Four National Cup Exits: When V-League Clubs Choose the Cheapest Path

Four National Cup Exits: When V-League Clubs Choose the Cheapest Path Saturday afternoon at Quy Nhon stadium. The familiar Pleiku stands were gone, along with the gongs and the flags of the highland city. Hoang Anh Gia Lai walked into their National Cup 2026-2027 qualifier against Hung Yen with a squad thinner than last season, on a temporary pitch because Pleiku was being reworked after heavy rain repeatedly overwhelmed its drainage. By the 77th minute the score was 1-3. A 90+4 penalty made it 2-3, but the final whistle came before anyone could believe in a comeback. I stayed behind after the match, watching the players file into the tunnel. None of them hung their heads as if they had lost something enormous. Some even put their arms around each other and smiled faintly. In that moment I understood that for many clubs here, defeat is not really a tragedy. It is a decision made in advance, one nobody has put into words yet. The match had no crowd, but I still heard applause coming from small screens. In Quy Nhon that day, a few hundred Hoang Anh Gia Lai fans followed the game on their phones, posting furiously in private groups. They were not angry. They all asked the same question: "Will we survive relegation this season?" Eight matches, four falls The National Cup 2026-2027 qualifying round took place across two weekend days with eight matches. Four V-League representatives lost to first-division sides. Three of them lost at home. Only Bac Ninh managed the opposite, winning 3-2 away at first-division Long An. The list of defeats already reads cold: Thanh Hoa lost 0-2 at home to Becamex Ho Chi Minh City. Hoang Anh Gia Lai lost 2-3 to Hung Yen. Hai Phong lost 0-1 at home to Thep Can Tho. Hong Linh Ha Tinh fell 2-3 to Phu Tho on penalties after a 0-0 draw over 90 minutes. What matters is the context behind each beaten name. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City were just relegated and are a promotion candidate on the way back. Their squad is in no way inferior to hosts Thanh Hoa, and they played with more purpose, so the win was not especially difficult. Thep Can Tho had just "moved house" from Quang Ninh to the Mekong Delta city, and had lost their opening match of the 2026-2027 first-division season. Only days after joining the club, striker Thaileon scored the only goal of the match in the first half. Phu Tho eliminated Hong Linh Ha Tinh through sheer stubbornness from the spot. For many V-League clubs, especially those without major ambition, the National Cup has never been the main stage. The deeper they go, the more they spend on travel and accommodation, and the more they must worry about squad depth, while staying up in the V-League matters far more. Because of this, these V-League sides usually approach the National Cup rather casually, unintentionally creating the conditions for first-division teams to spring surprises when they show greater determination. The worry called money Thanh Hoa best embodied that casual approach, but they also had the most legitimate reason for it. The club from Thanh Hoa province only learned it still existed right before the 2026-2027 V-League began. Their squad was limited because there was not much money to retain key players or buy new ones. Then, before facing Becamex Ho Chi Minh City, they ran into a fresh money worry about keeping the club alive. FIFA ordered the club to pay more than 305,000 USD, roughly 8 billion Vietnamese dong, to Jamaican striker Rimario Gordon after he filed a complaint with FIFA. If the matter is not resolved within 45 days of receiving the document on September 16, Thanh Hoa will be barred from registering new players for three transfer windows. The knot lies in responsibility. The matter dates back to the previous sponsor's tenure, while Thanh Hoa have already been handed over to a new sponsor. This is the kind of trouble anyone who follows Vietnamese football recognizes: a debt left hanging through several generations of management, and the one who ends up paying is always the one who arrived last. Between the transfer numbers, I found the heartbeat of a human being, and that heartbeat is weakening because of money, not tactics. Back in Quy Nhon, Hoang Anh Gia Lai are also facing a hard season in the relegation fight after two straight defeats to open the 2026-2027 V-League. Their squad this season is weaker than last, so against a more ambitious Hung Yen, coach Le Quang Trai's men fell quickly. But perhaps exiting the National Cup early is good for Hoang Anh Gia Lai. The highland club need to concentrate their strength on the V-League, where they almost always have to fight relegation. The other two, Hai Phong and Hong Linh Ha Tinh, have had decent V-League starts, with one loss and one win each, yet their National Cup defeats were not surprising either, since their main goal remains the relegation race. What these four names share is not form. It is cash flow and squad depth. A club that wants to take the National Cup seriously needs at least two quality lineups to rotate between the main league and the cup. Thanh Hoa do not have it. Hoang Anh Gia Lai do not have it. Hai Phong and Hong Linh Ha Tinh are not flush either. When the survival of an entire season depends on finishing in the V-League safety zone, an expensive away trip in a deeper cup round becomes an investment nobody wants to make. The rhythm of a match is not in the scoreline, but in the silence between two passes. In those silences last weekend, what I saw was not negligence but calculation. The first-division sides entered with the mindset of people with nothing left to lose, while the V-League sides entered with the mindset of people who must protect everything. When two sides are roughly equal in real strength, that difference in mindset often decides the outcome before any tactical difference does. The counter-intuitive view The easy conclusion is that first-division teams have grown stronger. I do not think so. What is growing is hunger, not ability. The more interesting point lies on the other side: the four V-League defeats were not caused by superior opponents, but by those clubs accepting that this was not an important match. For them, a National Cup win does not bring a survival spot. A National Cup loss does not take one away. It is an arithmetic so simple it feels cold. The counter-intuitive part is this: if this were truly a measure of strength, the gap between Vietnam's two divisions would have narrowed to a worrying degree. Read closely, though, and the gap has not narrowed. What has narrowed is the gap in commitment, because one side gives up before kickoff. Last weekend's results came from two different strategies, not necessarily from two different levels. In a league where a survival spot is worth more than any trophy, the National Cup becomes a variable that V-League clubs actively remove from the equation. The four defeats last weekend were not accidents. They are the logical consequence of a football culture where survival always comes before glory. When a club only just learns it exists in time to keep playing, its indifference to a cup that brings no survival spot is entirely understandable. This does not mean the fans are not hurting. After the Quy Nhon match, someone messaged me: "Losing in the Cup doesn't make me sad, but I'm afraid I've gotten used to losing." That was the line that stayed with me longest all week. What fans write behind a player's back is often a love letter never sent. A supporter's greatest fear is not defeat, but the slow arrival of indifference, settling into their minds as a default. Rimario Gordon, Thaileon, Le Quang Trai: three names at three different layers of the story. One is suing a club over unpaid wages. One has just arrived and scored to knock out a V-League side. One is a coach trying to keep his team on what people still call home ground, even though it is no longer home. All of them are wrestling with the same question: with these resources, what must we choose to survive one more season? I keep the rhythm for those running on the pitch; that is how I belong to the match. And keeping rhythm this time does not mean counting goals. It means counting how many clubs can still afford to aim higher than survival. A league is measured by the number of clubs allowed to dream, not by the number brave enough to play. So the question for the coming days is not which first-division team advances. The real question is this: if survival is the only goal worth investing in, how many people will keep sitting after the final whistle, in ever-emptier stands, still willing to feel sad about football?