This V-League Season: When Fitness Becomes the Biggest Star

In the last three rounds, I no longer write much about tactical formations. What makes me pick up my pen is the space that appears between the lines after the 80th minute. The players are still running, but the rhythm has changed. The stadium might be empty of fans, but I can still hear the heartbeat of a collective. And that heartbeat is telling a story about a V-League where fitness has become the most important player, even before expensive foreign signings or technical stars. People often tell me Vietnamese football learned possession-based play since Park Hang-seo. But what I observe this regular season is different. Mid-table teams rarely commit to high pressing after losing the ball. They drop deep, close the gaps between centre-backs and full-backs, then wait for a counter-attacking rhythm. Some matches are not won by ball domination, but by the team that ran an extra 12 kilometres in the final minutes. I remember 2026 when I was a teenage blogger ridiculed for analysing Park Hang-seo's 3-4-3 formation. My first article was wrong. I had missed the physical pressure on the midfield. After the Asian U23 final, I re-watched all six matches and wrote detailed notes in a 40-page notebook. I discovered that our victory did not come from the formation but from the ability of young players to maintain intensity for 120 minutes in freezing weather. From then on, I understood: before they are players, they are human beings; before they score, they must overcome themselves. Elite football is not only about passes, but also about endurance. This season tests that endurance more than ever. A congested fixture list, long flights for continental tournaments, and pressure from media and fans. V-League clubs face a puzzle that tactics cannot always solve: how to keep the squad fresh when matches arrive every three days. I follow a club once famous for high pressing. At the start they suffocated opponents, but by mid-season their PPDA – the number of passes allowed before regaining the ball – started increasing. Not because they lost tactical ideas, but because their legs no longer followed their minds. Someone once said that Gegenpressing has been decoded. Mid-table teams in Europe use fitness to turn football into athletics, and that trend is reaching Vietnam. I do not fully agree, but I agree with the latter part: fitness is redefining how we read the game. Instead of asking how a team plays, I ask how they play after the 80th minute. The difference between a champion and a relegation side often lies not in the first twenty minutes but in the last twenty. When technique is even, the one with more energy wins the duels. I once spent a long time following a player who taught me about human limits. Nguyen Van Toan of HAGL, in an online conversation in 2026, talked about sleepless nights caused by injury and malicious comments. In that moment, he was not a football star; he was a person trying to find himself. I wrote a three-part series on players' mental health based on his experience. After it was published, coach Kiatisuk called me to a private press conference and said, "You write like a teammate, not an outsider." That sentence taught me that sports journalism is not about judging performances but about understanding context. Every drop in fitness on the pitch has a story behind it: a shortened recovery session, a recurring pain after fifteen minutes of warm-up, a worry weighing on the chest. Football professionals usually do not say this. They know fans do not want to hear about fatigue. But if we truly want to understand why a team that played well early in the season suddenly declines in April, we must look at workload, not just the score. I often record the number of 30-metre sprints a team makes in each half. By the second half, those numbers drop noticeably in most teams. But the team that drops less is the one with more late chances. This season, I have seen many decisive goals scored after the 85th minute – not because of brilliant tactics, but because one team ran more and kept a cooler head. I do not deny tactics. Formations, positions, and ball circulation are important words in modern football. But remember that all those words only become meaningful when the players are strong enough to write them on the pitch. There is a paradox I observe: the teams with the most technical stars are often the most vulnerable when fitness declines. They are used to holding the ball, but when their midfield is exhausted, they can no longer keep it. Mid-table teams in V-League are reading this situation well. They do not try to have more possession than their opponents. They choose to have less, but with sharp intent in dangerous zones. They allow opponents to control the ball and become complacent, then suddenly accelerate through the spaces behind the defence. That style is not flashy. In the stands, I hear whistles when the home team passes backwards. But when the match ends favourably, those whistles turn into songs. Football tells its story through results, but a writer must tell it through the process leading to that result. I often remind young colleagues: watch the video at least twice before writing a tactical judgement. The first time, you watch to know the story. The second time, you watch to find the rhythm of the match. That rhythm lies in the unspoken moments: a run without the ball to stretch the defence, a tackle in the final third at the exact moment the opponent is about to make the decisive pass. Statistics only mean something when placed in that context. An 11-kilometre distance means little if I do not know that four of those kilometres were high-intensity sprints. The regular season is always a long piece of music with slow and fast movements. At this moment, I am listening to the final chapter. I want to know which team knows how to save energy for the most important moments. I watch how coaches rotate line-ups, how they make substitutions at minute 60 or 70, and how substitutes enter the pitch. Often a seemingly routine substitution changes the entire match, because the fresh player brings something the opponent has already lost: energy. There is another story I treasure. In 2026, when the pandemic silenced stadiums, I proposed a livestream series called "Football Coffee" with CLB TP.HCM. The first episode had only 47 viewers, but by the tenth, that number passed two thousand. In the chat box, fans talked about how much they missed the pitch. They did not ask about tactics; they asked about the players they loved and how they were living. I realised then that football's greatest strength is not victory but human connection. Every season is a piece of music; I am only the beat keeper for the stories that need to be heard. Looking at this season, I see a V-League maturing in its own way. No one is surprised when a small club holds a big club through physical determination. No one mocks a tactical article just because the writer is a woman. That does not mean everything is perfect. The football market still faces its own problems. I once wrote about the dark side of sports digitalisation, when data is collected not only for professional purposes but also for betting companies. Those numbers can be accurate, but if they are separated from human context, they become soulless and sometimes dangerous. For me, the boundary of sports journalism lies in credibility. Every number I publish must have a source. Every judgement I make must be verified, with at least two independent sources if it is transfer information. I learned that from past mistakes, from criticism, and from fans who remind me that they need the truth, not flattery. Trust cannot be bought with one good article; it is built through many honest articles over time. This season will not answer all the questions about Vietnamese football. But it is teaching us a simple lesson: success does not go to the team with the most stars, but to the team that understands its own limits and knows how to overcome them. The V-League pitch is witnessing a race of legs, and a writer like me is only trying to record the rhythm of dreams. Before they are players, they are human beings; before winning the title, they must learn to stand up after every defeat. And I, from my corner of the pitch, am still listening to the heartbeat of their hearts.