U17 Vietnam Before the 2026 World Cup: 29 Names, Group G, and a Gap Nobody Has Filled

Six in the morning at the Vietnam Youth Football Training Centre, I stood by the touchline with a sheet of paper listing 29 names. The man who handed it to me was an assistant coach, and he added exactly one sentence: “There will be cuts.” Out on the pitch, Cristiano Roland barely spoke. He walked the length of the technical area, paused for a few seconds at each group of players, and took notes. The players split into teams three times during the session, went at each other hard, and no tactical drill ran longer than twenty minutes. I get to training at six in the morning, because a sporting director never answers emails at night — and in youth football, what needs hearing does not sit in an email, it sits in the breathing of players after each period. Vietnam’s U17 national team has already booked its place at the 2026 U17 World Cup, earned through the AFC U17 Asian Cup in May. Cristiano Roland’s side landed in Group G alongside Mali, Belgium and New Zealand. Reading those three names together tells you this is a group with no easy door. Mali is one of Africa’s leading exporters of young players. Belgium is a product of the European academy system. New Zealand is the opponent Vietnam must take points from if it wants to advance. Everything else in the preparation report — the relaxed mood, the determination, a training camp described as important — is software. The hardware sits in those three names. The 29-man list is the most telling detail, and also the most skimmed one. A tournament squad usually settles around 20 to 23 players. Twenty-nine names say one thing: this is a screening phase, not a finishing phase. The starting eleven is not set, and several positions still have two or three competing options. Internally, that means every session is a test, and every friendly in West Asia can change a player’s fate. The players call it scoring points with the coaching staff — a polite way of saying nobody’s place is guaranteed. The second notable point is the decision to keep the spine from the AFC U17 Asian Cup. Van Duong, Chu Ngoc Nguyen Luc and goalkeeper Ly Xuan Hoa are named as mainstays, with Ly Xuan Hoa close to certain as the first-choice keeper. For a short tournament, keeping the core is a sensible choice: chemistry between lines cannot be built in two weeks. But it also stakes almost everything on a very small sample — one Asian Cup. A young player today is an expensive player tomorrow – I wrote that in 2026, and it still holds in both directions: the same cohort can rise in value after three matches, and can be fully figured out after three matches. The camp route deserves a closer look than the mood does. The team stays at the training centre until October, then travels to West Asia, and from there to Qatar. Those three legs are not about learning a new tactical system. They are about resetting body clocks, adapting to heat and humidity, and most importantly letting 17-year-olds feel what it is like to play football in a different time zone. At this age, one badly timed night of sleep can cost more than a tactical session. Then comes the part preparation reports usually skip: physicality. Historically, Vietnam’s youth teams have struggled to compete in high-duel moments and aerial situations against African or European opponents. At U17 level there is almost no public data to measure that gap — xG, PPDA or duel counts are rarely logged in domestic youth football. But anyone who has sat in the B stand watching a U17 game against South Korea or Australia knows the feeling of running out of air in the second half. I heard that boy’s name from the B stand, long before a big club came knocking — and what those years taught me is that physicality is not something a single training camp can fix. The second issue is expectation. The troop-training framing sounds stirring, but it creates an implicit psychological contract with the public: train seriously and the results must match. In a group containing Mali and Belgium, the realistic target is not advancing at any cost, but playing with structure, holding shape, and taking points against New Zealand. If expectations are inflated by heroic language, the outlets publishing the most optimistic copy today will be the ones spinning fastest after a heavy defeat. I have seen that cycle a few times in this job. Goalkeeping is the last detail I want to take apart, because it is a blind spot for both the market and youth media. At U17 level, scouts are increasingly drawn to keepers who can hit long passes and join build-up play. Meanwhile, a goalkeeper’s most basic craft — reflexes on a shot close to the post, positioning when the ball spills loose — is rarely scored. That is why keepers with good reflexes but average distribution still hold fairly high domestic transfer values, while keepers who pass well but lack consistency get their prices inflated. For Ly Xuan Hoa, the number worth tracking is his reflexes when Mali step up the tempo, not the range of his passing. The U17 World Cup is a shop window in both directions. Three group games are enough to put a 17-year-old’s name on the desk of a J-League, K-League or European academy. That is good for the player and good for Vietnam’s football image, but it also means this cohort can lose its best names before they ever reach U19 or U23 level. When a foreign club approaches a player under 18, the paperwork runs through Article 19 of the FIFA transfer regulations. A transfer is only a transfer once there is a signature; everything else is a rumour — but in this case, the rumour is how fans read an impending departure ahead of time. What I am waiting for in the next phase is the shortlist cut from 29 down to roughly 20 to 23 names, published after the West Asia leg. That list will show who the coaching staff genuinely trusts, and it will be the first piece of inference data with real weight on Vietnam U17’s prospects in Group G.