A Season Without Footprints: When Football Returns to Its Own Breathing

The first regular season after the pandemic, I sat in Stand B of Go Dau Stadium, counting empty seats. Not to find a place to sit — I had a season ticket. I counted to remember. Three years earlier, in that same spot, an old man with grey hair had sat beside me for ninety minutes without saying a word, clapping only three times: when the home team scored, when the referee awarded an unjust penalty, and when the match ended. He never came back after the pandemic. The seat to my left is now a rectangular pause, painted blue and faded by sun and rain.

I still come to the stadium every matchday. Not to write about scores — I stopped counting goals long ago. I come to listen. To hear the ball hit the net when there is no roar, to hear studs grinding into grass, to hear even the sigh of a thirty-four-year-old player after an unsuccessful sprint. When there are no spectators, football returns to its own breathing.

And in those pauses, I began to see what thirty years of watching football had taught me: that a regular season is not a series of matches — it is a living organism, growing match by match, ageing match by match, and sometimes dying before spring arrives.

The Table Is a Late Lie

We read the league table as a verdict. The top team is king, the bottom team is villain, and in between are the nameless waiting to be forgotten. But after twenty-one years observing Vietnamese and international football, I have learned one thing: the table tells the story of the past, never the story of the future.

In the 2026-2026 season, I followed a first-division team. After ten rounds, they sat eleventh out of fourteen. The press called them "a tornado losing its spin." But when I stayed behind after each match, replaying footage, I noticed a signal nobody else saw: their PPDA (passes allowed per defensive action) had dropped from 14.2 to 11.8 over three rounds. They were pressing higher. They were hungrier. But results did not come because of the crossbar and the post — two things I hate most in football because they are as indifferent as fate.

Two rounds later, they won three straight, scoring seven and conceding one. Only then did the table begin updating a story that had started weeks earlier. The blind spot of collective memory lies in believing the table is a state, when it is only a frozen moment.

I do not write this to appear clever. I write because I was once the man who believed in the table. In 2026, I sat in Stand C of Hang Day Stadium, watching my team lose 0-3. I went home and did not open a sports newspaper for three days. I did not want to see that number. But the number did not look back at me. It simply stayed there, waiting for me to be brave enough to see what it was hiding: that the team had played better than the score reflected, and that defeat is sometimes a form of postponed victory.

The Title Race: When Psychology Becomes a Tactical Variable

The regular season has a feature that short tournaments lack: pressure has time to ferment. At a World Cup, a team can die from a single mistake. But in a league season, mistakes can be forgiven — if you know how to correct them.

I once followed a V-League team during a title race. After round twenty, they led the table by five points. The press wrote about them as certain winners. But when I reviewed training footage, I noticed a small detail: their head coach began changing the starting lineup more frequently. Three rounds in a row, he altered four positions. Not because of injuries. Because of fear.

Fear in football does not show on faces. It shows in tactical decisions. A frightened team plays longer balls, prioritises safety, puts defence before attack. And in a regular season, that change has time to become a result. They lost three of their last five matches and surrendered the title to the second-placed team.

I remember a line from a Belgian coach I interviewed in 2026: "A season does not test your skill. It tests your tolerance of yourself." He said this after his team lost a match they had led 2-0 until the eighty-fifth minute.

In football, pressure is not an external factor — it is an internal tactical variable, operating as a hidden operating system for every decision on the pitch.

Physicality and the Silent War of Attrition

I once wrote about the five-substitution rule as a liberation. But after four seasons of observation, I must confess: it does not only liberate. It also creates a new kind of war.

With five substitutions, you can press furiously for sixty minutes, then bring on three fresh attackers to finish the match in the final thirty. This creates a paradox: deeper squads enjoy a greater advantage than ever, but it also produces matches where the final twenty minutes become a physical torture for the weaker team.

I once sat in the stands and watched a first-division team use all five substitutions in the second half. They scored three goals in the final fifteen minutes. The crowd stood and applauded. But I looked at the opposing team and saw nineteen- and twenty-year-old players — men who had run for ninety minutes at high intensity — collapse on the grass after the final whistle. Not because they were weak. Because they were beaten by a system that allowed their opponents to have more energy.

This is what I call "the war of attrition": the five-substitution rule has turned the final thirty minutes from a tactical period into a pure fitness test, where the deeper squad does not need to be better — only fresher.

This does not mean I oppose five substitutions. It means I see a tragedy: small clubs, with limited budgets, cannot buy five players of equivalent quality to bring on. They begin the season with hope and end it with exhausted legs. The regular season, with thirty-plus rounds, turns this injustice from a small wound into a chronic ulcer.

