The Empty Archive: When Vietnamese Football Slowly Loses Its Memory

The Empty Archive: When Vietnamese Football Slowly Loses Its Memory

In June 2026, I opened a styrofoam box in the archive room of an old television station on Hue Street in Hanoi. Inside were fourteen VHS cassettes, leaning sideways like an abandoned hand of cards. The labels were handwritten in blue ink, scrawled: "NAT CUP 2026", "SEMI 2026 - second leg", "FINAL 2026 (rain)". A thin film of white mould covered the lid. The damp smell worked its way into my nose, like clothes hung out that never quite dry.

I hauled the box home and borrowed a VHS player from an electronics repairman I know in Trung Yen alley. The first cassette ran for forty seconds. A tilted grandstand appeared on screen, the commentary broken as if the speaker kept losing breath, then the picture cracked into horizontal streaks and went dark.

Forty seconds. That is all that survives of a final that, twenty years ago, an entire generation of Hanoians sat down to watch.

I sat for a long time in front of the dark screen. Outside, the June rain fell and stopped and left behind a dampness that refused to leave. I realised I was standing in exactly the place that documentary filmmaking taught me to fear most: a gap with nothing left to shoot.

That night I called my old cameraman. He said: "Stop looking. They erased those tapes and re-recorded over them three times." That sentence stayed with me for months.

Fourteen finals, and one notebook

In 2026, at the age of fifty-two, I set foot at a World Cup for the first time. At fifty-two I finally learned what the World Cup is - an obsession that needs no reason. In Nizhny Novgorod I sat in a stand with thousands of strangers, and the only thing I managed to write in my notebook was the name of a Belgian player and three words: "right channel". No tactics, no diagrams, no possession stats. Just one man running alone between three layers of opposing shirts, and I understood that what I was watching was not football but organised loneliness.

Back in Hanoi, I started getting invited on air. From then on I developed an odd habit: whenever I prepared to commentate a big match, I did not rewatch that match. I went looking for older matches, matches nobody mentions any more.

When the domestic season was suspended by the pandemic, I threw myself into work many colleagues considered pointless: rewatching all fourteen National Cup finals from 2026 to 2026. I say "rewatching", but to be precise, I had to go and find them. I contacted four broadcasters, two private production houses, three former players, and one tape keeper at an old broadcasting unit. The result: seven finals have no video record at all. Three survive only as radio recordings. Two have pictures but are missing the entire first half. Two are reasonably complete, and both are from after 2026.

Fourteen finals of a national competition. Five still watchable.

I sat with that subtraction for a long time. It does not hurt the way losing a match hurts. It hurts the way opening a family album hurts when more than half the photographs have been cut away by someone, leaving only white paper edges.

Three layers of loss

After months of tracing, I understood that this disappearance was not an accident. It is a structured process, and it happens on three different levels.

The first is physical. Magnetic tape is a material of astonishing fragility. In Vietnam's hot and humid climate, a cassette stored in an uncontrolled room can begin losing its magnetic signature within a few years. Mould eats the iron oxide layer. The magnetic fields of speakers, of electric motors, of the playback heads themselves, can slowly erase the signal. A VHS cassette is not a durable record; it is a signal dying slowly.

But the physical layer is only the most visible part. The second is operational. For years, the common practice at broadcasters was tape reuse: record one match, overwrite it with another. A cassette had material value; its contents were treated as something that could be reconstructed when needed. Except what got reconstructed was the news bulletin, not the match. People kept the broadcast segment - the goal, the highlight, the roar - and erased everything else, including the things I believe are most worth keeping: the aimless passages, the silences, the people doing nothing at all.

The third layer, and the heaviest, is institutional. No agency in Vietnam is mandated to maintain a national football archive. Broadcast rights are signed by season, by competition, by package. When rights expire, the recordings sit in the old rights-holder's storeroom and nobody owes them anything. An investment in rights does not come with an investment in archiving. And when nobody is obliged, whatever happens is simply natural.

