Le Cong Vinh and Three Sessions in Kanazawa: A Quiet Milestone on the AFC A Licence Pathway

On 6 September 2026, on the training pitch of Hokuriku University in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, a 41-year-old man stood at the edge of a warm-up circle formed by Japanese university players. He was not wearing a match shirt, he did not have a captain's armband, and nobody was calling his name through a loudspeaker. He was holding a notebook and a whistle.

Ten years earlier, at My Dinh Stadium, more than forty thousand people had screamed his name at once after a goal against Thailand. Now nobody was screaming. There was only the sound of a ball bouncing on grass and the sound of a man learning his trade from the beginning again.

I once spent an entire afternoon at an U-15 training ground near Incheon, watching a former Korean international fumble his way through a session plan. He spoke beautifully on television. But when he had to teach a fourteen-year-old how to turn and receive a ball, he repeated the same sentence three times and then stood still. The distance between understanding football and teaching football is not a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of whether someone is willing to start again from zero.

Le Cong Vinh had three sessions at Hokuriku. Three sessions, and a report to submit to instructors of the Japan Football Association.

A pathway already mapped out, not an adventure

In June 2026 he completed phase one of the AFC A licence course in Japan. This September is phase two. December will be phase three. The licence is expected to be awarded in April 2027, and after that comes the door to the Pro licence — the highest level issued by the Asian Football Confederation to those who want to lead national teams or top professional clubs.

The notable part is that he chose Japan rather than Vietnam.

The AFC A course can be taken at home. The Vietnam Football Federation runs regular courses, they cost less, travel is easier, and he is a big enough name to be placed in a cohort. Instead, he called Koshida Takeshi, the VFF's technical director, directly, to arrange an internship at a Japanese university.

His stated reasons were blunt: the curriculum in Japan is more up to date, the instructor-to-student ratio is higher, and most importantly — he wanted to expand his network.

That last part is the part worth discussing.

A retired player has two roads. The first is to use his name to ask for a seat on a coaching staff, then learn the job by sitting next to somebody else. The second is to pay money, pay time, and pay his own ego in order to go back to school. Cong Vinh chose the second road. That is not an easy choice for a man who is the all-time leading scorer for the Vietnam national team with 51 goals across more than a decade, and a member of the 2026 AFF Cup winning side — Vietnam's first regional title after a very long wait.

When a man who has already reached the summit of his playing career decides to sit back down in a student's chair, the question is no longer how good he is. The question is how much he is willing to listen.

What the AFC A licence means, and why it is not the destination

Within the AFC system, coaching licences are tiered. The C licence is for beginners, usually grassroots and youth coaches. The B licence allows work at semi-professional clubs and more demanding youth sides. The A licence is required to lead a professional club in many competitions across the region, and it is a mandatory condition for progressing to the Pro licence — the top level, which allows a coach to take charge of a national team.

Each tier is usually split into several theory and practical phases, lasting from a few months to more than a year. The practical element is compulsory, and must be carried out under the supervision of an authorised instructor.

For Cong Vinh, the internship at Hokuriku University is the practical component of phase two. He has to design the sessions himself, deliver them himself, and write his own analytical report on what he did. That report goes to JFA instructors and forms part of the course assessment file.

This course involves genuine assessment. Nobody hands an A licence to a former star simply because he once scored a lot of goals. They hand it over when he proves he can stand in front of a group of players and make them better.

The three coaching themes Cong Vinh delivered during the internship were attacking, defending and counter-attacking.

At first hearing, these are themes everybody knows. Any AFC A curriculum revolves around the four phases of a match: in possession, out of possession, attacking transition, defensive transition. The three themes he selected are effectively three of those four phases, grouped into one foundation block.

But basic here does not mean easy.

A good coach is not measured by how much he knows about football, but by what percentage of that knowledge he can transfer to players, and in how many minutes. For an A licence student, the yardstick lies in the structure of the session: is the objective clear, does the progression from simple to complex hold together, is rest time accounted for, is the feedback specific or just generic encouragement.

And here is the point I have to state plainly: we have no data on those three sessions.

No session duration. No drill types. No feedback from the Hokuriku players. No video, no load data, no transition metrics. There is a report, but it sits with the JFA instructors, not with the public.

That means every judgement about Cong Vinh's coaching ability at this moment is a judgement about a man nobody has yet watched working. Including the flattering judgements.

What we do know for certain is the environment he walked into. The Hokuriku University first team recently appeared in the finals of the Japan Student Soccer Championship. Japanese university football is not a recreational amateur scene. There is a recruitment system, sports scholarships, full-time coaches, video analysis, and players who will sign professional contracts in the J.League after graduation.

A team that reaches the national finals is organised, disciplined, and good enough to force a coaching intern to do real work.

That is a good environment. But a good environment does not automatically produce a good coach. It simply does not allow anyone to hide.

