Tower Bridge, a Nearly Century-Old Band, and the Vietnamese Nights When the Streets Never Sleep

On a late-summer afternoon in London, a few hundred metres from the foot of Tower Bridge, a nearly century-old Mexican band suddenly set up a sound system right on the pavement and played a song. Passers-by stopped. Phones went up. A short video was filmed, posted online, and spread at a speed no box office could ever buy. Within a few hours, British police arrived, asked the group to stop playing and disperse. No one was arrested. There was no scuffle. There was only a performance interrupted mid-crowd, then dissolved into the afternoon as though it had never existed.

It was a small entertainment item. But when I read it, what surfaced in my mind was not music. It was football. And it was the nights when Vietnamese streets refuse to sleep.

I grew up in South Korea, I work in China, but there is one thing that pulls me back toward the S-shaped country every time their national team takes the pitch: the way people celebrate. Not inside the stadium. Outside, on the street.

A grandstand with no roof

In Vietnam, football does not live inside the stadium. It lives on the street.

The My Dinh National Stadium has a capacity of roughly 40,000 seats. But on the night of December 15, 2026, when Vietnam beat Malaysia in the second leg of the AFF Cup final, the number of people who took to the streets in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City was dozens of times that figure. They had no tickets. They had no seats. They had something else: a shared space in which to scream together.

I have rewatched the footage from that night many times. Not to count the crowd, but to watch how they stood. Someone dragged a plastic chair into the middle of an intersection. Someone hung a flag from a lamppost. A middle-aged man wept, still holding a bottle of water. A child sat on his father's shoulders, eyes wide at the sea of people. No grandstand could have choreographed that. It was born on its own, spread on its own, faded on its own.

When the fans sing aloud, that is not noise – that is the heartbeat of a city.

Context: why the street is where football truly happens

I hesitate to open with a number. But to understand why the street matters, we have to understand what the stadium has become in many football cultures.

Over the past few decades, stadiums have been redesigned as products. Seats are numbered. Sections are tiered. Security cameras cover everything. Fans become customers, and emotion becomes an add-on service. This model brings money, brings safety, and brings a very manageable order. But it takes away something else: the organised chaos that only the street can nurture.

In England, where I once spent a few months following matches, I noticed a paradox. England has one of the most commercialised football cultures in the world, and it is also the place where public space is most tightly controlled. A band performing near Tower Bridge can be asked to stop at any moment, for reasons of public order. So can a group of fans gathering too densely on a street corner.

That is what made me think of Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the street still preserves something Europe lost long ago: the right to gather simply to be happy together. People do not wait for a ticket. People do not wait for a permit. They wait only for the final whistle.

The core: when football becomes the emotional infrastructure of a city

I write about football, but really I am writing about people. And when I write about people, I am forced to write about the space they occupy.

Take a city like Hanoi on the night of a big match. Before kick-off, cafes in the Old Quarter push chairs onto the pavement. Old televisions are hung on walls. The commentator's voice spills into the street. When the referee blows his whistle, the whole row of streets stands up as one body. A goal comes, and the road surface erupts. No loudspeakers needed. No big screens needed. Only a stretch of space wide enough for thousands of people to breathe together.

Based on my experience following matches across different cultures, I have distilled three layers to a "street grandstand".

The first is the material layer. The street is the only place that needs no construction. It is already there. The cost of turning an intersection into a grandstand is zero. This is the most important economic reason that few mention: in countries where sports infrastructure is still modest, the street is a free stadium, open twenty-four hours, with unlimited capacity.

The second is the social layer. When they take to the street together, a lottery-ticket seller and a bank executive stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, shouting the same rhythm. Football achieves something very few other things can: it temporarily erases hierarchy. For fifteen minutes of celebration, that hierarchy vanishes. It is a small miracle, and it repeats after every victory.

The third is the layer of memory. What we remember about a victory is not the score. We remember where we stood, who we yelled at, who we hugged. The stands stand empty, yet hearts still beat to the rhythm of the ball – and those hearts need a street to beat together on.

