Anaheim Rehearses for LA28 While Vietnamese Volleyball Still Lacks a Points Engine

Twenty thousand seats in Anaheim will be tested before Los Angeles opens its doors. The most telling empty spot in that arena, the way I see it, is the one Vietnamese volleyball has occupied in silence for two decades.

It sounds absurd: an event held more than thirteen thousand kilometres from Nha Trang, with no slot reserved for the Vietnamese women's national team, is the hinge that decides whether the red flag with the yellow star appears on an Olympic court in 2028. I spent a good number of evenings piecing together how the international volleyball federation and the LA28 organising committee are designing the competition calendar. The interesting part is not the arena. It is the points system being bolted onto every tournament, turning each week of play into a pumping station for ranking points. The Vietnamese women's team stands outside that pipeline.

Honda Center, the rehearsal room of an Olympic Games

Honda Center in Anaheim, California, seats more than seventeen thousand in basketball configuration and has been chosen to host indoor volleyball at the 2028 Olympic Games. The organisers plan to turn it into a genuine rehearsal venue: a tournament staged roughly a year before the Games to test lighting, line cameras, spectator flows, locker rooms, electronic scoreboards and the broadcast workflow. For administrators, that is an operations check. For me, it is a signal that volleyball is being treated as a commercial flagship in the American market, something it has not enjoyed for decades.

The Olympic medal structure has not changed much in shape: twelve slots for men, twelve for women, with the host nation taking one automatically. The rest is distributed through qualifying pools, continental champion berths and the FIVB world ranking as the final safety net. Every match recognised by FIVB adds or deducts points for both teams, weighted by the opponent's ranking. Points therefore do not concentrate in a handful of summit matches. They spread according to frequency.

That is where the Vietnamese women's team runs out of breath. Vietnam holds no permanent place in the Volleyball Nations League, a stage where each week of competition returns more points than an entire SEA Games. The continental and regional events Vietnam enters offer fewer matches, lighter opponents and therefore a narrower band of points. Beating a lower-ranked side barely moves the needle. Losing to a strong side costs little. The machine rewards teams that play many matches against strong opponents all year, and only a small group in the world lives inside that machine.

Vietnamese volleyball and a points problem that sits off the court

Vietnam is playing a game whose rules are written by someone else. Based on the FIVB ranking I follow, the Vietnamese women's team hovers in the thirties worldwide. The direct qualification zone sits among the top twelve. That gap is not erased by one win, but by hundreds of weighted wins spread across several seasons.

Vietnam's realistic route is narrower. To reach Los Angeles, the team must become the strongest force in Asia outside Japan, China and Thailand, then hope for a berth through ranking. This is precisely the road Thai women's volleyball took, and it needed nearly two decades to become a permanent continental power. Thailand did not move fast. Thailand moved steadily.

The milestone I consider most important in this cycle is Vietnam's first appearance at the world championship finals, staged in Thailand after the tournament expanded to thirty-two teams. A world championship berth does not deliver an Olympic ticket, but it delivers something more valuable than points: real matches against taller, stronger, faster opponents. For a squad that spends most of the year facing only Southeast Asian rivals, the value of a few matches like that exceeds many conditioning camps.

But here is where I want to be blunt. At the elite level of women's volleyball, height and reach decide the ceiling. The women's net stands at 2.24 metres, and the world's leading teams field attackers above 1.90 metres, sometimes close to two metres, behind three-woman blocks. Vietnam lives on technique, speed and nerve, yet in a five-set match against a European side, that gap surfaces in the decisive rallies. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy and Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen are the two hitters with enough reach to stand level with big opponents. The problem lies with the third and fourth options, and with the bench whenever one of those two rotates out or fades.

Volleyball permits six substitutions per set, plus the libero. That means squad depth is tested continuously, not once per match. A team with six hitters of comparable quality holds its rhythm in the fourth and fifth sets, when a tenth of a second lost in the footwork is enough to send a spike straight into the block. Watch how the Vietnamese women's team distributes the ball in set one compared with set four in regional tournaments, and the share funnelled to the two main hitters climbs as the match wears on.

I have to mention the coach here. Nguyen Tuan Kiet has done something several previous generations could not: he turned an emotional but structurally loose team into a system, particularly in blocking and back-court defence. That fingerprint is clearest in matches where the team falls behind and still claws back, the kind Vietnam used to lose with regret.

Based on my experience following matches at VTV Cup editions and the SEA Games, I have seen clear progress in Vietnam's back court. The digs from Le Thi Hong and the libero group stretch rallies and buy extra chances for the hitters. Doan Thi Lam Oanh sets with growing composure, and Bui Thi Nga remains a dependable link in the middle. But good defence only keeps a match within reach. To win, a team needs someone to finish the rally.

Beyond the court, the story is harder still. Our national championship has decent clubs: LP Bank Ninh Binh, the Signal Corps, VTV Binh Dien Long An, Duc Giang Chemicals Tia Sang, Vietinbank, Thanh Hoa. Yet the calendar is compressed into short windows each year, with a modest number of matches compared with a genuinely professional season. Young players in many provinces train all year to play a few dozen matches. That is the biggest knot, and it cannot be untied by an Olympic berth.

The international stage Vietnam builds for itself is worth mentioning too. The VTV Cup, an international women's tournament held in Ninh Binh and a few other localities, has brought foreign national teams and clubs to Vietnam. A few thousand seats, a more modest broadcast setup, but in terms of the idea behind it, this is our rehearsal room. The Americans build theirs in Anaheim to test cameras and crowd flows. We build ours in Ninh Binh to test where we stand.

There is a commercial paradox I want to put on the table. Vietnamese volleyball's pull is far greater than the team's ranking. Every SEA Games, every match against Thailand, every appearance by the women's team in an Asian event draws online audiences with Vietnamese commentary that many leading sports would envy. But viewers do not convert into competition slots. FIVB does not hand out tickets for viewing figures. A market full of volleyball lovers only matters when a team exists there capable of beating strong opponents, and that loops back to the same knot.

The contrarian view: the ticket is not the right target

This is where I separate myself from the crowd. Most Vietnamese fans talk about the 2028 Olympics as the ultimate goal. I believe framing it that way is slowing down the very thing it seeks. When the ticket becomes the goal, money and manpower flow to the national team, into short training camps, into a few friendly tournaments. When the domestic league becomes the goal, money flows into courts, into long-term player contracts, into youth academies in the provinces. A three-month season cannot produce a generation of taller hitters.

I have also been wrong often enough to know I could be wrong again. A rebel does not fear being wrong; he only fears being like everyone else. If FIVB expands qualification by awarding extra berths to continental champions, or if the number of Olympic teams grows, Vietnam's road shortens by several years. If a few young prospects above 1.85 metres emerge from training centres within two seasons, the physical picture shifts faster than I expect. And if a wave of overseas Vietnamese players returning to the national team becomes a real trend, the height question may be solved through the path Asian volleyball has always used.

Being 52 has taught me that a hot take is not recklessness, but daring to look one set further ahead. Looking one set further ahead here means this: do not measure the progress of Vietnamese women's volleyball by the ticket, measure it by the number of official matches a twenty-year-old player gets in a single year.

What I am willing to write down for later comparison

My prediction, recorded for future verification: if by the end of 2026 the Vietnamese women's team has not entered the top twenty-five of the FIVB ranking, then Anaheim and Los Angeles will be nothing more than a stand for us to watch from. If they do enter it, I will be the first to write that I underestimated the pace of this generation.

The majority is never wrong, but the majority never writes history either. People say I shock them. I am only naming what they are too polite to say.