Responsibility for youth football

Vietnam is also the Southeast Asian representative with the best performance at the U23 Asian tournament, finishing as runner-up in 2018; and is the only representative of the region to have participated in the World Youth World Cup (U20) after passing the qualifying round.

Over the past decade, Vietnam’s youth football achievements can be considered the best in the region. Only Thailand can really compete with us in youth football while countries like Indonesia, Malaysia or Singapore have not been successful and have had to switch to a policy of naturalizing players.

Not many football countries can maintain a long-term youth tournament system like Vietnam, not to mention we have enough tournaments from U11 to U21, ensuring continuity to serve the work of screening talents as well as supporting "output" for training centers. However, success in youth football does not guarantee stability for the national team level. After more than 25 years of making an impression at the U age group, reaching deep into the Asian level, the Vietnamese team only had a short period of making a breakthrough on the FIFA rankings under coach Park Hang-seo. Most of the time, Vietnamese football is outside the top 100 in the world, top 20 in the continent, which means it is still in the underdeveloped group.

We need a breakthrough in youth football, shifting from quantity to quality with a modern and different approach to take advantage of existing advantages. However, to do this, we need more courageous and enthusiastic decisions from football managers, including the professional club system. For example, at the upcoming national U17 finals in Ba Ria ward (HCMC), 10/12 teams are named after clubs participating in the V-League. This is a good sign, more or less showing the interest of professional teams in their successors. These U17 teams, whether they are organized by themselves or in association with other training units, also mark a very clear change if we know that in most of the previous U17 and U19 tournaments, this number is usually not more than 50%.

In fact, youth football receives very little attention from both clubs, businesses and fans. We do not lack the number of youth tournaments, but the number of matches per year is very small, the competition format is still the same as 30 years ago, and there is currently no participation of social organizations, so communication, marketing and sponsorship work is almost absent, leading to youth tournaments having difficulty attracting viewers. These factors have slowed down the development of young players and that is the reason why Vietnamese football falls into a paradox: the higher it goes, the more it declines in level and class.

It is impossible to create a breakthrough in investment for youth football just by calling and waiting for the awareness of clubs and localities. Responsibility for youth football needs to be promoted through mechanisms and policies to attract investment resources, sponsorship and advertising. These can be incentives specifically for businesses participating in youth training, or building talent development funds. In addition, there should be legal constraints or clear sanctions for members under the Vietnam Football Federation in building U-line routes and the proportion of using self-trained players. Even for localities, whether there are professional clubs or not, there must be a proportion of the sports budget for youth football teams.

DANG LINH

Source: https://www.sggp.org.vn/trach-nhiem-voi-bong-da-tre-post812809.html