Sông Lam Nghệ An are riding high in the V.League this season. Photo courtesy of Sông Lam Nghệ An Football Club

Anh Đức

If you’re back rewatching the V.League after a long break, you’d be surprised when you see the top of the table.

Sông Lam Nghệ An, a team far away from its former glory and struggling for years, battling relegation, is currently undefeated in the top half of the table with 11 points. 

Nghệ An, a province where football is deeply loved by the people, is also Việt Nam’s equivalent of West Ham United, ‘The Academy of Football’, as one might say. Many Vietnamese football talents of old and new, such as Lê Công Vinh, Phạm Văn Quyến, Nguyễn Công Phượng and Nguyễn Đình Bắc, were born in Nghệ An and learned the ways of the ball on their villages’ pitches there.  

For much of the V.League era, that pipeline made SLNA the benchmark. They were champions in 2000, 2001 and 2011, and the yellow shirts of Vinh carried a weight few provincial clubs could match.

But like their East London counterparts, who watched Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand and Joe Cole leave for richer clubs, SLNA became better at producing stars than keeping them. The talent kept flowing out of Vinh; the trophies stopped flowing in, and recent seasons have been about survival.

With two rounds left in the 2024-25 campaign, they sat 12th, just two points above the bottom, as main sponsor Tân Long announced its departure. Last season brought more of the same: a first home defeat to Hoàng Anh Gia Lai in 16 years, another anxious scramble to stay up, and a summer exodus that included Olaha Mạnh Đức, the striker who had spent nearly a decade at the club. Coach Văn Sỹ Sơn, a son of Nghệ An himself, even finished the campaign serving a touchline ban.

Which makes this start all the more remarkable.

Five games, three wins, two draws, ten goals scored and four conceded. A 4-1 thrashing of Hà Nội FC at Hàng Đẫy. And on Friday, a 2-0 win at Pleiku, where Brazilian centre-back Jairo Rodrigues headed in against his former club before French-Vietnamese midfielder Abdel-Amine Trần Đức Vinh sealed it in stoppage time with his first V.League goal. The last time SLNA topped the table was July 2022, and it lasted a single day.

The most encouraging part is how they are doing it. Sơn has built around youth, noting at the start of the season that most of his players had just come from the national U21 and U19 tournaments. The club’s U21 side won the national title this year, ending a 12-year wait. Midfielder Nguyễn Quang Vinh, only 21, has three goals and is the sole Vietnamese player among the league’s top five scorers. Sơn dedicated the Pleiku win to the supporters who made the long trip from Vinh, a reminder that the passion in Nghệ An never went away, even when the results did.

Caution is warranted: five rounds do not make a season, the margins at the top are wafer-thin, and defending champs Công An Hà Nội FC are next. A young squad will hit a rough patch at some point, and how the club responds will tell us more than any early table.

But for now, Nghệ An’s fans can enjoy a feeling they have not had in years. The real prize will not be a few weeks at the summit. It will be if, this time, the academy of Vietnamese football gets to keep its own graduates long enough to see what they can become. VNS