V.League and the pressing trap: When Vietnamese football runs faster than itself

Second half, minute 78, at Hang Day Stadium. A central midfielder of the home team stops in the middle of the center circle, hands on his hips, chest heaving. About thirty meters away, the away team has just won the ball and launched a long pass. Within ten seconds, the ball is in the net. Nobody chases. Nobody can chase in time. It is an image I noted in my notebook that night, and it made me think about something larger than a single conceded goal.

The 2026-2026 V.League season is showing a familiar paradox: the teams that run the most are not the teams that score the most. The teams that press hardest are the ones that run out of gas soonest. This paradox is not random. It is a sign that a tactical model has reached its expiry date, and the first people to pay the price are the players.

I have followed Vietnamese football from afar for many years. Long enough to notice a trait: the V.League absorbs European tactical trends with a delay of a few years, but absorbs them without bringing the infrastructure that comes with them. When Jürgen Klopp turned gegenpressing into a religion at Liverpool, the V.League copied it. When Pep Guardiola built positional play at Manchester City, the V.League copied that too. Football cannot be photocopied. Each league has its own ecosystem, its own physical baseline, its own philosophy.

And high pressing, in the V.League, is running into a wall of its own making.

The problem is this: the V.League has turned pressing into athletics, instead of turning it into the art of winning the ball.

Look at the numbers. In the 2026-2026 season, the top group of V.League clubs has a markedly higher average pressing volume than in the 2026-2026 season. But the efficiency of those presses — successful ball recoveries in the opponent's final third, goals coming from counter-attacks after a recovery — has not risen correspondingly. The teams run more, but they do not win the ball more. They burn energy without achieving the objective.

I have seen this before at Bordeaux. When I worked in France, I watched mid-table teams hurl themselves into pressing because it was what the media praised. They ran, they applied pressure, they bought muscular midfielders. But they lacked two things: a transition system coached to a high standard, and a squad deep enough to sustain that tempo for ninety minutes. The result was that the best pressing teams were the fastest to be relegated. Pure, bare logic.

On the day Bordeaux collapsed, I did not look at the table. I looked at the eyes of the children clutching their scarves. In the V.League, I look the same way. I look at the packed stands at Hang Day, at Hoa Xuan, at Lach Tray. I look at the loyal fans, the ones who come to the stadium every weekend. Football goes beyond tactics. Football is a promise to the people in the stands. And when V.League clubs apply pressing mechanically, they are breaking that promise.

What is more telling: V.League clubs are learning pressing without learning how to defend once the ball is lost. This is the biggest blind spot. Pressing, by its nature, is a gamble. You push players high, you apply pressure, you hope to win the ball. If you fail to win it, you leave a vast space behind. In Europe, big clubs can press because they have center-backs quick enough to cover, midfielders clever enough to read the situation. In the V.League, not every team has those players.

The result is lethal counter-attacks. Goals conceded in the 80th, 85th, 90th minute. Points dropped at the most important moments. I have watched enough V.League matches to see this pattern repeat: a team presses fiercely in the first half, takes the lead, then collapses in the second half as fitness drains and the opponent exploits the space.

I went back through my notes on the three most recent V.League games I tracked. In all three, the team that pressed more lost. In all three, the decisive goal came after the 75th minute. This small sample is not enough to conclude anything, but it is a signal. And in football, signals often matter more than numbers.

Players like Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Hoang Duc, or Nguyen Tien Linh — men born to create moments — are being forced to run like laboring midfielders, and by the 70th minute their batteries are flat. Even a veteran like Do Hung Dung cannot sustain that intensity for ninety minutes.

People remember the goals, but I remember the moment before the whistle. The moment when a V.League midfielder, after 75 minutes of shuttle running, stops to breathe, puts both hands on his hips, and looks toward the touchline. That moment says everything about the limits of the pressing model in Vietnam. Vietnamese football does not lack technique. It does not lack will. But it lacks a physical baseline and a rotation system good enough to sustain pressing for a full match.

And this is where I offer a counter-intuitive angle: perhaps the solution for the V.League is not to press more, but to press less — yet smarter. Instead of throwing the whole team forward for ninety minutes, choose the moments. Instead of making pressing an identity, make it a selective tool. Barcelona under Luis Enrique, Atalanta under Gian Piero Gasperini, did not press continuously. They pressed in rhythms. They pressed by situation. They pressed like a conductor leading an orchestra, not like a crowd charging into one another.

I know this will be controversial. I know some will say I am advocating passive football, that I am betraying the attacking spirit. But I am not advocating passivity. I am advocating clarity. Modern football is not decided by who runs the most. It is decided by who runs at the right time.

Kazan does not choose heroes. Kazan only exposes the loudest. I was in Kazan in 2026, when France won the World Cup not through pressing, but through coldness in decisive moments. Didier Deschamps did not build a pressing team. He built a team that knew when to run and when to stand. That is the lesson the V.League should learn. The lesson lies not in intensity, but in restraint.

So what will happen to the V.League if clubs keep pressing mechanically? I predict a sharper stratification. The clubs with the deepest squads and best physical foundations will keep succeeding. The rest will hit crisis in the second half of the season, when fitness declines and the fixture list thickens. Coaches will be sacked for "losing control of the defense." Fans will be furious as their teams drop points late.

But I also predict a new wave. A few V.League coaches will begin to realize that football has more than one way to play. They will test more flexible models. They will learn to press in rhythms, to defend as a block, to transition with discipline. And when they do, they will hold an advantage over the teams still running like machines without brakes.

The empty summer of 2026 taught me that silence is also a form of rebellion. In football, not pressing can be an action. Standing in the right position, waiting, and striking at the exact moment — that is an art. And in the V.League, perhaps the time has come for that art to be valued again.

I hate VAR because it is right too often. Football is interesting because it is wrong too often. The V.League is the same. This league is interesting because it still has gaps to explore, mistakes to fix, stories to tell. And the biggest story of this season may lie in who dares to slow down, rather than in who wins the title.