Vietnam National Team: A Bright Future from the Last Line of Defense

30/09/2025 06:53:00 GoalGuru

At the end of round 5 in the LP Bank V-League 2025/26, the top five spots on the leaderboard belong to Ninh Binh, CAHN, CATP.HCM, The Cong Viettel, and Hai Phong respectively.

It is easy to identify a shared characteristic among these five teams, as each has a starting goalkeeper demonstrating stable performance and strong professional capabilities. Except for Patrik Le Giang (CATP.HCM), the other four goalkeepers in this group have either been or currently are national team members, including Van Lam (Ninh Binh), Nguyen Filip (CAHN), Van Viet (The Cong Viettel), and Dinh Trieu (Hai Phong).

People often say that the goalkeeper position is as important as half the team, and this is entirely accurate because the goalkeeper is the final barrier for every team, and any mistake here can render the whole team's efforts useless. Therefore, it is no coincidence that all five leading teams in the LP Bank V-League 2025/26 have extremely high-quality goalkeepers in their squads.

This also gives coach Kim Sang Sik additional options when compiling the Vietnam national team roster, and it must be said that the Korean coach is very lucky, as the V-League does not always have so many goalkeepers of such caliber.

The reason for this is that besides the five goalkeepers mentioned above, coach Kim Sang Sik can also consider two young goalkeepers who are regular starters this V-League season: Trung Kien (HAGL) and Van Binh (SLNA), with Trung Kien frequently being the first-choice goalkeeper for the Vietnam U23 team for over a year now.

Goalkeeper Dang Van Lam is currently performing exceptionally well in the colors of Ninh Binh Club. Photo: Hoang Linh

It has been a long time since the V-League has seen such a group of goalkeepers with national team-level skills at the same time, and although the Vietnam national team and U23 team rarely face a shortage of personnel in the last line of defense, having an abundance of players in this position will make coach Kim Sang Sik’s scouting work much easier.

One notable detail is that among the five goalkeepers from the top five V-League 2025/26 teams mentioned above, only Van Viet is part of the "Gen Z" generation (born in 2002), while Van Lam, Le Giang, Dinh Trieu, and Nguyen Filip are all over 30 years old. However, this is not a major concern because goalkeepers tend to have long careers, and it is common for goalkeepers to maintain peak form until the age of 35 or 37.

Therefore, for at least the next five years, the head coach of Vietnam’s national or U23 teams likely will not have to worry much about the last line of defense. This is not even considering that among the recent wave of overseas Vietnamese players returning over the past two years, no new overseas Vietnamese goalkeeper has come back, except for Nguyen Filip and Patrik Le Giang who returned earlier, so there is still a very promising talent pool yet to be tapped.

In other words, Vietnamese football may lack top-quality forwards or strikers, but other positions rarely experience personnel crises, especially the goalkeeper spot, since most clubs or leading youth academies in Vietnam dedicate significant effort to this position, which is valued as highly as half the team.

The history of Vietnamese football over nearly two decades shows that every successful tournament for the Vietnam national or U23 teams is linked to the prominent roles of goalkeepers, such as Hong Son at the 2008 AFF Cup, Van Lam at the 2018 AFF Cup, Dinh Trieu at the 2024 ASEAN Cup, or Tien Dung at the 2018 AFC U23 Championship. Therefore, the more quality goalkeepers the V-League produces, the brighter the prospects for the national teams’ achievements will be.

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