V.League's Touchline Is Vanishing, and Set Pieces Are the Heir

At minute 84 in a stadium in northern Vietnam, a left winger receives the ball beside the touchline. Fifteen metres of empty grass open up in front of him. The opposing right-back has been beaten for pace, his body twisted the wrong way, and the whole stand leans forward like a wave. The winger takes one touch, then cuts inside, shifts the ball onto his right foot, and rolls it back to midfield. Three seconds later the ball is at the feet of his own centre-back. Nobody boos. Nobody sighs. That silence is what chills me. A mistake provokes anger; a habit does not.

I stayed behind with my notebook after that match and asked myself: if fifteen metres of empty grass is no longer an invitation, what is a winger still doing on the pitch? When the entire commentary box says the V.League lacks quality wingers, I heard someone quietly closing a notebook. Quality was never the problem. The problem is that we taught a generation to be afraid of the touchline.

A consensus that sounds entirely reasonable

V.League 1 runs with 14 clubs and a congested calendar. Most rounds fall in the hottest stretch of the year, and matches often kick off at 18:00 while the grass still holds the afternoon heat. With temperatures regularly above 32 degrees Celsius and humidity to match, every forty-metre sprint followed by a recovery run is a real cost. At this level, stamina is not an abstract concept. It is money.

Out of those conditions a very common analytical school has formed in Vietnam: the intelligent team controls the ball, holds its distances, plays just slowly enough, and squeezes maximum value from set pieces. In that model, the traditional winger — a player whose only trade is to face up a full-back and go to the byline — looks like a luxury. So he is pushed inside, given the polite title of "inverted number ten", or worse, converted to full-back to "make use of his running".

The consensus sounds entirely reasonable. It has numbers, it has modern vocabulary, and it carries an almost religious conviction: European football plays this way, so we must play this way. Inverted wingers are the standard. Set pieces are king. Anyone who dares to run at the touchline and cross is written down as a man wasting possession.

I believed it for years. Then I reopened the tapes.

The notebook and sixty matches

The old tapes were sitting there, and I put on my glasses, and I saw the future. In a summer without live football I locked myself in a room and rewatched sixty V.League matches from the last three seasons. I counted four things: goals that came from set pieces, goals that came from a move starting near the touchline, the number of times a winger chose the outside line when space opened, and the number of times he chose to cut inside instead.

The results made me watch two of the matches again. Thirty-eight per cent of the goals in my sample came from dead-ball situations. Most of those followed corners designed towards the near post, where a tall centre-back runs diagonally from the second line. That surprises nobody who watches the V.League, because set pieces have long been the number one weapon of mid-table sides. What stopped me was the second finding: in ten situations where a winger received the ball facing a defender with space on the outside, he took the touchline only 2.3 times.

I cross-checked my counting three times, because a statistic is only worth something when the method holds. I excluded situations where the defender was already tight before the ball arrived. I excluded moves starting in central midfield. I excluded aimless long balls. With tighter criteria, the ratio barely moved.

Since I started "Góc nhìn ngược" (The Reverse Angle), I have kept one rule: every hot take carries at least two numbers on its back. So let us talk about cost. A run to the byline and a cross costs a winger roughly twenty-five metres of high-speed movement. If it fails, he must cover a similar distance back while the opponent counter-attacks into the space he left. On paper that loss is trivial if the conversion rate is high enough. In the V.League, the conversion rate from deep crosses is low, because most teams field a single target striker — and that striker is usually a foreigner marked by two centre-backs.

This is where the story gets interesting. Nguyễn Xuân Son, previously known as Rafaelson, scored thirty-one goals for Thép Xanh Nam Định in the 2026-24 V.League 1 season and won the Golden Boot; according to the league organiser's records, that is the highest tally ever registered in a single V.League 1 campaign. Those thirty-one goals did not come from spectacular strikes outside the box. They came from a centre-forward standing in the right place, receiving the ball inside five metres, and finishing with one touch. This is the kind of striker who makes crossing optional. All you have to do is get the ball into the danger zone somehow.

But there is a paradox nobody in Vietnam says out loud. The rise of that efficient centre-forward is eroding the very supply line that feeds him. A good centre-forward does not need crosses, but he still needs space. And space inside the box only appears when a defensive line is stretched. The only player who can stretch a defensive line horizontally is a winger willing to go to the touchline. When that player disappears, the opposing centre-backs simply stand still, close the gaps, and wait for the ball to land on their heads.

What follows is a loop I call the safety spiral. A team without a genuine winger passes sideways more. Passing sideways more means the winger gets fewer chances to receive facing his marker. Fewer duels means he cuts inside more to keep the ball safe. Keeping the ball safe means the team scores fewer goals from open play. And with fewer open-play goals, the coach invests more in set pieces. Set pieces become the legitimate heir to the flank — not because they are better, but because nobody wants to do the hard job anymore.

Based on my experience watching matches, the earliest warning sign is not possession share. It is the position of the full-backs. When a V.League team's full-backs are permanently camped in the opposition's final third, that usually does not mean the team is attacking. It means nobody else is doing the job, and their winger has been converted into a third central midfielder.

There is a human detail I cannot leave out. I once spoke with a young winger at an academy in southern Vietnam. He told me that in a youth tournament, his coach instructed him not to dribble more than three touches. Three. Not because he dribbled badly, but because "losing the ball on the flank is a goal against". He obeyed. He became a safe player. He is still a professional footballer, and he has never once been called up to the national team.

That is why I say we taught a generation to fear the touchline. Not because they lack technique. Because in Vietnam, that technique was never allowed to cost anything.

Where I might be wrong

Before anyone calls this nostalgia, I have to argue against myself.

My sample of sixty matches is a sample I chose. I have no access to league-wide tracking data, so I cannot eliminate subjective error. A young analyst in Hanoi could count again and reach a different answer.

Second, inverted wingers are not a baseless fashion. In leagues with full-backs who run like machines, pulling wingers inside creates numerical superiority in midfield, and cut-backs from near the byline convert at a far higher rate than floated crosses. If the V.League rejects that, perhaps it is drifting away from the global trend rather than being smarter than it.

Third — and this is the possibility I fear most — the touchline is not dying from tactics. It is dying from structure. Vietnamese academies produce plenty of technical midfielders and very few one-on-one dribblers. If that holds, all my tactical analysis describes a symptom while the disease sits somewhere else entirely.

I might be wrong, but hear the reasoning: I do not want the touchline back because it is beautiful. I want it back because it is the cheapest available tool for stretching a defence that has learned to fold in on itself.

What I am willing to bet

A testable prediction: next season, the team with at least one genuine winger starting more than twenty matches and regularly attacking the byline will finish near the top for open-play goals. If that does not happen, my notebook is wrong, and I will be the first to say so.

At fifty-five, I still believe in what you call a delusion — and then it comes true. Football does not change because of a trend. It changes because one person dares to do the hard job, and one coach is brave enough not to punish him.