V.League 2026-2026: How the Touchline Runner Is Being Erased, and Why That Is a Mistake

At minute 67, at Hang Day Stadium, a left winger took off his training jacket, set his water bottle beside the bench, and sat still. He was not on the injury list. He was substituted for a purely tactical reason: the coaching staff wanted someone who could drift inside, not someone who hugged the touchline. The scoreboard showed his number, and he nodded like a man long accustomed to being the first option discarded. The crowd applauded politely. None of them knew that ten minutes earlier, he had been the only player to stretch the opponent's defence.

I sat behind the technical area, notebook open, and recorded that moment. Not to file a substitution report. But to ask a bigger question: what is happening to the winger in the V.League?

In my years on the beat, I have learned that the biggest changes in a league never show up in the table. They show up in small details: a player sitting down on the bench, an empty flank, a cross that no one waits for anymore. The V.League is going through such a change, and it is happening so quietly that almost no one names it.

Context: a league copying itself

The 2026-2026 V.League 1 is entering its closing stretch with a title race that is no longer the story of a single club. Nam Dinh, the defending champion, has kept its core but must split its energy with continental competition. Cong An Ha Noi keeps investing heavily in its squad. Ha Noi FC, after a transition period, is searching for its identity. Binh Duong, Thanh Hoa and Hai Phong form a stubborn chasing pack. The interesting part is not the table, but how these teams organise their attack.

Over roughly the past five seasons, the 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 have become the standard. That brings a requirement for the two wingers: they must drift inside, create space for overlapping full-backs, and become a second threat inside the box. The traditional winger — the man who hugs the touchline, beats his marker, delivers a cross — is increasingly treated as outdated. At many clubs, that position is handed to a central midfielder pushed wide, or a wide forward trained to shoot rather than to cross.

Based on my experience watching these matches, there is a paradox rarely discussed: V.League clubs are copying a model designed for leagues with elite full-backs, while lacking that very precondition. When the winger drifts inside, the flank must be occupied by the full-back. If the full-back cannot push high and deliver, that flank becomes dead space. The team loses width, the opponent compresses centrally, and every attack becomes cramped.

This is not a problem for one club alone. It is a problem for an entire system. From the champions to the relegation battlers, nearly all of them choose the same road. And when everyone takes the same road, that road becomes crowded, slow, and easy to block.

Core: when every flank drifts inside

The inverted winger is not a mistake. It is an evolution. It originated in Europe, where top clubs realised that a right-footed winger playing on the left could create an advantage: he can shoot from distance with his stronger foot, combine centrally, and force the opposing full-back to choose between tracking him or holding position. But evolution only has value when there is diversity. In the V.League, that diversity is narrowing.

Look at the leading clubs, and almost all of them organise their attack to the same template: one centre-forward, two wingers leaning inside, two controlling central midfielders, and two attacking full-backs. The pattern repeats so often that it is hard to tell one team from another by shape alone. The difference, if any, lies in individual quality, not in tactical ideas.

The tactical consequences are concrete. First, V.League centre-backs are growing used to facing balls delivered from the inside channels. They learn to mark, cover, and cut passing lanes. Second, when a winger drifts inside, he places himself in a crowded zone. He needs high individual technique and strong combination play — qualities not every player has. Third, when both flanks drift inside, the team loses the advantage of width, and counter-attacking sides can compress the space with ease.

By contrast, the traditional winger offers a different threat. He stretches the defence, forces the opposing full-back to drop deep, and opens space for central midfielders to break through. He delivers the ball into the box from angles the defence cannot easily read. And most importantly, he creates surprise — precisely what a homogenised league is badly missing.

I counted. In a typical V.League match this season, the number of crosses from the right or left flank is usually lower than the number of balls played through the middle. That is not wrong in theory. It only shows that teams are prioritising one route and neglecting the other. The problem is that when every team prioritises the same route, the league becomes predictable.

Another overlooked aspect is fitness. The inverted winger must cover more ground, contributing to both attack and pressing. In a league with a congested schedule like the V.League, that leads to overload. Traditional touchline wingers, with a more energy-efficient game, can sustain form more consistently across a long season. This is an undervalued advantage.

Then there is youth development. V.League academies are teaching young players how to drift inside, how to combine, how to press. They rarely teach how to beat a man, how to deliver an accurate cross, how to hold the ball on the flank. As a result, a generation of traditional wingers is quietly disappearing from Vietnamese football — not because they have lost value, but because no one teaches them.

