Three Sessions in Hokuriku: Le Cong Vinh and the Silence Between Two Football Cultures

I stood at the edge of a small training pitch at Hokuriku University, in the north of Honshu, on the third morning of September. Dew still clung to the grass. The first whistle came before the first birdsong. On the pitch, a man in the windbreaker of an Asian Football Confederation licensing course bent down and arranged orange plastic cones into two straight rows. He worked slowly. Carefully. As if he were rearranging something inside himself, not merely laying out a drill. Le Cong Vinh. Vietnam's number 9, once upon a time. It was the third day of a ten-day internship, running from September 6 to September 15. He had already led three sessions. Afterward, he would have to submit a written report to instructors of the Japan Football Association. It sounds simple. For a man who spent his youth running toward goal, stopping at the touchline to teach others how to run is an entirely new kind of movement. The sound of a ball striking the ground is the last sound of truth. Everything else – formations, scorelines, reports, contracts – is a layer on top. In Japan, the sound is drier, faster, and it forces you to listen with a different kind of ear. To understand where Le Cong Vinh stands, you need to look at where he has been. He was born in 2026 in Nghe An. In 2026, at 23, he was the spearhead of a Vietnam team that won the AFF Cup – a tournament Vietnamese fans still call “that year.” He tried his luck abroad, wearing the shirt of Consadole Sapporo in Japan and Leixões in Portugal, before returning home to play for Hanoi and Binh Duong. He scored 51 goals for the national team, a record no one has yet broken. He retired in 2026, at just 31. Seven years later, he began the coaching path. In 2026, he enrolled in the AFC A License course – the level just below the Pro License, Asian football's highest qualification. The course runs in phases. Phase one took place in June. Phase two in September. Phase three is scheduled for December. The license will be awarded around April 2027. From there, if he wishes, he can progress to the Pro License – the ticket to managing top professional clubs or national teams. His choice of Japan was not accidental. In Vietnam, the Vietnam Football Federation employs a Japanese technical director, Koshida Takeshi. Le Cong Vinh contacted him directly to ask about the path to an A License in Japan. Koshida connected him with Hokuriku University. The president of the Japan Football Association, Miyamoto Tsuneyasu, also sent congratulations, acknowledging the internship as a step in football cooperation between the two countries. One thing should be made clear: Hokuriku University is not an elite academy. This is Japanese university football. But the university's first team has just reached the final of the All-Japan University Football Championship. That is a genuinely competitive environment at a high amateur level. Not professional, but no place for an intern to merely stand around. The three themes Le Cong Vinh must teach during this internship are attacking, defending, and counter-attacking. To an outsider, they sound like three chapters from an old textbook. To someone inside the game, they are all of football, compressed into three words. Attacking. Defending. Counter-attacking. Three phases of a match. But in the AFC syllabus, each phase is broken down into dozens of small principles: the principle of occupying space when in possession, the principle of applying pressure when out of possession, the principle of transitioning within the first seconds after winning the ball back. A good player does these things by instinct. A coach must do them with words. That is where the story becomes difficult. At A License level, trainees are expected to design and lead a complete session, explain the objective of each drill, and assess a player's rate of improvement. At Pro License level, the expectations rise sharply: managing a professional club, handling media, building a long-term playing philosophy. The gap between the two levels is enormous. Le Cong Vinh is on the first rung of the upper half, where a coach begins to see the match from above rather than from inside it. A résumé can never capture the moment the ball passed through a player and time stopped. It can only capture results. Goals. Trophies. Ranks. But to teach a 19-year-old how to receive the ball and turn in half a second, you cannot simply show a résumé. You have to isolate that moment, place it on the training pitch, repeat it twenty times, and correct every detail. Le Cong Vinh spent his entire career living inside those half-second moments. Now he must learn to turn them into lessons. My own experience of watching football, after more than thirty years at the touchline in many places, gives me a somewhat sad observation: great players are often the most demanding coaches, because they cannot understand why others do not see what they see. With Le Cong Vinh, the biggest question of his entire coaching career ahead is whether he can stay patient with a player who cannot do in a match what he once did in his sleep. The internship in Japan has a notable quality-control mechanism: the report. After every session, the trainee must submit a written record to the instructor. The report asks not only “what did you teach,” but “why did you teach it,” “what did you observe,” and “what will you change next time.” This is a discipline Vietnamese football rarely imposes on former stars. At home, a man who scored 51 international goals is often placed straight onto a coaching bench, sometimes without having completed any course at all. In Japan, he has to sit and write. Every run off the ball is an unfinished poem, waiting for someone else to complete it. In modern football, coaches do not teach individual runs; they teach how those runs connect. A striker runs into space, dragging a centre-back with him. A midfielder sees the space open and runs into it. A full-back realises he must push higher to keep the shape from tearing. This chain of reactions unfolds within two seconds. Le Cong Vinh teaches Japanese university players to think two seconds ahead of that chain. Notably, the JFA syllabus places heavy emphasis on transition – how a team moves from defence to attack and back again. This is no accident. Japanese football over the past two decades has built an identity rooted in intensity and discipline during transitional moments. When Le Cong Vinh teaches counter-attacking, he is not merely