Anh Đức

When Thép Xanh Nam Định fell 2-1 to Selangor FC in the first leg of the ASEAN Club Championship semi-finals on Wednesday at MBPJ Stadium, the result itself was not a disaster. Brazilian striker Chrigor Moraes scored twice for the home side, with Nguyễn Văn Vĩ pulling one back, leaving the V.League champions a single goal away from levelling the tie at Thiên Trường this week.

But this season’s Nam Định cannot be measured by 90 minutes alone. The defeat in Petaling Jaya arrived in the same week that rumours surfaced of the club’s main sponsor potentially walking away ahead of the 2026/27 season. 

The list of clubs licensed for next season’s V.League, published by the VFF on Friday, registered the club simply as "CLB Bóng đá Nam Định". The "Thép Xanh" prefix, the steel industry brand attached since 2022, was conspicuously absent.

The club was quick to address the speculation. In a statement issued the same afternoon, Nam Định explained that AFC licensing rules forbid sponsor industry names in official club titles, which is why their international entry has always been "Nam Định FC". 

Domestically, they remain Thép Xanh Nam Định, and they said the sponsor “continues to accompany the team with great commitment”. On paper, this is plausible. The naming rule does exist, and the club has used it for years.

But rumours rarely emerge from nothing. The original 2022 sponsorship deal, reportedly worth at least VNĐ200 billion (US$7.6 million), was due to expire at the end of last year. Whether a new agreement has been finalised, and on what terms, remains unclear. Vietnamese football has seen sponsors come and go with bewildering speed, and for Nam Định’s supporters, the silence on specifics is unsettling.

And those supporters — or what remains of them — have already been here before. In August 2023, the official Nam Định Supporters’ Club voted unanimously to disband following a string of incidents that left fans feeling let down by the team’s commitment on the pitch. 

Fan club representative Nguyễn Văn Quân said at the time that “when love has been betrayed, it is very difficult to come back”. The supporters’ fanpage was renamed "Nam Định Football Past and Present", a quiet eulogy for a relationship that had defined one of Vietnamese football’s most passionate fanbases for years.

Thiên Trường, once the loudest cauldron in the country, has not been the same since. The atmospheric scenes of red flares and choreographed chants that helped make Nam Định the league’s most romanticised club have grown noticeably thinner. Recent V.League and continental success has filled some of that void with new fans, but new fans are different from old ones. They follow trophies. Old fans follow the club through everything.

Which brings us to where Nam Định find themselves now. They are still the V.League champions, still in the running for an ASEAN Club Championship final, still backed by serious investment. They have Nguyễn Xuân Son, the most marketable footballer in the country, on their books. The pieces are there.

But football clubs are not just pieces. They are institutions built on trust, between owners and sponsors, between players and fans, between a name above the door and the city it represents. The supporters’ club is gone. The sponsor’s commitment is being publicly questioned. And on Wednesday night, the team ran into a Selangor side that simply wanted it more.

If Thép Xanh Nam Định cannot turn this tie around at Thiên Trường this Wednesday, and if they cannot quickly clarify what is actually happening with their sponsor and their identity, they will lose far more than a semi-final. They will lose the last threads of credibility that hold a football club together. VNS