An archivist at one broadcaster once told me something I copied verbatim into my notebook: "Old tapes have no asset value, so nobody applies for funding to digitise them."

When material stops being footage and becomes storytelling

Without pictures, I had to learn to rebuild matches from other things.

The first method was paper. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, Vietnamese sports newspapers printed very detailed match records: lineups, scorers, minutes, sometimes a summary of play at ten-minute intervals. Old newsprint, yellowed, ink fading, but the information was remarkably specific. I reconstructed a 2026 semi-final using three different print sources, cross-checking line by line.

The second method was sound. Radio taught me that a voice can touch a fate the way a foot touches a ball. I found a few radio recordings of matches whose video had vanished. Listening back, I understood something a screen can never teach: radio does not describe a match, it interprets it. A radio commentator has no pictures to lean on, so he must trust his ears, select, compress the match into heartbeats. In such a recording I could hear both the crowd and the breathing of the storyteller. That is a kind of material video does not possess.

The third method was people. I interviewed eleven former players, two retired referees, four retired sports journalists. And what I learned outweighed everything else: a player's memory is not symmetrical with a fan's memory.

Fans remember goals. Players remember other things. One former defender told me he only remembers the moment he made a mistake in the twenty-seventh minute, in a match his team won by two goals. He does not remember who scored. He remembers the feeling of the ball passing through his feet. Another former midfielder remembered exactly the temperature of that afternoon, and that he was thinking of his mother as he walked onto the pitch.

The collective memory of Vietnamese football is held in paper and in speech, not in images. Which means it depends on whether people are willing to sit down and tell each other stories.

This is the part I want to dwell on, because it is why I am writing this.

A match exists in two forms. The first is the physical event that happened: it was real, once, and cannot return. The second is the collective record of it in many people's memories, retold, passed on, edited each time. Footage is raw material for the first form, but it does not automatically create the second. What is most frightening is that the second form does not preserve itself intact: with each generation, one detail is kept and three others are dropped.

During my work I found an example that cost me several sleepless nights. It concerned a final that many Hanoians "remember" - everyone recalls that the home side won, everyone recalls the scorer of the decisive goal. But when I found an old newspaper printing the result afterwards, the third detail everyone remembers was not in the record at all. It was not false. It belonged to a different ritual: a community's belief about itself.

Those of us who make documentaries call that emotionally true memory. Historians call it a problem.

The flip side of abundance

This is where I have to say something many colleagues will not enjoy hearing.

We usually frame the issue this way: without material, memory is lost. I believed that for years. But ten months of work in old archives taught me the opposite.

I reopened the high-definition recordings of the 2026 AFC U23 Championship, one of the most thoroughly documented events in Vietnamese football history. Thousands of hours of footage. Every moment exists, from at least three camera angles, at multiple speeds, with analytical graphics. In archival terms, these are conditions any historian could only dream of.

But if I ask ten average Vietnamese fans about a specific detail in a specific match from that tournament, most will not remember. They remember things outside the match: an image that went viral, a phrase, a melody.

I do not say this as criticism. I say it as a finding.

When everything is recorded, nobody has to remember. And when nobody has to remember, collective memory thins out, regardless of how much footage accumulates.

Once, a boy in Nam Dinh listening to a match on radio had to retell it to his friends the next morning. That retelling was an act of reconstruction: it categorised, emphasised, omitted, misplaced the emphasis, and in doing so created a version of the match that a whole group owned together.

Today, that boy saves a thirty-second clip. The clip exists. But nobody in the group owns it. It sits in a library where an algorithm decides who gets to see it.

I think this is the central paradox of Vietnamese football today: we live in the era when football is recorded most, and told least.

And this leads me somewhere uncomfortable. In documentary work I have repeatedly watched young players pushed onto the stage too early. An eighteen-year-old plays twenty-eight matches in a year across three competitions, and by twenty-two his knees no longer let him run the way he used to. His body had not finished growing but was already carrying an adult's workload. The media records every stride during his brilliant phase. But when he can no longer play like that, nobody records anymore. The archive is very thick at the beginning and very empty afterwards.

