Two Payrolls, One Football Nation: Truths from the Empty Training Room of Vietnamese Women's Football

On the morning of 12 March 2026, on the stands of the Hanoi stadium, I counted 120 people. Not 120,000. Exactly 120, including a group of primary-school children brought in by their school to make up the numbers and three sugarcane-juice sellers at the gate. The opening match of the National Women's Championship between Hanoi I and Ho Chi Minh City I took place under the glaring March sun, and not a single television station bothered to broadcast it live.

I had come to the stadium that day to write a short feature about a "festival of women's football". Then, halfway through the first half, I noticed the number 7 on the home side. She ran as if fleeing something. At half-time, I went down to the technical area and struck up a conversation. Her name was Nguyen Thi Lieu, 23 years old, from Thai Binh. When I asked about her nutrition regime, she smiled awkwardly: "I have to buy my own weight-gain milk, brother. The club doesn't cover that."

That was the first sentence that made me decide to stay at the stadium for another four hours. Four hours to understand that behind every one of their matches lies a payroll no one wants to disclose.

A week later, I had the payroll of both teams in my hands. The average for a Hanoi I women's player at the time was 4.8 million dong a month. At the same moment, male players at the very same club were earning an average of 52 million dong a month — a gap of nearly eleven times. A gap that does not come from playing ability. It comes from something else: institutions, prejudice, and the collective silence of those with the power to decide.

People call it the margin. I call it the place where the real stories are hidden.

The forgotten season

Vietnamese women's football is nearly forty years old, counting from the founding of the first national women's team in the late 1980s. In its early phase, the women's team was built mainly to serve SEA Games and Asian Games cycles, with no proper national league until 2026, when the National Women's Championship officially kicked off with four teams: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Coal and Minerals, and Ha Tay.

Nearly three decades later, the number of participating teams has risen to just six. Six teams, playing a double round-robin over about two months, with fewer than forty matches each season. For comparison, the men's V.League 1 has fourteen teams, plays more than two hundred matches a season, and runs for nearly nine months. This difference in matches is not just about player sharpness. It directly affects income: women's players have no match bonuses, no endorsement contracts, no fixture list to sell tickets against.

In the notebook I have kept across eighteen years of watching Vietnamese football, there is one page I have never torn out. That page records the 2026 season summary: the total income of an average women's player across a whole season, salary, bonuses, and allowances combined, ranged from 60 to 80 million dong. A men's V.League 1 player earned on average between 600 million and 1.2 billion dong a season. A tenfold gap, unchanged across half a decade.

The question I always get from male colleagues when I write on this topic is: "But who comes to watch? Where's the money to pay them more?" It is a fair question asked in the wrong place. Nobody asks "who comes to watch" when state money pours tens of billions of dong into a newly founded men's competition. Nobody asks "who comes to watch" when a men's club spends billions to buy a foreign player for eight months of football. The system's priorities were decided long before any audience had a chance to appear.

And it is worth remembering that the Vietnamese women's national team has never lacked achievements. Five consecutive SEA Games titles from 2026 to 2026, eight further SEA Games golds, and two Women's World Cup appearances. Huynh Nhu became the first Vietnamese player to win a continental club-level Golden Ball while playing for Lank FC in Portugal. Chuong Thi Kieu, Bich Thuy, Hai Yen — names already written into the history of Southeast Asian football.

But history does not pay the electricity bill. History does not buy weight-gain milk for a 23-year-old player in Thai Binh.

The salary map and the power map

It took me two years to reconstruct the full income picture of Vietnamese women's football between 2026 and 2026. No body publishes this data. I had to piece it together from three sources: individual contracts that some players agreed to share with me (about twenty cases), the expenditure tables of four clubs I could access through personal relationships, and direct interviews with coaching staff.

The results kept me awake many nights.

Basic salaries for women's players in the National Championship range from 3.5 million to 6 million dong per month — below the regional minimum wage in many areas as of 2026. Meanwhile, a substitute men's player in V.League 1 already earned at least 15 million dong a month, and a first-team regular could earn ten times that.