teaching tactics. He is passing on part of Japanese football to a group of Japanese players. There is an exchange here that caught my attention: a Vietnamese man learning to teach Japanese players in the language of English football, at a foreign university. An internship like this is, in essence, a test of translation. Translating memory into drills. Translating Vietnamese into English. Translating from a tropical football culture to a temperate one, where players run without stopping and never ask why they must run more. By his own account, one reason Le Cong Vinh chose Japan is that the instructor-to-trainee ratio in Japanese courses is higher, and the curriculum is updated more often than in domestic courses. This is a technical remark, not a complaint. It shows that the gap between the two coach-education systems lies not in the name of the licence, but in the quality of the learning process. There is a demographic detail worth pausing on. The players Le Cong Vinh is teaching were born somewhere between 2026 and 2026. They have never watched him play live, or remember him only vaguely through clips online. To them, he is not a legend. He is a teacher who speaks English with a strange accent, holds a whiteboard, and asks them to repeat a drill because it was not right. Perhaps that is the ideal condition for an apprentice: to be judged by the craft, not by the name. Looking at this qualification path, one thing is clear: it is a route defined by the AFC, with standards, quality control at each phase, reports, and instructor assessment. There is no sign that Le Cong Vinh is taking a shortcut. He is on the correct path. That matters, because Vietnamese football has seen cases of former stars appointed to coaching positions without completing the full formal training. And it is worth repeating that this moment is sensitive. September 2026. This is phase two of the course. Phase three is three months away, in December. After that come the examination and assessment. The license only takes effect in April 2027. That means Le Cong Vinh is still a student, not yet an official coach at the highest level. He has not signed a contract to manage any team. He has no management record. All he has so far is a learning file being built. But there is a blind spot in the way this story is usually told in Vietnam. The story is told like this: a Vietnamese football legend goes to Japan to learn the coaching trade, preparing for the future. It sounds beautiful. But if only one man goes to Japan, Vietnamese football solves nothing. The real problem lies elsewhere: how many instructors in Vietnam are qualified to teach the A License? How many centres can run an AFC-standard course without importing foreign experts? How many clubs are willing to let a young coach truly lead, rather than just putting him up for photographs? A good coach is not a good player who can talk. A good coach is someone who knows how to ask questions. Le Cong Vinh is learning in Japan how to ask questions. But when he returns, will Vietnamese football have room for those questions, or only for his name? This is the point that worries me most in the whole story. In Vietnam, a former star is often moved straight into an assistant or head coach role at a V.League club, sometimes after only a few months of study. People believe that experience playing football automatically converts into experience teaching football. That is almost never true. What a great player has is muscle memory. What a great coach needs is the ability to translate that memory into instruction, into drills, into measurable standards. There is a telling detail in this story: Le Cong Vinh chose Japan over studying in Vietnam, and his stated reason is that teaching quality in Japan is better. He said it plainly. That is a confession of no small courage. It admits that the coach-education system at home is not yet good enough. But if only one man admits it, and no one fixes that system, then ten years from now other former stars will still be boarding planes to Japan, to Korea, to Europe, learning to teach football in someone else's language, while their own country still lacks enough teachers of real standing at home. And one more thing must be said about expectations. Vietnamese fans are waiting for a Vietnamese head coach of genuine calibre for the national team. Le Cong Vinh is one of the most plausible candidates, simply because of his name. But a name cannot substitute for qualifications, and qualifications cannot substitute for real management experience. The pressure placed on his shoulders will be enormous, but it will arrive later, on the day he takes a real job. Until then, no one should rush to assign him a role he has never held. Conversely, there is a more optimistic way to see it. Le Cong Vinh's choice of Japan may set a precedent: other Vietnamese former stars might follow, seeking high-quality courses abroad instead of waiting at home. In twenty years, if ten Vietnamese former players walk this path, Vietnamese football will have a generation of coaches far better trained. That is a future worth dreaming of, even if it takes time. At Hokuriku, that afternoon's session ended as the sun dropped behind the ridge. The Japanese university players gathered the cones, rolled up the nets, and went inside. Le Cong Vinh stayed alone on the pitch a while longer, notebook in hand, writing a few more lines. I do not know what he wrote. Perhaps what he will teach in the next session. Perhaps what he thinks he taught badly. We do not watch football with our eyes; we watch it with memory. And perhaps this is the hardest part for a former star turning to management: he must forget his own memory in order to see the match unfolding in front of him, rather than the match he once played. The A License will be awarded to Le Cong Vinh around April 2027, if all goes well. Then the Pro License, if he wants it. Ahead lies a long road on which past achievements buy nothing. He will have to prove himself with dry things: a well-organised session, a player who improves over three months, a team that holds its structure when trailing. And Vietnamese fans will keep waiting for something bigger: a Vietnamese head coach with the calibre, the qualifications, and the nerve to lead the national team in a major tournament. Le Cong Vinh is walking a path that might lead there. But that path is not paved with applause. It is paved with the sweat of misty mornings, whistles, and notebooks no one reads. That path begins in Hokuriku. And it is still very long.