The 'Grassroots' Label and the Classification Problem of Vietnamese Women's Football

In the content-classification systems of most Vietnamese sports newsrooms, the final of the National Women's Football Championship and a weekend fun run sit in the same folder: "grassroots – mass sport." I once sat beside a veteran editor as he dragged the headline of the Hanoi vs. Ho Chi Minh City I match into exactly that folder, then turned to me and said: "If you're writing about the women, keep it over here — readers just want something light."

I kept that sentence in my notebook for years, not because it hurt, but because it was a confession about how an entire sport gets classified. That folder on the screen is not just a place to file a story. It is a label, and in Vietnam a label decides money flow, broadcast slots, sponsorship contracts, and whether a player appears in the transfer database at all.

When a sport is mislabeled, everything downstream drifts with it. That is what I concluded after nearly a decade of covering Vietnamese women's football through a documentary lens rather than an emotional one.

One number, one life

In 2026, at 25, my desk sent me to the Hanoi stadium for the opening match of the National Women's Championship. The stands held 120 people. I sat in the third row and wrote in my notebook: more empty seats than people. After the match I met Nguyễn Thị Liễu, shirt number 7, who had just run more than ten kilometers in the sun. She opened her bag, took out a weight-gain milk carton she had bought herself, and said her income was about 4.8 million VND a month. At the same time, a male player at a club in the same city was earning 52 million.

I wrote the story. The editor rejected it: "not interesting enough." I published it on my personal blog. It spread to 2,300 shares, and a benefactor donated 50 million VND to Hanoi's youth women's team.

What brought me back to the story was not the 52 million figure. It was the label standing in front of it. People called women's football grassroots, so a grassroots salary became reasonable. People called it mass sport, so a 120-person crowd was not a failure but "true to its nature." Once the label is wrong, no one sees a reason to fix the number behind it. They do not know they are being forgotten until the payroll is made public.

How a label operates

I spent months re-reading the content-classification documents of several sports newsrooms, cross-checking them against how those outlets spend money and assign staff. Three layers emerged, and all three start with the label.

The first layer is budget. When a competition is filed as grassroots, it no longer sits in the budget line for professional sport. Reporters are not sent on multi-day trips, there is no money to license data, no dedicated photographer. I once paid for my own transport to follow a women's team for an entire season. No one reimbursed it, because within the system I was "doing grassroots."

The second layer is data. Modern football runs on numbers. No numbers, no valuation, no transfer market. In Vietnam there is still no complete statistical system for the women's league: minutes played, assists, distance covered, duels won. I asked three domestic data providers and got the same answer: no demand, so no product. There is no demand because the label says this sport does not need numbers.

The third layer is sourcing. A story with no named source cannot be verified. Vietnamese women's football is usually written exactly that way: no contracts, no payroll, no minutes, only impressions. When there is nothing to verify, no one can invest, because investment needs evidence. And when no one can invest, the "grassroots" label is confirmed once more.

That is the self-fulfilling loop of a mislabel. A wrong label at the input poisons the entire pipeline at the output, in sports data as much as in a policy meeting. I have seen it at small scale: a news item filed in the wrong category means no reporter is assigned; no reporter means no photographs; no photographs means an empty page; and an empty page is read as proof that the sport has no audience. No one in that chain breaks procedure. Everyone is simply obeying a skewed label.

Why men's football has the right label

To understand why the women's label skews, look at how men's football was positioned. For decades, Vietnamese men's football was built as a national product: broadcasting rights, corporate sponsors, player metrics, a transfer market, capability profiles. Each layer was stacked on the last, and each made the next easier to build.

Women's football never got the first layer. Without rights large enough to create cash flow, there is no long-term sponsorship; without long-term sponsorship, no data department; without data, no player valuation; without valuation, no transfers; without transfers, no compelling story to sell. That loop is not fate. It is the consequence of missing a correct label from the start.

People call it the margin. I call it the place where the real stories are kept. Because at the margin, no one scripts the story on the player's behalf. Everything I recorded was original.