I once interviewed, over video call, seven Vietnamese fans across seven different provinces during the period when competitions had to be suspended because of the pandemic. A man who sold drinks in front of Thong Nhat Stadium told me something I still remember: "With no one coming to the stadium, I have no reason to open up either." He was not talking about money. He was talking about a rhythm of life. When the stands close, an entire network of livelihoods and emotions around them stops breathing.

The ball is round, but fate never is

There is one thing I always try to hold in mind when I write about nights of celebration: it is not only joy.

In that crowd there is someone who just lost their job. Someone who just broke up. Someone who was just called the wrong name on a form. They go out not only because the national team won, but because it is the only reason this month to be part of something larger than themselves. Collective joy has a very human dark side: it exposes the gaps that daily life keeps hidden.

When I rewatch the scenes of three young Black English players criticised, even racially abused, after a major final defeat, I understand that not everyone is allowed to celebrate in the same way, and not everyone is treated the same in defeat. Skin colour does not decide talent, but it decides how people look at you. The same missed shot is an "occupational accident" for one person and "nature" for another.

In Vietnam, the street is more democratic in spatial terms, but it is not thereby immune. Who is allowed to occupy the intersection? Who is asked to disperse? On those nights, I notice that people manage the crowd, not the joy. Joy takes care of itself.

The counter-intuitive angle: when "professionalisation" kills the grandstand

Here I must say something contrary to the prevailing trend.

The football industry, for years, has believed that the way to grow is to build controlled "fan zones". Big screens in squares. Entry cards. Traffic routing. Fences. All of it reasonable, all of it civilised, all of it for safety.

But every fence erected is a little heartbeat cut away.

I do not deny the need for safety. I only question the exchange rate. When a city turns open space into space with a door, it does not merely manage a crowd. It converts emotion into a kind of service with opening and closing hours. And once emotion has closing hours, it begins to become an event rather than a ritual.

Look again at the story in London. A band nearly a hundred years old, on its European tour to mark its own journey, played a few minutes on the pavement. The police came. The performance stopped. No one protested. No one rioted. There was only a moment cut short, and a self-posted video that quickly spread on social media.

What is notable is not the legal merit of stopping the performance. What is notable is the public response. Thousands shared that video for a simple reason: they regretted it. They regretted a street moment being cut off. They felt as though they themselves had been ejected from a party they had not yet joined.

In Vietnam, the football world often looks toward European standards for event organisation. I understand that desire. But if we imitate the control and discard the abandon, we will get prettier grandstands and sadder street nights. And football, in the end, lives on street nights.

The blind spot that collective memory often covers over

There is a kind of pride I still hear in many places: "Now kids go to the stadium instead of gathering in the streets." That sounds very progressive. But it carries a false assumption: that the street is the faulty version of the stadium, and the stadium is the correct one.

The street is not the faulty version. It is the ancestor.

Before there were stadiums, seats, tickets, cameras, people already played football in the street, and already watched it in the street, together. Modern football was born from empty lots, alleys, and patches of ground no one owned. When we praise the stadium, we are praising the descendants. But we tend to forget the grandfather.

And there is a very small truth that few notice: the greatest Vietnamese players all once played on concrete pitches littered with broken glass. Nguyen Quang Hai once trained under conditions a European academy would call "impossible to coach in". Doan Van Hau, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tien Linh – this list is long, and each name is a sliver of street packed into a shirt.

When collective memory forgets this, it forgets not just a historical detail. It forgets the root from which Vietnamese football drew its strength: its rawness, its spontaneity, and the belief that any patch of ground can become a launchpad.

The moment I always look for

I remember a World Cup semi-final I once reported on when I was still a student contributor. When the final whistle blew, I did not look at the scoreboard. I looked at the tunnel. One player slumped down, and a teammate bent to embrace him. No camera prioritised them. But it was the only moment that made me understand what I wanted to write about: the moment of a generation's defeat, held up by the very people who had failed alongside.

Defeat deserves to be told in a human voice, not through a spreadsheet. A loss is not a growth lesson. It is a sting. And the writer's job is not to smooth that sting into motivation.