Meal allowances for women's players at some clubs stand at only 120,000 dong a day, while men's players in the same system receive 300,000 to 500,000 dong a day. This gap is not just about money. It directly affects stamina, injury recovery, and the length of a women's player's career.

I have followed Nguyen Thi Oanh — a three-time SEA Games champion in athletics, but her story sits at the intersection of women's football and Vietnamese sport at large. She once had to sell her medals to pay her mother's hospital bills. That is the reality of a system with no income insurance for female athletes.

The salary map I built reveals something striking: the income gap between men and women in Vietnamese football is larger than the income gap between men and women in almost any other profession in Vietnam. While the national average wage gap between men and women sits at around 15-25%, in football it reaches 800-1000%.

Why? Because football is not paid by productivity. It is paid by revenue, and revenue is decided by audiences, sponsors, and television. All three have been shaped for decades by a system that favours the men's game.

This is not a loophole to be patched. It is an architecture to be dismantled.

The public payroll and the shock of truth

In late 2026, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept through and the entire league was cancelled, I realised something I had previously not dared face: Vietnamese women's players had no income insurance. When the league stops, pay stops. When pay stops, they scramble: selling goods online, tutoring, modelling, some moving back to their villages to farm.

I persuaded the paper to dedicate a special page to a series called "Voices from the Empty Training Room". Over two weeks, I video-called fifteen different female athletes — not only footballers but women's basketball and volleyball players too. I recorded every conversation, every figure, every story.

Nguyen Thi Oanh was the first I called. She talked about selling her SEA Games medals to cover her mother's hospital bills, about training through the pandemic in an empty park, about the loneliness of watching male athletes at her level receive far more support. When I asked what message she wanted to send to decision-makers, she paused and said: "I just want people to know that we are still trying, still competing, still waiting."

The four-part series ran in August 2026. It is not the best thing I have ever written. But it became the most-read piece of the year for the paper, with more than two thousand shares in the first three days alone.

More importantly, it exerted real pressure.

The Da Nang Department of Culture and Sports issued a 100-million-dong support package for female athletes in the city. A community fundraising platform set up by the paper raised more than four billion dong in three months, disbursed to over one hundred female athletes nationwide. And — most moving to me — more than fourteen hundred readers donated directly, some just ten thousand dong, some five hundred thousand, with very long messages attached.

One reader in Hue wrote: "I don't follow women's football, but I know what it means to be paid less than men because you are a woman. I am sending one month of my pension."

Policy does not change from a desk. It changes from voices that refuse to stay silent.

The tactical truth inside the empty training room

There is one aspect that sports journalism usually skips when it discusses women's football: the tactical side. There is a quiet prejudice that women's football is slower, less technical, less attractive. I want to rebut that with hard data, because it bears directly on why so few spectators come.

I analysed video from thirty national-level women's matches between 2026 and 2026, using passing metrics, average running distance, and pressing density for each team. What I found runs against the popular prejudice.

First, the average running distance of women's players across a 90-minute match matches that of men's players — around 10 to 11 kilometres, sometimes higher in women's national teams. The reason is that women's football is often played at a different tempo: fewer long balls, more short passes and combination triangles, which forces players to keep moving to maintain structure.

Second, Vietnamese women's teams typically use tighter tactical systems than men's teams at the same level. While many men's V.League 2 sides play simple defence-and-counter with long balls to a striker, women's sides such as Ho Chi Minh City I and Vietnam Coal and Minerals routinely build out of the back: a defender passes to the central midfielder, the midfielder turns and plays into the gap between the opposition centre-backs.

Third, I noticed a physical fact: Vietnamese women's players often get fewer recovery minutes between matches than men. The National Women's Championship is usually crammed into two concentrated blocks with a dense fixture list: one match every four days, sometimes every three. That is a brutal condition for a human body, regardless of sex.

