku Stadium is being resurfaced due to poor drainage in persistent heavy rain. Without the familiar support of their own crowd, and facing a Hung Yen burning to win, the side managed by coach Le Quang Trai fell 1-3 by the 77th minute before pulling one back to 2-3 from the penalty spot in the 90th plus fourth. Hai Phong, playing at home, lost 0-1 to Thep Can Tho — a club that had just moved its registration from Quang Ninh to the Mekong Delta and had lost its opening match in the 2026-2027 First Division. Striker Thaileon, only days into the squad, scored the game's only goal in the first half. Hong Linh Ha Tinh lost 2-3 on penalties away to Phu Tho after a 0-0 draw over 90 minutes. Read this far, the instinctive reaction is to call it an earthquake. I do not think so. I think it is a pattern that has repeated often enough to stop surprising anyone — only this time it crowded into a single weekend, dense enough that nobody could skim past it. What matters is the context behind those scorelines. V-League 2026-2027 has only just kicked off. Clubs entered the National Cup with unsettled squads, unaccumulated fitness and, more importantly, in a frame of mind not everyone wants to admit: they came to this competition without committing their full attention. At many V-League clubs, especially those without ambition, the National Cup has never been the main arena. And that has its own logic. The deeper you go, the higher the cost. Travel gets more expensive. Accommodation gets more expensive. The squad must rotate, and rotation at a thin club means injury risk and decline in the competition that matters more. Meanwhile, survival in the V-League is a life-or-death objective, deciding the entire budget, sponsorship contracts and the very existence of a club. That calculation is not unreasonable. It merely reflects a harsh reality: in Vietnamese football, survival is prioritised over glory. A ticket to the next round of the National Cup does not bring revenue matching its cost. A V-League survival slot brings everything. So V-League representatives tend to approach the National Cup with indifference. It is not that they do not want to win. It is that they do not want to pay the price for a win that does not matter enough. And that very gap in commitment lets first-division clubs — with far greater motivation — spring surprises. This is the point I want to stress, because the common reading puts the emphasis in the wrong place. People say first-division clubs have grown stronger. Perhaps. But before concluding that, one must ask whether V-League clubs actually walked out with their strongest line-ups and their highest intensity. In most cases, the answer is no. Thanh Hoa embody that paradox most clearly, and they are also the club under the heaviest pressure. The Thanh Hoa club only knew it still existed just before V-League 2026-2027 began. A limited squad, because there was not much funding to retain key players or buy new ones. For a club like that, deciding clearly which battle is the main one is a survival choice, not a moral one. And it did not stop there. Before facing Becamex Ho Chi Minh City, Thanh Hoa confronted a fresh money worry, this time from beyond the border. FIFA has demanded the club pay more than 305,000 US dollars, roughly 8 billion dong, to Rimario Gordon, after the Jamaican striker filed a claim with FIFA. If the matter is not resolved within 45 days of receiving the document on September 16, Thanh Hoa will be banned from registering new players for three transfer windows. Three transfer windows. For a club already struggling for personnel, that is close to a sentence. It locks down the route to reinforcement exactly when reinforcement is most needed. The irony is that the knot arose during the previous sponsor's tenure, while Thanh Hoa has now been transferred to a new sponsor. The current club must carry a debt it did not create, and settle it with the resources of a different entity. This is the kind of governance risk long familiar in Vietnamese football: a club is a legal entity, but its identity is bound to successive people and sponsorship tenures, leaving wounds that travel across leadership generations. Watching Thanh Hoa against Becamex Ho Chi Minh City, I did not see a club beaten on pure football merit. I saw a club with its focus scattered in every direction. A player walking into a match with his head full of questions about his own club's future, about whether anyone will be able to sign a contract, can hardly play with the calm required. Elite football is already brutal on clear minds. It becomes near impossible on divided ones. At Hoang Anh Gia Lai the story differs somewhat, but the ending is the same. The mountain club entered the season with a relegation battle forecast well in advance. Two consecutive defeats at the start of V-League 2026-2027 showed those difficulties were no exaggeration. This season's squad is weaker than last season's. Against a far more ambitious Hung Yen, coach Le Quang Trai's men fell quickly. But an early exit from the National Cup, viewed coldly, may be good for Hoang Anh Gia Lai. It gives the club more rest, more training time, and frees them from a congested schedule their squad lacks the depth to sustain. This club faces the survival equation almost every season. For a side like that, every match in a secondary competition is an unprofitable fitness cost. I know this sounds cold. It puts efficiency above emotion, survival above dignity. But professional football in leagues with limited resources operates exactly like this. The problem is not that Hoang Anh Gia Lai chose this approach. The problem is that they were forced to choose it. Losing Pleiku Stadium to resurfacing only makes everything harder. A home ground in football is not just a familiar surface. It is psychological space. It is where a player knows exactly where to run, where to stand, and feels the roar behind his back. Without it, a club loses a fragile but essential layer of protection. Quy Nhon against Hung Yen was a stadium with spectators, but not their spectators. And in football, the difference between home and borrowed home is sometimes bigger than people think. The two remaining clubs are Hai Phong and Hong Linh Ha Tinh. Their defeats were the least surprising of all. Both had decent starts to V-League 2026-2027, with one loss and one win. But their collapse in the National Cup stayed within the expectations of many observers. Simply because, for them, this competition is not a priority either. Saving strength for the relegation race is the sensible choice, and an early cup exit incidentally lets them do so without heavy media pressure. There is a telling detail in Hai Phong's loss to Thep Can Tho. The only scorer was Thaileon, a striker only days into the squad. That a newcomer could make an immediate difference says something about the state of both clubs. For Thep Can Tho, it is a sign of a collective finding momentum and a timely addition. For Hai Phong, it is a reminder of the absence of an attacking option sharp enough to break down a determined defence. That goal also says something about preparation. A first-division club that had just moved from Quang Ninh to Can Tho, that had just lost its opening match, could still send a new signing out and turn him into the hero of the match. Meanwhile, a V-League side playing at home could not produce a matching answer. That gap is much smaller than the league ranking suggests. On the other side of the divide, motivation is a very different weapon. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City were just relegated and are candidates to climb straight back. Hung Yen went into the match against Hoang Anh Gia Lai with clear hunger. Thep Can Tho had just relocated from Quang Ninh to Can Tho, had just lost their opener, and needed a jolt to shape their season. Phu Tho played at home and stayed calm enough to drag Hong Linh Ha Tinh to penalties and win 3-2. Each of these clubs had a specific reason to treat that match as a final. Each V-League club on the opposite side had a specific reason to treat it as an ordinary game. A gap in commitment, in a single match, carries more weight than a gap in class on paper. This is an old rule of knockout football, and the National Cup is simply where it shows most clearly. On top of that, first-division clubs face a rare opportunity: to play against famous opponents, in bigger stadiums, under media attention they seldom get. That opportunity does not come often, and they know it. There is another stratum these matches expose, and it is the one that draws my attention most. For years I have spent most of my time tracking youth competitions and the lower tiers of national football systems. That work taught me one thing: most talent does not disappear. It is buried under tiers the media spotlight rarely reaches. A 24-year-old in the first division may have been called up to the national youth team three years ago. A midfielder at a provincial club may hold numbers nobody at the centre bothers to measure. The National Cup is one of the few occasions that stratum is brought to the surface. And when it is, people are usually startled to find it thicker than they thought. This is why I always follow the National Cup qualifying rounds with attention equal to, even greater than, the big V-League clashes. Not because these matches are better in technical quality. But because they are more honest about people. A team playing with everything it has reveals more about itself than a team playing with half a mind. Raw jade does not lie on the surface of the pitch; it lies beneath years of neglect. I have written that line many times, and each time I remind myself it is not merely a pretty sentence. It is a working method. Looking at a match like Phu Tho eliminating Hong Linh Ha Tinh, what I search for is not the winner's name. I search for overlooked details: a defender holding his position correctly through extra time, a midfielder knowing when to pass sideways instead of forward, a goalkeeper calm to the point of coldness in a shootout. Those details do not appear on the scoreboard. But they are evidence of a layer of talent waiting to be excavated. Based on my experience watching matches across many competitions, I have learned that the only way to judge a player properly is to place him in many contexts. A National Cup match, however small, is such a context. And sometimes it yields answers ten matches in the top flight cannot. The 2026 World Cup taught me that dreams, too, need to be excavated, because sometimes they break before they can sprout. I witnessed that up close, and it changed how I write. Since then, whenever I look at a small club that has just beaten a big one, I do not only look at the winner's joy. I look at the players on both sides and ask myself who among them will still be here in three years. And here is where I want to go against the common reading. The usual explanation for a weekend like this is that the V-League is weakening, or that the National Cup has lost prestige. Both are comfortable because they allow a conclusion without analysis. I do not believe either is right. What actually happened is not that first-division clubs suddenly grew stronger, nor that V-League clubs suddenly grew weaker. What happened is that the reward structure of Vietnamese football is operating exactly as designed. A system that rewards survival over ambition will produce clubs that disdain secondary competitions. That is a logical outcome, not a surprise. In other words, the National Cup did not lose prestige. It never had enough prestige to force clubs to bet on it. And when a competition does not matter enough for people to fight with everything, smaller clubs taking it over is inevitable. The second blind spot lies on the other side. People often explain V-League defeats by saying those clubs did not want to win. But that is too simple, and somewhat of an excuse. Not wanting to win and being unable to win are two different things. For some clubs, indifference is merely the reason offered to cover a more uncomfortable fact: their squads are so thin that even if they wanted to win, they would not have enough players to do so. I still ask myself whether I am seeing what I want to see rather than what is truly there. When I say first-division clubs have greater motivation, is that a conclusion drawn from data, or just a more pleasant way of telling the story? When I say the depth of V-League clubs is overrated, am I exaggerating to make the narrative more compelling? That caution is not pointless hesitation. It is discipline. Over the years I have paid the price for writing too enthusiastically about things I had not verified enough. A surprising match does not license the conclusion that the order has been overturned. It only licenses the conclusion that the order is more fragile than we thought. And sometimes that fragility is the most important information of all. What I take from this weekend is not a warning about the V-League's decline, nor praise for the first division. What I take is a question this football nation needs to answer for itself. If a national competition cannot persuade clubs to fight with everything, then the problem lies with the competition, not the clubs. And if clubs must choose between dignity in a secondary arena and survival in the primary one, that signals a system that has not given them enough reason to pursue more than one objective. Four defeats in two days may be just a weekend. But we should read it as a trace. And like any trace in an excavation, its value lies not in itself, but in what it points to beneath.