Infrastructure in Southern Saigon and Where Ho Chi Minh City Football Stands

On a Tuesday morning I stood outside the fence of a training ground in the south of the city, counting the strides of seventeen children. They ran laps around what is left of a plot that was once three times larger. Outside the fence, a three-metre billboard advertised a residential project about to open for sale, printed with a foreign player celebrating. Not one child looked up at it. But the billboard stayed where it was, right on the boundary, a reminder that the land under their feet was repriced long ago.

That morning I counted eleven minutes of half-time. For the first four, the coach drank water and said nothing. For the remaining seven, he spoke only about the distance between the feet when receiving the ball. I wrote in my field notebook: seventeen players, one ball, a chalked goal twenty-two metres wide. Those figures sell to nobody, and no contract pays me to write about them.

Over the past twelve months, most of the news from the southern market that reached the desk I work with was about infrastructure. Metro Line 4 is in its preparation stage, planned to link the north of the city down to Hiep Phuoc in Nha Be district. Large groups such as Sovico and T&T keep announcing expansion plans; firms such as Hai Thanh and DKRA Realty appear steadily in market reports. A project named Hiep Phuoc Premia is marketed with complete legal status, pink certificates ready, payment split into several instalments. According to data published in the latest quarter, primary prices in the area sit around 1.79 billion dong per apartment.

I do not dispute those figures. They are correct the way a balance sheet is correct. The problem lies elsewhere: they occupy the space of a kind of information nobody pays to produce.

This city has nearly ten million people. Thong Nhat Stadium, regarded as the home of the city's football, holds roughly twenty-five thousand seats. The number of pitches good enough for a youth team to train twice a day is smaller than the number of hourly-rental pitches serving amateur football. That is the familiar paradox of big cities: amateur football survives on the market, professional football survives on land. And in the south of the city, land is the fastest-rising asset.

In 2026, still a freelance contributor, I spent ten consecutive mornings counting the left-footed finishes of Vu Loi, number seven, from a thirty-five-metre angle. I logged forty-two shots and seven goals. The piece that followed drew fifteen hundred comments, but what I kept was not the read count, it was the notebook. Since then every article of mine begins with me counting, not with me being confident.

To judge whether a city has a football culture, I do not look at the stadium. I look at three distances.

The distance from home to the training ground. A fifteen-year-old needs two sessions a day plus travel. If the journey exceeds forty-five minutes by motorbike, the family must choose: rent a room near the pitch, or let the child quit. Metro Line 4, if completed, would shorten that distance for part of the southern population. But a train carries people, not boots. It only helps if a real training ground sits at the end of the line.

The distance from the training ground to school. In many youth football cultures, the pitch sits within walking distance of the school. In this city, most pitches sit at the edge while schools sit in the middle. Every day a child crosses that boundary twice, and every crossing needs an adult.

The distance from the academy to the first team. It is the shortest geographically and the longest in time. One academy cohort may produce eighteen good players but only three places in the first team. The first two distances decide who arrives. The third decides who stays.

I have a habit of reading data tables before watching footage. Looking at minutes played by young players in the national league across several seasons, one trend holds: players under twenty-one usually get their chance precisely when the squad runs out of bodies. Those minutes rise in a crisis and vanish once the team stabilises. None of that appears in any financial report.

Real football infrastructure lies in the hours a child touches the ball before turning eighteen; the seats in the stand are only the visible part. A twenty-five-thousand-seat stadium can be filled by a concert in one night. A six a.m. training session sells no tickets.

A training ground is a stage without an audience, where understudies rehearse for the lead. And a stage without an audience has no tickets, no sponsors, and nobody to speak up when the billboard goes up.

Last month I received a file labelled football. All of its twenty-odd data points were about rail lines, land prices and payment schedules. No team, no player, no match. The label was wrong, but it reflected a habit that keeps growing: people call anything with grass in the illustration a football story.

The comfortable assumption is that better infrastructure lifts football. My experience in large Asian cities says otherwise. When a metro line opens, land around the stations rises, and the first thing to disappear is the empty plot once used as a training pitch. Stadiums do get upgraded, into event venues. The stands stay full, just full in a different way.

The pitch never lies; only the watchers do. A club handed a new stadium without extra training hours will not run faster. An academy given a new dormitory without a safe walking route to school will not keep its fifteen-year-olds. And a story labelled football with not a single player's name in it will not make anyone run faster either.

Over the next three years I will count three things: how many standard training grounds remain in the south of the city, how many players under twenty start in the national league, and how many football reports name a training ground as their source instead of a trading floor. The beat keeper is not allowed to doze off amid the cheering. And the pitch, whatever label it is given, stays where it is, waiting for someone to come and count.