Those three findings led me to an uncomfortable conclusion: the problem of Vietnamese women's football has never been the quality of the football. The problem is how it is perceived and invested in. If spectators do not come, it is not because the women play badly. It is because the media does not cover them, the fixtures are not widely announced, the tickets are not advertised, and the stadiums are not prepared to receive an audience.

I once went to Thanh Tri stadium for a Hanoi women's match. The grass was ankle-high, uncut for two weeks. Only half the floodlights worked. The away dressing room had no hot water. These are small details I jot down in my notebook. But put together, they paint a much larger picture: the quiet acceptance of an entire system.

When the training room is empty, their voices carry farther than ever.

The contrarian argument

I understand the popular argument: women's football is not attractive, has no audience, generates no money. It is a vicious circle many use to justify not investing. But the argument has a basic logical flaw I want to point out.

That flaw lies in the assumption that audiences and money are independent variables, when in reality they are determined variables. Spectators come to a stadium when they know a match is on, when the pitch is clean, when kick-off time is convenient, when tickets are cheap, when someone invites them. Money arrives when sponsors see a chance to reach the public, when broadcasters buy rights, when rules force men's clubs to invest a share in women's sides.

All of those conditions, in Vietnam, have never been seriously created. We have failed to organise women's football as an industry. We have only organised it as a movement activity.

And here is what I consider most important: the commercial value of women's football does not need to equal that of men's football in order to have the right to exist. A women's player does not need to earn 50 million dong a month to have the right to eat properly and live off the game. A women's league does not need the allure of V.League 1 to have the right to be organised decently.

I have spoken with many male and female coaches in the industry. One — I will not name him, since he is still working — told me something I recorded word for word: "Vietnamese women's players are better than Vietnamese men's players at the same age, in terms of tactical thinking and collective discipline. But the system never gives them the chance to prove that in front of the public."

If that is true — and I believe it is, based on eighteen years of watching both leagues — then the debate is no longer whether women are good enough. The debate is whether the system is fair.

And the answer, so far, remains no.

Action and change

After the 2026 series, there are three concrete changes I can list here — not as evidence of personal achievement, but as evidence of what happens when the truth is brought into the light.

First, some V.League 1 clubs began including revenue-sharing clauses with their affiliated women's teams. This is not a complete solution, but it marks the first time in Vietnamese football history that a line item explicitly labelled "women's team spending" appears on a men's club's financial statement.

Second, the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) issued a rule requiring every club in V.League 1 and V.League 2 to field a youth women's team or support a local women's side. The rule has many loopholes, but at least it turns investment in women's football from voluntary into mandatory.

Third — and this is what makes me most hopeful about the future — the number of girls enrolled in youth football programmes in Da Nang, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City has tripled over the past two years. When a girl can walk onto a training pitch without her parents blocking her because of prejudice, that is the deepest sign of cultural change.

I write about people with no place in the standings, but whose names are in the history books. And I write so those names finally become visible.

They do not need a stage light

On the stands of the Hanoi stadium on 12 March 2026, there were 120 people. On the stands of Hang Day stadium on an October afternoon in 2026, I counted more than two thousand spectators for the National Women's Championship final between Ho Chi Minh City I and Vietnam Coal and Minerals.

Two thousand is still not enough against the potential. But it is a number rising, not falling.

Nguyen Thi Lieu — the girl who once had to buy her own weight-gain milk — has now retired and coaches a youth women's team in Thai Binh. Her current income is fifteen million dong a month. Still far below the salary of a young male coach in the same role. But she is now training twenty-two other girls, who will not have to buy their own weight-gain milk the way she once did.

I do not know when Vietnamese women's football will have a properly organised league, a serious broadcast system, a fair financial structure. It might be ten years, or twenty.

What I do know is this: every time a girl in a match jersey steps onto the pitch, every time a spectator pays for a ticket to watch them play, every time a journalist sits for four extra hours after the final whistle — we are rewriting a new chapter of history. Not the men's game with one more variation. The history of a sport reclaiming its space.

They do not need a stage light. They only need people to see them work.

And I, as a writer, have only one job: to watch, to record, and not to let anyone forget.