That too is an empty archive. An empty archive on the far side of fame.

Heroes with no footage

I want to tell a story I have not told publicly.

While gathering material for a short film about substitutes, I worked with a striker who came off the bench and scored an equaliser in a knockout match at a major tournament. After the match, when the cameras were off, he said something I used as the film's title: "I cannot remember what it felt like to touch the ball. I only remember breathing like an animal being hunted for twelve minutes."

Twelve minutes. In all the television material of that match, those twelve minutes are fully recorded. But what he had just told me - that breathing - is in no frame. It exists only because someone sat and listened.

I tell this story because it illustrates what I consider most important: most of a player's value is not in the recording. It lives in the space between what is captured and what is felt.

Which is why I tell young people entering the profession today: interviewing is not the craft of collecting quotes. It is the craft of collecting what the camera has never seen.

Stop filing old material in the back row

Since I entered the trade in 2026 at the newsroom of a football newspaper, I have heard one line repeated: archives are somebody else's job. Reporters write what is new. Archivists keep what is old.

I understand why that line exists. Writing news has deadlines, column inches, fees. Arranging a tape store has no deadline at all, so it always sits at the bottom of the list.

But I want to offer a different calculation. In football, one generation of fans lasts about thirty years. If an important detail is lost, it is lost for that entire lifespan. You cannot wait until funding appears and then go and find it, because the people who remember it will be gone.

There is one thing I am certain can be done immediately, without waiting for any grand decision: record the telling. No professional camera needed. A phone, a person sitting opposite, one hour. Prioritise the over-seventies. Prioritise those who have never been interviewed. Prioritise the matches you assume nobody cares about.

I did this for ten months. I have three hundred and twenty-seven audio recordings. None has been broadcast. But if one day someone wants to rewrite the history of a match whose tape is gone, they will have somewhere to begin.

And one more thing for those of you working in transfers, because I know you write a great deal. Every contract is an unfinished poem; every transfer window is a parting. But if you only record the numbers, you are archiving the part that depreciates fastest. What is worth keeping is the reason a player agreed to leave the place he grew up, and what he said to his mother before getting in the car.

Back to the styrofoam box

I still keep those fourteen cassettes. Not one plays through.

Someone told me I should throw them out, that they only bring damp into the house. I did not. Sometimes I still open the lid, look at the blue labels almost faded away, and read them aloud: "NAT CUP 2026", "SEMI 2026 - second leg", "FINAL 2026 (rain)".

I read them aloud because that is the only way I can still hold on to them. When the stadium is empty, I hear clearly the applause of the years that have passed.

Once a student asked me: if I want to understand Vietnamese football, where should I start? I thought for a long time and answered: find someone who sat in front of a radio in 2026 and ask them to tell it to you. Keep going until you can see the grandstand inside your own head.

She asked: and what about statistics?

I said: statistics are the skeleton. A skeleton is necessary, but nobody loves a skeleton.

What I want to leave behind

I did not write this to lament mouldy tapes. That is easy, and it leads nowhere.

I wrote it because I believe Vietnamese football is at the exact moment when one generation of storytellers is about to leave, and the next generation is very busy recording everything while telling nothing. If we do not shift from recording to telling within the next ten years, most of what made our football will turn into an enormous database nobody can walk into.

The pitch is not only where the ball rolls; it is where dreams land. And a dream that lands with nobody waiting at the end of the runway is very quickly forgotten for having ever flown.

I do not know how many seconds of image can still be saved from those fourteen cassettes. Possibly nothing. But I know one thing for certain: tomorrow, in some coffee shop on Lang Street, a seventy-two-year-old man will tell the story of a match no newspaper printed and no station recorded. The only person present to hear it will decide whether that match continues to exist.

I only hope that person is not sitting alone.