An article with a skewed label

In June 2026, my editor-in-chief assigned me to write about "the hidden corners — female fans" at the World Cup in Russia, instead of letting me do tactical commentary. I accepted. In Moscow I met Anna Morozova, 34, who had sold her bicycle to buy a ticket for the Russia vs. Saudi Arabia match. I interviewed 47 female fans at random across three stadiums, and 82 percent of them said it was their first time at a World Cup stadium.

The four-part series became the outlet's most-read content that summer. But what I remember most is the compliment: "Well written, but it has a woman's voice." Once again the label appeared, not on the article but on the writer. And just as with women's football, that label decided what I would be assigned next.

Since then I have understood: the mislabeling error does not happen only to articles. It happens to people, to competitions, to an entire sport. When a system files something in the wrong drawer, every decision after it rests on a false premise, and no one feels guilty, because everyone is following procedure.

A pandemic and the label's test

In 2026, when competitions were canceled by COVID-19, I realized Vietnamese female athletes had almost no income insurance. I video-called 15 of them over two weeks. Nguyễn Thị Oanh, a three-time SEA Games champion, was then selling her medals to pay her mother's hospital bills.

The series produced a concrete response: the Đà Nẵng Department of Culture and Sports issued a 100 million VND support package, and 1,400 readers donated directly through the newsroom's fundraising platform. What stands out is not the money but this: before the story ran, the authorities had not a single line of data showing that female athletes had no income during the pandemic. It was not that they did not want to know. It was that the classification system had never asked the question, because the label had already answered it: this is grassroots, and grassroots looks after itself.

An empty gym and a voice that carries

There is a paradox I have observed for years. Precisely because they are ignored, female athletes are forced to tell their stories more precisely, more concretely, more patiently. They keep invoices, receipts, messages, contracts. When I come to interview them, many open their phones to show me photos of documents they saved years ago, as if they had been waiting for someone to ask.

When the gym is empty, their voices carry farther than ever. That is not a nice line. It is an observation about method: where something is left empty, people are forced to preserve evidence, and evidence always has value when a serious conversation begins.

The counter-view: the problem is not money

The most common explanation for the distortion of Vietnamese women's football is a lack of money. I do not believe that is the root cause. Money follows labels. Where the label says "professional," there are sponsors, broadcast rights, data, player valuation. Where the label says "grassroots," money does not arrive, and people call the absence of money the cause, when it is only the result.

This leads to a second, more uncomfortable paradox. The commercial value of women's football is undervalued, but its competitive value is not low at all. I have watched women's matches with pressing intensity higher than many men's matches at the same level, with well-coached combinations, with players who read the game quickly. If the competitive value is real, then the market's failure to price it is a market failure, not a failure of the sport. And a market failure, in the end, usually begins as a data failure.

There is a naive belief that a few good matches, a few viral moments, will change everything on their own. I have watched such moments come and go without leaving any structure behind. Short-term attention cannot fix a long-term label. To fix a label, you must fix the operating layer: data, contracts, rights, policy.

Signs of change rising

Not everything stands still. In recent years, some women's clubs have begun publishing internal payrolls, however timidly. A few regional data platforms have started recording metrics for Southeast Asian women's leagues. The Asian Football Confederation has introduced women's club licensing standards, obliging member federations to hold minimum data. In Vietnam, youth women's teams have drawn more attention after seasons in which television audiences rose noticeably.

What these changes share is that they did not come from a media campaign. They came from people in meeting rooms forced to answer a new question: if this is professional sport, where is its data? When that question is asked often enough, the label has to change.

I write about people who have no place in the standings but have a name in history. Nguyễn Thị Liễu, Nguyễn Thị Oanh, and hundreds of other names that never appear on the transfer wire. They do not need a spotlight; they only need people to see them working. And the first step in seeing someone working is to call their profession by its right name.

Conclusion

A wrong label makes no noise. It injures no one in an afternoon. It only quietly decides that this match gets two reporters and that one gets none; that this player has metrics to negotiate a contract and that one has only memories. Fixing a label is the least glamorous of all tasks, but it is the first task.

Policy does not change from a desk; it changes from voices that refuse to stay silent. If you work with data, start recording metrics for the nearest women's league. If you work in media, try filing one women's football match in its proper professional drawer for a week. If you are a spectator, ask the name of the scorer, and call the competition by its right name. Those small acts, added together, are how a label gets rewritten.