The Wrong Drawer: How Vietnamese Football Labels People Too Early

A Wednesday afternoon, rain slanting across Saigon. I sat on the second floor of a coffee shop on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, in front of a seven-page document a young colleague had sent over. On the cover she had taped a yellow slip and written two words in blue marker: FOOTBALL. I opened it. Inside was a translated interview with a video-game studio in Poland. Not one team. Not one player. Not a minute of the ball rolling. She messaged me: "Uncle, could you check this? The system filed it under football. I think that is wrong." She was right. Wrong drawer. I read all seven pages, folded them, and did not peel off the yellow slip. Because in those seven pages there was one sentence that made me think about Vietnamese football longer than any tactical report I have read all month. That sentence was about locked doors, and about our habit of filing everything into drawers to keep the desk tidy. WHAT THE REPORT SAYS CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, holds one principle in its collaborations. It will sell exclusive physical goods: a hoodie available only with an Xbox order, a collector card set bundled with The Witcher 3 pre-orders. But it will not put in-game content behind an exclusivity door. Miles Tost, the studio's level design lead, said they do not want anything that exists only because you bought it in one particular place. They still work with others. A Geralt-inspired outfit is coming to Diablo 4. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners outfits are heading to Overwatch next year. After the BlizzCon announcements, Tost said they will sit and listen to feedback. And he left a gap in the door: they are not the kind of studio that does one thing and then never does another. That is the whole report. An analyst reading it would write in the notes column: insufficient data. No transfers. No tactics. No wage bill, no table, no sponsorship contract. If I forced these seven pages into a football article, I would have to invent a player who does not exist. My trade does not permit that. But the wrong drawer itself is worth writing about. I once sat in a press room in Hanoi and heard a data manager explain that every item has to pass through a queue, and at each gate a person or a machine applies a label. Label it right and the item moves on. Label it wrong and it is either blocked, or worse, it moves on and goes astray. These seven pages went astray. They slipped into the football drawer, sat there a few days, and reached my desk. In football the same thing happens every week, except nobody removes the file. They remove the person. My colleague wanted to delete the file. The natural reflex when something sits in the wrong place is to lift it out, put it elsewhere, or throw it away. We do that with documents every day. We also do it with people, only more slowly, and the price is not paid in the bin. DRAWERS ON THE PITCH Football starts labelling a child the moment he walks into a training ground at twelve. The scout writes one word in his book, one word only: fast, slow, stubborn, soft, has a brain, no left foot. From that day, every match the boy plays is re-watched through that one box of text. Based on my experience following matches from the stands and from screens for more than fifty years, I believe the thing that ruins the most careers in Vietnam is not injury. It is the label. Nguyen Xuan Son is the most recent example. Before he wore the national shirt, his name almost always carried the word "naturalised" in the headline. People argued about paperwork before they argued about finishing. Then ASEAN Cup 2026 arrived. He scored, scored heavily, and finished as the tournament's top scorer. Then in the first leg of the final at Viet Tri, he broke his leg after a collision, lay on the grass, and the whole stadium went quiet. That night, and in the days after, "naturalised" turned into "hero". The player did not change. The drawer changed. Filip Nguyen is the second example. A goalkeeper born in Czechia with Vietnamese blood, waiting years for citizenship through paperwork. Throughout that time he was filed as a "project" rather than a "player". Every save was read alongside a question about his file, and a goalkeeper read through his file is never read correctly. Nguyen Quang Hai is the third. He went to France to play for Pau FC in Ligue 2, then came home. The football part was simple: few minutes, a few injuries, a very different environment. The label was much shorter: "a failure abroad". Those words followed him home, and every misplaced pass afterward was read as evidence. Nguyen Cong Phuong is the fourth. At nineteen he was labelled a "prodigy". That label sounds better than a bad one, but it is still a drawer, and drawers have ceilings. When he did not fly as high as the ceiling, the whole country turned to ask why he had not grown. Nobody asked whether the ceiling was correct. Nguyen Tuan Anh was labelled a "glass player". Bui Tien Dung, after one U23 Asian Cup, was labelled "the goalkeeper of one night". The two labels differ in wording and match in consequence: both made people stop assessing the player and start assessing the sheet of paper. What is worth saying is that nobody stuck these labels out of cruelty. They were stuck during work. A reporter has a deadline. A coach has three days before a match. A scout has twenty grounds in one weekend. A label is a tool of the trade, and like every tool of the trade, it does not consult the person it acts upon. Then it was a collective's turn. After a few defeats in the early phase of Kim Sang-sik's tenure, more than a few newspapers wrote about a national team that had "lost its identity". A few months later, the team won ASEAN Cup 2026. The name on the shirts did not change. The way of calling it did. And there is one more drawer, colder, kept not in a scout's book but in a broadcast rights contract. Vietnamese football is splitting its content across platforms, subscription tiers, and different doors. In many alleys, a whole neighbourhood still gathers around one television set, or one phone with an external speaker. That child does not pay, so he is filed as "not a customer". A scoreboard cannot hold a heart, and football writes its poetry in exactly those places. The sentence from the game maker in Poland lands right in that gap: you can sell the shirt without locking the door. In football we can sell tickets, shirts, streaming packages, and still leave the match belonging to everyone standing outside the gate, listening to the roar. WHERE MOST PEOPLE GET IT WRONG We usually object to labelling because it is unfair. Unfairness is only the visible part. The submerged part is convenience. Labels exist so that we are allowed to stop watching. A scout who writes "slow" in his book means that from that day he no longer needs to watch the boy again. An editor who files a report in the wrong drawer means that from that day nobody has to read it. Nobody is being deceived here. People are simply saving time, and saving time in football is a form of profit. The reflex for handling something in the wrong drawer is the same everywhere: lift it out, and if you do not know where to put it, drop it. The file in the wrong drawer gets deleted. The player in the wrong drawer gets sold. The supporter in the wrong drawer is counted as non-existent. I am not calling for the abolition of drawers. Without drawers nobody could do this job, including me. I ask one small thing, doable once a year: open one drawer, read a few names again, and see whether anyone inside has changed while the paper has not. They called me a dreamer. But the ball has never hidden anything from me. WHAT I KEPT I left the yellow slip on the cover. But I wrote one more line under the word FOOTBALL: "read again in three months". A young colleague asked me why I kept it. I did not answer. I only thought: if a document can sit in the wrong drawer for years without anyone opening it to check, then how many names in Vietnamese football's own book are still waiting for their yellow slip to be peeled off. Sixty-nine years old, and I still believe a beautiful pass is a love letter. And when the radio goes on air in the middle of the night, the pitch asleep, football knows how to wait.