Ho Chi Minh City Club in soft group at Asian Women's Cup C1

TPO - The Asian Football Confederation has just held the draw for the 2025/26 Asian Women's Cup. Vietnam's representative, Ho Chi Minh City Women's Club, has avoided the group of death and is in a fairly "soft" group.

Accordingly, HCMC Women’s Club is in the same group with Melbourne City of Australia, Stallion FC of the Philippines, Lion City of Singapore. Among these, Melbourne City is probably stronger than the rest. They own many Australian players such as Holly McNamara, Alexia Apostolakis, Karly Roestbakken…

Meanwhile, Stallion FC and Lion City are not too worrying. In the preliminary round, Stallion FC could only win against clubs from Mongolia or Guam, which are among the weakest in Asia. In the remaining match, they lost by a large margin to the representative of Myanmar, ISPE.

This year's group of HCMC Women's Club is quite similar to last year, when they were in a group with Urawa Reds of Japan, Taichung BlueWhale of Chinese Taipei and Odisha of India.

Of the three groups, perhaps group C is the death group. In addition to the two names Suwon FC (South Korea) and Tokyo Verdy Beleza (Japan), the North Korean club, Naegohyang FC, promises to be very formidable as North Korean women's football is among the elite of the continent. In this group, ISPE is considered the weakest.

3 groups for the 2025/26 season

According to the format, a total of 12 teams are divided into 3 groups to play a round-robin at centralized locations. The top 2 teams in each group will advance to the quarter-finals, along with 2 of the 3 third-placed clubs with the best records. The quarter-final pairings will be determined by a draw, taking place in March 2026.

Last season, HCMC Women's Club hosted a group. And they took advantage of the home field to get good results. HCMC Women's Club won against Odisha of India, Taichung BlueWhale of Chinese Taipei and lost lightly to Urawa Reds of Japan. This year, the Vietnamese team continues to be the host and with a group that is not too difficult, they are expected to be able to pass the group stage.

However, the team will have to step up the recruitment of foreign and overseas Vietnamese players to support the current force. In the 2024/25 season, the mark of foreign and overseas Vietnamese players is not really clear, most of the goals that the HCMC Women's Club has still come from the domestic force.

Source: https://tienphong.vn/clb-tphcm-vao-bang-mem-tai-cup-c1-nu-chau-a-post1777312.tpo