Vietnam U17 and the List of 29 Names: A Training Camp Longer Than the Group Stage

Osaka, 1:12 in the morning. I sit in a small apartment in Namba, hear the last train pull out of the station, and open my phone. The list of 29 names for Vietnam's U17 side appears in the blue light of the screen. Below, the izakaya on the corner has cleared its tables, its yellow lamps dimming one by one. I read every line. Then I read it a second time.

People do not remember the scoreline; they remember why they did not leave the bar. My most recent memory of this young team is a May evening in a small Vietnamese cafe in Sakai, watching them play their final AFC U17 Asian Cup group match on a laptop with a flickering connection. No Japanese commentary, no banners — just twelve Vietnamese people more than four thousand kilometres from home, holding their breath together. When the final whistle blew, the whole cafe broke into song. I keep the rhythm of the story, because I have watched it fall and rise many times.

Now the story turns to another chapter.

This stage is preparation, not a tactical plan. I want to be clear about that from the start, because for two weeks I have read almost every report on this team, and most use the same vocabulary: "important camp," "warm-up," "experimenting with the lineup." Those phrases are accurate about the schedule. They say nothing about how this team will play in Qatar, how they will build a defensive block, how they will react when they fall behind. That is the first gap I noted in my notebook.

Three core points are worth keeping. Head coach Cristiano Roland continues in charge — a stability signal that is not always present in Vietnamese youth football, where cycles are often cut mid-stream. The staff deliberately retained the spine from the May AFC U17 Asian Cup rather than tearing it down and rebuilding. And the squad called up numbers 29 players.

Twenty-nine names means the list is open, not a team already shaped. A tournament squad usually settles at around 20 to 23 players. The surplus is not a slot for luck; it is an observation room with a window facing the training pitch. It says the staff want a longer look, and that someone will leave the group before the plane touches down in Doha.

I have sat in press areas often enough to know this phase is not glamorous. No goals, no stands — only bright mornings and the coach's whistle cutting the air. But this is when the real squad is written, in sweat rather than in reputations.

The schedule shows the team will train at the Vietnam Youth Football Training Centre until October, then travel to West Asia, then to Qatar. I have followed Southeast Asian youth teams on overseas camps for years, and I have learned one thing: when a federation pays for a trip that long, it is not buying tactics. It is buying acclimatisation.

Climate, humidity, time zones, pitch surfaces, daily rhythms — things that cannot be taught in a meeting. A Vietnam U17 side playing in Qatar will face conditions very different from what the players know in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Go early, stay long, adapt gradually. That is the logic of the trip, and it is sound.

But there is one thing I want to say plainly, as I always tell colleagues in Osaka when they ask about Vietnamese youth football: Southeast Asian youth football usually fails at exactly one point, and that point is not technique. It is physicality. Teams like Mali or Belgium are stronger tactically, and they are also bigger, faster and more ferocious in every duel. No report on this camp mentions that. I do not blame anyone. But it is the biggest gap in the story, and it deserves to be said out loud.

As for the spine, the staff kept names already used to pressure. Van Duong and Chu Ngoc Nguyen Luc are regarded as mainstays, while Ly Xuan Hoa is most likely the number one goalkeeper. That is a clear leadership column — no small thing in a youth team, where a power vacuum is often what makes matches fall apart in the last ten minutes.

But I want to be careful here. That spine was built from a single tournament. One tournament is a small sample. I have seen far too many Vietnamese youth teams praised after one competition, then dissolve in the next for lack of depth. Keeping the old names is a sensible choice for a short tournament. It becomes a problem only if nobody among those 29 is ready to step in when needed.

Group G is Mali, Belgium and New Zealand. I will not call this group easy, because that would be a lie. Belgium has one of Europe's leading youth development systems. Mali is one of Africa's strongest exporters of young talent. New Zealand represents Oceania and is the opponent Vietnam has the best chance against.

There is one detail rarely mentioned. Modern U17 World Cups have expanded to 48 teams. The door is wider for Asian and Southeast Asian football nations. That means qualifying is a genuine achievement, but it is no longer the rare feat it was a decade ago. I say this to place it correctly, so that a youth World Cup berth is not inflated into something larger than it is.

Because the biggest risk to this team is not on the pitch. It is in how we tell the story.

Vietnamese fans are very good at loving, and very good at being disappointed. I have sat in the middle of that, in cafes without air conditioning, on nights spent awake in front of a phone screen. If we sell the public the image of a golden generation before they have played a single minute at a World Cup, then when they lose to Mali and Belgium as predicted, the loudest voices will be the first to turn away. I have seen that script. In many football nations.

A youth team on a long camp does not need to be praised; it needs to be assessed correctly. At 17, players do not need extra weight. They need time, they need to lose, and they need permission to lose without it becoming a national event.

Organisationally, the signals look reasonably positive. A federation paying for a West Asia trip and then Qatar, keeping a coach across cycles, retaining the spine rather than overhauling it — these are marks of a programme with a plan. In Southeast Asia, that kind of consistency is rarer than people think.

But I also have to mention the flip side few discuss. The World Cup is a global shop window. Academies in Japan, Korea and Europe always have scouts watching major youth tournaments. A good tournament can open overseas doors for a few of those 29 names — good for the individuals, good for Vietnam's image, yet potentially thinning the U19 and U23 sides over the next two years.

I have watched this happen in many places. Young talent matures too quickly, leaves, and leaves behind a gap the home system cannot fill in time. Nobody makes a mistake in that story. But the cost is real, and it rarely appears in the honours list.

There is one more risk I think about when reading the list: accumulated load. A camp stretching from autumn all the way to the tournament, for bodies barely seventeen years old, is not a simple load-management problem. There are no injury or fitness reports. That silence is not necessarily good news; it is just silence.

I remember something I wrote after the night Cerezo Osaka beat Urawa Reds at Yanmar Nagai Stadium in 2026, when midfielder Hiroaki Okuno scored in the 83rd minute and the whole city forgot its fear of relegation. I wrote about strangers embracing in the stands, and the piece was shared more than five thousand times. I learned that night that emotion is not the enemy of analysis. It is the reason analysis exists.

At my age, people do not count trophies; they count the nights a whole city stays awake. I will stay awake following this U17 team in Qatar, and I want to stay awake with clear eyes.

If you ask me to predict something, I will not talk about results. I will talk about what I need to see, and what I need to see is not on the scoreboard. The match against New Zealand is the real pivot. That is the game Vietnam has the right to think about points in, and the game where collective character shows most clearly. In the two matches before it, I am not demanding results. I am demanding a structure that does not collapse after conceding.

Those 29 names will shrink. Some will walk off the plane at Noi Bai airport as World Cup squad members; others will stay home and watch on television. I always think more about the second group. They are the truest part of youth football, the part that never appears on a poster.

An empty stadium does not make a match smaller; it only makes the memory larger. In Qatar, the stadiums will not be empty. But what interests me is what happens after the stands clear, when seventeen-year-old names return to classrooms, training contracts and early-morning sessions — whether we still remember that list, or whether we only remember the score.

I close the screen. The clock in Namba reads two in the morning. The last train passed long ago, and this city is asleep. In Hanoi it is also past midnight, and 29 young players are sleeping in a dormitory, not yet knowing which of them will still be there when autumn ends.

The shout of that night still rings in me, though Osaka went to sleep long ago. I keep the rhythm of this story, keeping it from being distorted by headlines larger than the truth. This team does not need a biographer before it has written its own match.