Japanese university football: a place few Vietnamese look toward

Japanese student football has its own competition system, larger in scale and far more competitive than most Southeast Asian fans imagine. Universities are divided by region, play round-robin leagues, and the strongest qualify for the national finals. Some university teams have facilities better than many professional clubs in the region.

More important is the function of this system. It does not exist to let students play for fun. It exists to produce professional players and to train the people who work in professional football — players, coaches, analysts, sports physicians.

Dozens of players every year step from lecture halls straight into J.League squads. Those who do not continue playing stay in the game as coaches, coordinators or fitness specialists. It is a continuous flow of human capital, fed by an education system with defined outcomes.

When Cong Vinh steps into that environment, he is not just learning one session. He is seeing how people run a football team at a level Vietnam does not yet have an equivalent for. He is seeing how a university coach prepares data before a match, takes notes after it, runs meetings, handles a player who has lost form.

Those things are not in the curriculum. They are in the air.

And to breathe that air, you have to go there.

The gap between the two systems is not in player talent

Japan built its coach education system very early and has maintained it for decades. The number of licensed coaches in Japan is among the highest in Asia, and more importantly, that system is tightly bound to the school system. A Japanese university graduate may have spent ten years being coached by licensed professionals, not by a part-time physical education teacher.

Vietnam took a different road. Most players come through club academies, where coaching quality depends heavily on the individual teacher and on the club's budget. On retirement, many former internationals enter coaching through connections and playing experience rather than through formal certification.

There is nothing wrong with that. But it has limits.

The gap between the two systems is not in player talent. It is in the number of properly trained teachers.

A good Vietnamese player can learn a great deal from a foreign coach in two years. But a Vietnamese generation can only learn from a sufficiently dense domestic coaching system over twenty years. Cong Vinh going to Japan is not about learning one specific drill. It is about seeing how that system operates, learning what people use to assess coaching quality, and building a network he can later use from the other side of the desk.

The JFA president made a supportive statement about this direction. In image terms, it is a good signal for Vietnam-Japan football cooperation. In substance, it shows that Japan views training coaching personnel for neighbouring countries as part of its long-term strategy.

That is what people who only look at scorelines never see.

The trap called the returning hero

There is a familiar script that regional sports media loves: a former star goes abroad to earn a coaching licence, returns a few years later to lead the national team, and is celebrated as a perfect marriage of reputation and expertise.

That script sometimes comes true. But most of the time it fails, and it fails in the same way.

The problem is not that he is not good enough. The problem is that the name is too big for the chair.

A former star walks into a dressing room holding two identities at once: teacher and legend. Players will listen to the legend, but they will not always learn from the legend. They respect him for what he once did, not for what he is currently teaching. When bad results arrive — and they will — that aura fades very fast, much faster than it does for an unknown coach.

So the only way for a former star to build real authority is to start where nobody is watching. A university team in Kanazawa. Three sessions. One report.

No cameras. No crowd. Nobody to perform for.

And precisely because nobody is watching, we should not rush to conclusions.

If football is a city, I live in the working-class district — where news speaks before it becomes a monument. Three sessions are not enough to build a monument. Three sessions are only enough to say that someone has begun.

At 41, starting later than his counterparts in Europe, Cong Vinh does not have much time for detours. But he also does not need to hurry. A good coach typically takes eight to twelve years after retirement to accumulate enough leadership experience at various levels before being handed a national team.

The road ahead is long. And it does not begin with a big match. It begins with three sessions on a school pitch with no grandstand.

Signals worth tracking

December 2026 is the nearest milestone: phase three of the AFC A course. If he passes, he will hold the licence in April 2027. That is when the road forks — either he finds an assistant role at a club, or he continues toward the Pro licence, or he returns to work inside the VFF technical system.

Each branch says something about how serious this choice really is.

If he chooses to continue toward the Pro licence in Japan, it signals he wants to walk the full professional path rather than find a management seat. If he takes an assistant role at a domestic club, it signals he wants hands-on experience first. If he joins the federation's technical department, it signals he has chosen influence at system level over club level.

All three are reasonable. But only one of them leads to the national team head coach's chair, and that is the longest one.

I once carried a story in my head for two days before I found a way to put it down. I understand the feeling of waiting until everything is ripe before saying it out loud. But there is a difference between waiting for a story to ripen and holding it back because you fear it is not beautiful enough.

This story is beautiful enough to tell right now, even without an ending.

The all-time leading scorer for the Vietnam national team is learning how to teach other people to score. He may succeed. He may not. But the fact that he is willing to stand at the edge of a warm-up circle, without a shirt, without his name on a loudspeaker, is a signal Vietnamese football should keep.

The press room does not put my name on the chair, so I write my own name with questions. With Cong Vinh, this time the question is not for anyone else. It is for himself.

Three sessions in Kanazawa do not make a coach. But they mark the moment a man decided his name was no longer enough, and that he needed a trade as well.

The next thing worth watching is not who he will lead. It is what he will learn before that happens.