Refereeing Controversies: When Technology Cannot Solve Ambiguity

Last season, I counted forty-seven controversial refereeing decisions in matches I attended live. Forty-seven. The number is not large against hundreds of matches, but each decision is a crack in trust.

VAR was supposed to solve this. But after years of observation, I realise VAR does not solve ambiguity. It merely transfers ambiguity from the pitch to the screen. An offside of two centimetres is still an offside by law. But to fans, two centimetres is no different from two metres — both are "unfair."

I once witnessed a match where VAR took four minutes to determine whether a goal was valid. When the referee finally pointed to the centre circle, the stands erupted. But I saw something else: the players had stood waiting for those four minutes, their legs cold, their heart rates dropping, and when play resumed they needed another five minutes to regain rhythm. Technology can correct a wrong decision, but it cannot return lost time.

This is the paradox of modern football: we want absolute accuracy, but we forget that football was born from inaccuracy. Maradona's goal in 2026 was beautiful because it was inaccurate. With VAR, it would have been disallowed. And we would have lost one of the most beautiful moments in football history.

The Relegation Battle: A Tragedy Not Written as Poetry

I have written much about defeat as an aesthetic subject. About Viking claps ringing out amid despair. About human dignity appearing most clearly when all hope has died. But I must confess one thing: the relegation battle is not as beautiful as poetry.

I once followed a first-division team through the final six rounds. They needed four points to survive. They had three home matches and three away. Theoretically, a feasible equation. But football is not played on theory.

The first match, they lost 0-1 at home to a goal in the ninety-third minute. The second, they drew 1-1 after leading from the twelfth minute. The third, they lost 0-2. After three matches, they still needed four points from three. Their head coach was sacked. His assistant — a fifty-two-year-old man who had never been a head coach — took the hot seat.

The final three matches, they won two and drew one. They survived. On the last night, I stood outside the stadium and saw a thirty-three-year-old player sitting alone in the empty stands, crying. Not from happiness. From relief. He told me afterwards: "I was not afraid of relegation for honour. I was afraid of relegation for wages. I have two children. I do not know how to do anything else but play football."

The relegation battle is not a story about sporting spirit. It is a story about livelihood.

This does not mean I deny the beauty of great escapes. It means I refuse to romanticise a system where failure can destroy a person's life. The regular season, with its harshness, turns every late-season match into a gamble of survival. And in that gamble, not everyone holds good cards.

Pauses Not Recorded in the Match Report

In 2026, when the V-League was suspended by the pandemic, I closed my apartment in Binh Duong and lived with match footage for sixty days. I replayed the second leg of the 2026 AFF Cup final between Vietnam and Thailand. I recorded my own feelings as though observing an injured athlete: contraction, waiting, helplessness.

When the season returned, I realised something: matches without spectators carry a kind of truth that matches with spectators conceal. Without the roar, you can hear a coach screaming at a player. You can hear a young player crying in the tunnel after being substituted. You can hear a referee sighing after a wrong decision.

These pauses are not recorded in the match report. They do not appear in statistics. They are not mentioned in post-match press conferences. But they are part of the season — perhaps the truest part.

I remember a July night, sitting in the stadium after everyone had left. The lights were off, only moonlight spilling onto the grass. I heard footsteps. A player — I do not know his name — was walking around the pitch, alone, slowly, as if searching for something lost. After three laps he stopped, sat down at the centre circle, and stayed silent for a long time. I did not dare approach. I just sat there, in the dark, understanding that football is not something we watch — it is something we pass through, like a season passing through a life.

Ending: The Season as a Living Organism

The pitch holds not only the ball, but also the calluses of human life. The regular season, with all its harshness and exhaustion, is a special form of time. It is not like a short tournament — where everything unfolds in a week and ends with a final. A season is a process. It has its own winter and spring. It has days when a team soars and weeks when it crawls. It has young players who begin with dreams and end with reality.

I am thirty-seven. I no longer sprint down the touchline to take photographs as I did at the start of my career. I sit more, observe more, write less but deeper. And I understand that a season does not promise victory. It only promises time. Time for a team to grow. Time for a coach to learn endurance. Time for a fan to understand that their love does not depend on the league table.

Age does not extinguish love for the pitch, it only changes its colour.

Next season begins in a few weeks. I will sit again in Stand B, beside the empty seat of the grey-haired man. I will count the empty seats again — not to remember the dead, but to remember that football always has room for those who are no longer there. The match ends, but the applause still rings in my memory.

And perhaps, this season, I will hear a roar rise from an empty seat. Not through magic. But because football, when it is truly alive, can turn silence into sound.

Sixty days listening to recordings, I imagined the roar of empty seats.