I recall the lesson from Pitch 9 in 2026. Back then, I analysed a lower-division team's 4-2-3-1 in fine detail, and the piece drew only 87 views. People do not read to understand a formation. They read to understand people. And in the story of wingers being substituted, those people are the ones the system has pushed to the margins.

The full-back problem

The inverted model only works when the full-back can attack. In Europe, sides like Manchester City or Liverpool own full-backs who can play like midfielders. In the V.League, the number of full-backs at that level is very small. That means when the winger leaves the flank, no one fills it. The team attacks in a space it has voluntarily narrowed.

I have seen this repeat many times. A team controls sixty percent of possession, strings together dozens of short passes, yet cannot create a clear chance. The opponent only needs to hold position, compress, and wait. Football becomes a game in which the team with more of the ball is the more stuck one.

Impact on the national team

The problem does not stop at club level. The Vietnam national team is also affected by this trend. When our best wingers are all trained to drift inside, the national team loses its ability to attack down the flanks. In matches against opponents who defend in numbers, we lack a simple but effective option: play the ball wide, beat a man, and deliver.

This is a systemic problem, and it will take years to fix. It starts in the academies, in how coaches shape young players, and in how the media values a given action. If a cross never appears in a highlights package, it will never be considered important.

The fans and the pulse of the pitch

Here is something curious: V.League fans have by no means turned their backs on the traditional winger. In conversations on the terraces, when a player beats two men and delivers, the crowd stands up. That is the moment they came to the stadium for. Yet tactical decisions are made by people reading data dashboards, where a dribble that produces no goal is filed as a failure.

The mismatch between fan emotion and data logic is one of the great tensions of modern football. And in the case of the traditional winger, the fan emotion may be more right than the data. Because football, in the end, is played by people and for people.

A counter-intuitive angle: the blind spot of homogenisation

There is a common belief that the traditional winger is obsolete because modern football demands connectivity and pressing. That is partly true. But it ignores a fact: the most successful clubs in Europe still keep touchline wingers as a strategic weapon. They do not use them for the whole match, but they have them. The difference is this: strong teams use traditional wingers as an option to change the rhythm; weak teams discard them because they believe they do not fit the model.

The V.League is in the second situation. Smaller and mid-table clubs, which lack full-backs good enough to sustain the inverted game, are the first to discard touchline wingers. As a result, they surrender the one weapon that could help them make a difference against stronger sides.

The irony is this: when I asked a few V.League coaches why they discard traditional wingers, the answer was usually that they are not good enough without the ball. But football is not only about being without the ball. It is about having the ball and needing someone to make a difference. A good touchline winger may not press well, but he can unlock a defence that has already compressed — something an inverted winger of average technique cannot do.

There is a blind spot here. When V.League clubs shift en masse to the inverted model, they create a league in which every defence is coached to stop exactly one type of attack. That means that if a single team dares to go against the current — fielding a genuine touchline winger — it can create an unexpected edge. But to do so, it must believe in the value of difference, rather than following the crowd.

The transfer market and systematic mispricing

The V.League transfer market reflects this trend too. Inverted wingers, especially young ones, are valued higher. Traditional touchline wingers are treated as bargain-bin goods. This is a systematic mispricing. A smart club can exploit it: buy a touchline winger cheaply, and turn him into a strategic weapon no one has prepared to face.

I recall the night in Qatar and the Bengali workers singing their chant at full voice in their mother tongue. They sang a song no one around them understood, yet it still rang out. Football is the same. Traditional wingers are singing a song the league no longer wants to hear. But that song is still in time.

Takeaway

Pitch 9 in 2026 planted a question in me: where does football beat when no one scores? The answer, years later, is this: it beats in the corridors with no cameras, in the runs down the flank that no one records, in the players substituted because the system no longer has room for them.

The stumble in front of the microphone in 2026 did not silence me; it taught me to listen before I write. And when I listen, I hear in the empty dressing room a match that has never been broadcast — the match of the touchline runners, still waiting for a coach brave enough to give them a chance.

The V.League can keep homogenising. Or it can remember that, in a league where every team drifts inside, the man who runs wide is the one who makes the difference. The question is not whether the traditional winger still has a place. The question is: which club will be the first to realise it?