The Transfer Window and the Silence Around Vietnamese Women's Football

On the night of 24 August 2026, in the stands of Shah Alam Stadium, I typed Huỳnh Như's name as "Hoàng Như". I was 24 then, a rookie reporter for an online sports site in Da Nang, sent to cover women's football at the 29th SEA Games while my male colleagues travelled with the U22 men's team. In the 61st minute, when Huỳnh Như herself scored the opening goal, I caught the error and corrected it live on air. Vietnam beat Thailand 2-1, with Nguyễn Thị Tuyết Dung scoring the winner in the 89th minute. The players cried a great deal that day. I understood something: they were not crying over a medal, but because someone had remembered their names correctly.

Since then, I have learned to check the spelling of names at least three times before publishing. But the bigger lesson lies elsewhere: a misspelled name is not the fault of the writer alone. It is a symptom of an entire system that has grown used to not looking closely at women's football.

That story comes back to me every time the transfer window opens.

Every summer, the transfer feed sweeps away everything else. A young striker who has not played 50 top-level matches is valued at a hundred million euros, and the whole world talks about it for a week. At the same time, a national women's champion club cannot even hold a proper press conference. Women's football keeps playing, keeps training, keeps earning a living on contracts many times smaller, yet it barely exists in the news flow.

In 2026, I wrote a piece asking why tens of millions of Vietnamese were indifferent to the women's national team. I offered an observation: each day, men's football received around 300 articles, women's football around 5. The piece drew fierce controversy. Many said I had invented it to shock. I spent nearly two months afraid to keep writing, and that was the period in which I learned the most.

I came to understand that to talk about women's football, you first have to talk about how information is distributed. Silence does not happen by accident. It is manufactured.

The transfer window is where that mechanism shows itself most clearly. The structure of a deal deserves more scrutiny than the headline. A transfer contract consists of a fixed fee, performance add-ons, a release clause, image rights and wages. In men's football, most of the money sits in the transfer fee, which is why the news flow circles around blockbuster deals. In women's football, most of the value sits in wages and stipends, usually too small to generate a headline. No blockbuster, no news. That is the logic of media, not the logic of football.

In August 2026, Huỳnh Như joined Portugal's Lank FC, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to play professionally abroad. A historic milestone. Yet the coverage it received in its first week did not amount to a fraction of the coverage of a single men's national team training session. Not because writers were lazy. But because newsrooms did not consider it news.

This is where I want to linger longer, because it sits at the intersection of transfers and value.

The true value of a women's player is not measured by a transfer fee, but by the number of years she persists in an environment that does not pay a living wage. When the national women's league was cancelled after round 8 in March 2026, roughly 140 players lost their income almost overnight. They had no release clause to negotiate with, no agent to apply pressure. They had only one option: find another job.

I remember the call with Nguyễn Thị Vân Anh, 26, then delivering food on a motorbike because the pitches were closed. She said: "I watch the livestream of the men's teams training away and I'm not allowed outside. I wish I could be like them." I wrote that line down, and I still have not forgotten it. In the longest night, I learned to listen to the breathing of an empty stand.

During the "Women's Football in the Long Night" series in March 2026, I called 12 women's players in Thái Bình, Quảng Ninh and Ho Chi Minh City. All of them said the same thing: they did not need pity, they needed pitches and an income they could live on. The series was later shared by a foundation in the Netherlands and helped the women's national team secure a sponsorship package. It is proof that when information travels the right way, it can create real change.

So-called young-player price bubbles in men's football — a player who has not played 50 top-level matches valued at a hundred million euros — reach beyond men's football. It is the visible surface of a distorted valuation system, where value is created by attention rather than ability. And on the other side of that system, women's football is valued at exactly the attention it receives: almost nothing.

But here is the counter-intuitive point it took me years to accept: women's football does not lack commercial value. It lacks a market built long enough to measure that value.

The 2026 Women's World Cup in France is the proof. The quarter-final between the United States and France on 28 June 2026 ended 2-1, and it was one of the most breathless matches I have ever watched. The stands were full. Television audiences were large. The demand was real. Yet people still say women's football is not attractive enough to sell. Demand appears first, and investment follows — and in women's football, investment has never arrived on time.

In Vietnam, the women's national team qualified for the 2026 Women's World Cup for the first time, an achievement the men's game took decades to reach. It was greeted with a brief wave of pride, then quickly swept away by transfer news from men's clubs. I wonder: if the media covered women's football with the same frequency as men's football for a year, would anyone still dare say it has no market value?

There is a tactical blind spot few name out loud. When analysing women's football, people often compare it with men's football at the same age, then conclude it is slower and less physical. That comparison is wrong. Women's players train with less sports nutrition, fewer recovery facilities, fewer high-quality matches. Comparing speed under different conditions is a very polite way of invalidating someone.

What is striking is that men's football is itself paying for that valuation. Hundred-million-euro deals for young players push wage bills to unsustainable levels, forcing clubs to sell key players to balance the books. The transfer window thus grows louder but carries less and less real information. Fans are drowned in rumours, and the true signals — form, injuries, squad structure — are buried by the noise.

Women's football, precisely because it has no noise, still retains some signal. There, players are still judged by what they do on the pitch, because no price tag is large enough to obscure it. But that is an advantage born of scarcity, not of choice. If women's football develops along the exact trajectory of men's football, it will soon face the same disease.

Change is happening, but more slowly than the rhythm of the transfer window. It does not come from a blockbuster deal, but from smaller things: a foundation in the Netherlands sharing my series and the women's national team receiving a sponsorship package; a player being written with the correct name; a women's training session with someone in the stands.

A player's value is not on the price tag; it lies in what they dare to reclaim. And each time a women's player dares to reclaim something, we move closer to a market that knows how to measure true value.

People count goals. I collect the times they fell and stood back up. The transfer window will close. The names once misspelled remain there, waiting to be written correctly.