The Stands Hold More Than Ninety Minutes: Vietnamese Football and the Lesson of an All-Inclusive Model

At a ticket counter in a Vietnamese stadium, three hours before kickoff, there is a scene television never replays. People queue not merely to buy a ticket. They buy a whole day: a seat, a shirt, a meal, parking, a photo beside the club mascot. What they are looking for is not ninety minutes in the stands, but a day in which they do not have to think about anything. I record the atmosphere before I record the match. In recent years, that atmosphere has changed its voice. It is no longer purely a chant. It is a negotiation: is the combo cheaper, is there a package with dinner, do I get a discount for booking early. Vietnamese supporters, perhaps without realizing it, are behaving more like tourists than like pure fans. And that is why I want to talk about a strange document that recently reached me. It was labeled football. But read closely, there is no team inside, no player, no match. Only all-inclusive vacations, customer reward points, and a travel conglomerate. A mislabel, at first glance, with nothing to do with the pitch. But if we dismiss it, I think we will miss something important about Vietnamese football. Vietnamese clubs have long lived on three sources: sponsorship, broadcast rights, and ticket money. All three are fragile. Broadcast rights get squeezed. Sponsorship depends on a handful of large companies; change the owner and you change the club's fate. Ticket money depends on results, and results are volatile. Meanwhile, a travel conglomerate in Vietnam can sell a Phu Quoc vacation from 5.2 million dong per person, including hotel, flights, entertainment, meals, and reward points on top. That figure raises a question few in football are willing to ask: why is an all-inclusive vacation easier to sell than an all-inclusive season ticket? The answer lies in the fact that the conglomerate does not sell a service. It sells an ecosystem. Its hotels, its airline, its entertainment parks, its shows, and its reward system all click together. Customers do not buy scattered pieces; they buy continuity. And continuity, it turns out, is the most expensive thing in the experience economy. Does Vietnamese football have a similar ecosystem? It does, but it is fractured. Look at how a fan goes to a match. He buys a ticket in one place. A shirt in another shop. Eats at a stall outside the ground. Travels by bus or motorbike. No reward point connects those actions. No system records that this man has been loyal for five seasons, how much he has spent in total, how many friends he has brought. Every time he comes to the ground, he is a stranger. The all-inclusive model I read about works on a different logic. It gathers every piece of a trip into a single payment and gives back something called reward points. Those points are not merely a discount. They are memory, weighed and counted. The specific mechanism matters less than the principle behind it. A reward point has little material value. But it creates a reason to return, and each time you return, you accumulate more. Over time, that accumulation becomes part of your own memory. You no longer return for the product, but for the chain of experiences you have become part of. No advertising campaign can buy that. In football, a club's greatest asset is its supporters' memory. But Vietnamese clubs barely know how to measure it. They have no system to know that Mr. A has attended two hundred matches, bought seven shirts, brought three generations of his family to watch football. They have no way to turn that loyalty into something repayable, beyond selling Mr. A the same ticket as a first-time visitor. That document, unrelated to football as it is, points to something Vietnamese football is missing. When you sell a fragment, you compete on price. When you sell continuity, you compete on loyalty. And loyalty, in sport, is the one thing that cannot be bought with sponsorship money. I once sat in a small cafe in Saigon, listening to a group of supporters argue about their club. They were not talking about tactics. They were talking about memories: a year the team won away, a player who signed their shirt, a time the whole group took a twelve-hour bus to watch one match. Those memories have value. But no club earns a single dong from them. The fans carry the memory home, and the club knows nothing. This is the biggest blind spot of Vietnamese football in the era of commercialization. We talk a lot about broadcast money, shirt sponsors, ticket prices. We talk little about building an ecosystem where every time a supporter touches the club — buying a ticket, a shirt, a meal, streaming a game, taking a child to watch — it is recorded and repaid. Such an ecosystem does not need a trillion-dong conglomerate. It needs an idea, and patience. In Vietnamese football, there have been small efforts. A few clubs tried selling season tickets with a shirt. A few opened souvenir shops inside the ground. But those are scattered pieces, not an ecosystem. No club has gathered tickets, shirts, food, memory, and fan data into one place, to turn every visit into a repayable data point. They are still selling single tickets, not a relationship. There is one more detail in the document I find most striking, though it was written for tourism. It is the assisted self-service model — customers want to explore on their own, but still need someone behind them to help when needed. They do not want to be led by the hand like children, nor to be abandoned in a maze of choices. Football is the same. Fans do not want to be stuffed into a top-down service package. They want to choose how they come to the club: single ticket or season ticket, which stand, which shirt, alone or with family. But they need a system that understands them, remembers them, and repays them. The difference between assisted self-service and abandoned self-service lies exactly there. But I do not want to be naive. The all-inclusive model I read about also has clear limits. The most worrying thing is the up to 20 percent discount figure in that document. It is classic marketing language: an attractive number, attached to unstated conditions. Up to 20 percent off what? Compared with booking each service separately at list price, or against the lowest market price? For how many days, for which room categories, in which season? Up to is a beautiful word, but it is also a concealing one. Football can learn from that model, but it must also learn the trap within it. If a club turns the stands into a shopping mall, fans will arrive as customers and leave as customers. Loyalty bought with reward points is loyalty that can be bought with a rival's reward points. When everything can be bundled, everything can also be substituted. A fan loyal through memory will not change clubs. A fan loyal through reward points will switch the moment a rival offers more points. Football is not tourism. A vacation can be all-inclusive, because its purpose is experience, and experience can be designed. But football is not only experience. It is identity. People do not choose a club the way they choose a hotel. They are born into a family and carry that family's club for life. Misunderstand that, and the all-inclusive model will produce a generation of consuming spectators, not a generation of supporters. They will come to the ground when there is a promotion, and stay home when it ends. The stadium will be fuller in numbers, but emptier in soul. That is the paradox I want to put on the table: Vietnamese football needs an ecosystem, but must not let the ecosystem swallow its identity. There must be a line between caring for supporters and turning them into customers. That line is thin, and it is easily crossed once revenue becomes the only measure. I do not write about goals. I write about the silence before the roar. And that silence, in Vietnamese football today, is being filled with price lists. The question I leave behind is not which club will sell the most combos. It is: when everything can be packaged, can we still keep what cannot be packaged — the moment a father leads his son into the ground for the first time, and both fall silent before a flag, before a song, before a club that neither of them chose, but both inherited? If we can, Vietnamese football will have both an ecosystem and a soul. If we cannot, we will have a stadium full of customers, and a stand empty of supporters.