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Coach Park Hang Seo’s proposal for a mechanism for young players in the V-League is almost identical to the way Chinese soccer does it. Since 2017, the China Football Association (CFA) has established regulations on the use of young players for the national championship (CSL).
Consequently, each club must qualify at least 3 under-23 players to play in each match. This rule was relaxed from the middle of the 2018 season to a minimum of one player under the age of 23 playing per team game.
For 2019, CFA has a fit idea again. They want teams to use U23 players in the middle of a game or a full game. However, this proposal was not accepted by the clubs.
This CFA approach has not proven effective, while Chinese youth teams are consistently disappointing in the Asian arena. Part of the important reason is the behavior of the clubs. This led to a lot of funny and bad situations at CSL.
Many clubs assign an under-23 player to start and replace as soon as the game has started, or simply put on the field in injury time to “set the mode.” The record for the least competitive time went to Wen Junjie of the Tianjin Quyen Kien Club when he was substituted in the 14th second of the match. There are even clubs that get by by randomly replacing players on the field, bringing the goalkeeper to the striker.
To deal with this problem, CFA created the U23 tournament in a free-for-all format like the National Championship, replacing the reserve team tournament. The goal of the U23 tournament is to increase the number of games for young players so that they can meet the requirements of the CSL.
In Southeast Asia, Thailand also has a youth tournament system with a large number of participating matches and teams. Excluding the playoffs for local soccer centers and without professional teams, a Thai youth team can play up to 24 games per season.
Thai Youth League was born in 2016 with 4 levels, including U13, U15, U17 and U19. The teams are divided into 8 regions, each with up to 10 participating teams. The first and second teams from each region are entitled to participate in the final round in a 4-group cup match format.
A Thai youth team can play more than 20 matches a year.
The condition for Thai and Chinese football to adopt this approach is a solid enough financial base to support many youth teams and organize tournaments. Money can be a big deal, but the advantage of this approach is that young players are playing a lot to improve and prepare for the higher level playing field.
Similarly, Malaysian soccer also has a youth tournament system with more than 20 matches a year for each team. Malaysia’s under-21 national tournament has 24 participating teams, divided into two circular groups with two rounds, taking the top 4 teams from each knockout group in the round-trip format. The U19 tournament is also similarly organized with 20 clubs.
Recently, the Soccer Association of Malaysia (FAM) also studied with Singapore, leading the young team to the professional tournament. In addition to the youth team of the clubs, Malaysia also has a national youth player training program and they founded the Young Tiger Club, led by former national coach Ong Kim Swee to participate in the second division.
Currently, the Vietnamese youth tournament system still operates in the form of cup matches and regional qualifiers with a small number of teams and matches. In 2020, the Vietnam Soccer Federation has increased playing time for young players by hosting more U17 and U19 national cups.