I say this because I worry about Vietnamese football in the current period. As domestic leagues become more professional, as player wages rise, as stadiums are upgraded, as academies sprout – all of it is good news. But if professionalisation pushes emotion out of the street and locks it into limited-area zones, then we are trading blood for bone. Bone looks good in photographs. Blood is what makes life.

People in the moment

I keep thinking about the drink seller in front of Thong Nhat Stadium.

Once he told me about a night of celebration. He sold out every bottle in his cooler. But what he remembered was not the profit. He remembered that a group of young people came back after the crowd dispersed and helped him clear away the chairs. He said: "They did not buy anything more. They just cleaned up. And still I was happy."

That is football. Not in the goal. In people staying behind after everything is over.

And the student I interviewed by video call told me she cried when the club her father loved was knocked out. She said: "My father has passed away. But every time that team plays, I sit in exactly the spot he used to sit." Football here is no longer a game. It is a seat.

And that seat, sometimes, is not inside the stadium.

Why I keep coming back to the street

There is a question I ask myself every time I finish a piece: "If I were the other side, how would I feel?"

When I write about fans taking to the street, I must also write about those who clean up after they leave. About the traffic police who must stand amid a singing crowd. About street vendors who must pack up before being asked. Collective joy always has people bearing its cost, and usually the bearers are not the ones singing.

That is why I do not want to turn the street into a myth. I only want it recognised as real infrastructure: it has users, it has operators, it has people who bear the cost, and it has spiritual value that cannot be measured in money.

Empty stands, and what they taught us

During the period when stadiums had to close because of the pandemic, I started a small blog. I wrote about old matches rewatched through a screen, and I noticed something strange: those matches lost a great deal of their weight when there was no crowd behind them.

A beautiful pass is not a beautiful pass without the collective gasp of a crowd. A goal is not a goal if no one, somewhere, jumps up and knocks over a glass of water.

Empty stands taught us that football is incomplete without spectators. And spectators, to truly be spectators, need a place to be together. That place can be a stadium. But most of the time, it is a street.

What I want to see next

I do not want Vietnamese football to have to choose between the stadium and the street. That is a false choice.

What I want is for organisers to understand that the street is not the enemy of order. It is a partner. A city that knows how to close one street for one night of celebration is not a weak city. It is a city that knows joy also needs infrastructure.

As for writers like me, the job is very simple: record it. Do not judge. Do not embellish. Just sit in the crowd, listen to the singing, look at the faces, and capture the moment when a stranger suddenly becomes an acquaintance because of the same team.

I write about football, but really I am writing about people. And people, to feel they belong to one another, sometimes need only a stretch of street wide enough, one banner, and one shared shout.

The interrupted moment, and what remains

Back to the story at Tower Bridge. That band travelled nearly a century to stand there. They crossed countries, generations, upheavals. And then, within minutes, they were asked to stop. The performance ended. But someone filmed it. Someone posted it. Someone in another city, ten thousand kilometres away, watched and smiled.

Football is the same. Every beautiful moment on the pitch can be cut off by a whistle. But the moment the crowd creates around it cannot be cut by anyone. An emotion that has spilled into the street stays in the street. A city that has breathed together will always remember that it once breathed together.

The ball is round, but fate never is – it rolls through the cracks of history. And on those cracks, sometimes, a street full of people grows up.

A thought to take away

If one day we finish building every stadium to international standard, and teach every young player modern technique, yet no one takes to the streets to celebrate any more, then we will have won at the technical level and lost at the level of the soul.

Tomorrow, when the national team plays, look out your window before you look at the screen. Notice who is setting out a plastic chair on the corner. Notice who is hanging a flag from a lamppost. Because the history of Vietnamese football, for the most part, is written by hands like those.

And if your city closes a street for that night, walk through it. Do not just watch on television.

Matches will be forgotten. Scores will fade. But the feeling of standing in a sea of people all shouting one name – that will not.

That is why I believe Vietnamese football does not need more stadiums. It needs more streets.