5 Questions with Dzung Le

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is  Dzung Le:

What is your first memory of football?

I don't have that big, special first memory of football, but only fragments. My dad picked me up from the kindergarten in 1998 earlier than usual, because the World Cup was on, and he told me something about France and Zinedine Zidane were doing very well. World Cup 2002, when I was 9 years old, in a huge party threw by LG Corporation to cheer for South Korean national team only for them to lose to Germany in the semi-final. All these football computer games like USM, TCM, CM, FM... Japanese football mangas were huge to me too. I grew into the sport with them.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche you’ve found in this space?

So far I have dipped into 2 "spaces" which are football journalism and football management. I think both have their own problems that I've experienced - obviously talking about Vietnam here.

I'm humble and proud to say that I was one of those who started pushing football tactical analytics into mainstream football journalism in Vietnam.

It started with me as a high school boy unhappy with the football coverage at the time as there were many stories but most of them were trivial and papparazzi-ish. And then I discovered the blog "Zonal Marking" on the internet. I can definitely say that Michael Cox' contents kicked start a whole new curiosity in me as I wanted football in a more strategic, manageable way. When I was younger I was really into the turn-based strategic video games such as Fire Emblem, Blue Lagoon, Der Langrisser etc, and probably in combination with Football Manager series, that was the moment I started to think about football tactics more and more and more.

I went to the Academy of Journalism and Propaganda (yup, that's a huge university in Vietnam) and starting writing about football tactics in a blog at first. Chances arrived and my tactics pieces came to the real newspaper pages/sites.

In this area, a huge thing that I had to face was the ideas against tactical content from the mainstream papers' editors. A lot of them thought that tactics is too advanced as a topic for the readers, and even more extreme: readers don't care about tactics.

There was an editor explicitly told me to write good lines for the winning team, because they must had been working their tactics out well, and the losing team must had been bad at it. He rejected the ideas that the losing team's tactics might had been good and aspects such as randomness and morale affected the games.

I tried to take these comments not as criticism but only as proof that my writings weren't good enough to convince them yet, in order to keep improving my journalistic skills. But at the same time I knew that this is a misconception because I kept writing a few blogs and the articles were doing very well, a lot of readers encouraged me to keep on with these tactical contents.

Maybe it is a bit of both - the writers have to try to improve the effectiveness of writing in order to get a better journalistic values to the articles, but at the same time, I believe that football tactics can be a really good topic to get the readers to keep subscribing.

The other field of my career which I'm on for the 4th year now, is football management. Now this is something more "inside" and definitely required from me much more skill sets. Still, I'm on a journey that is exciting but at the same time quite unthinkable to even myself. 26 years old CEO of a pro club is probably not in any of my plans or visions, but here I am.

Within this fields, there are so so many misconceptions around. The environment has been affected by Vietnam development, the mindsets from Subsidy Era, the lack of transparency in a lot of aspects around, but most importantly the lack of professionalism, lack of common interest in developing pro football in Vietnam. All contributed to a very weird and wrong way thinking of professional football and how it should be carried out.


If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

To be honest I can still go the very same route. But if choosing another is a possibility, I can think of studying abroad in sport science field, or economy, business management. At the same time, I'm an autodidactic learner, so I feel that I can still try to get more knowledge of these fields right now.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

- Definitely Pep Guardiola. His Bayern Munich team was eye-opening for me and I have to say that they changed my view of football forever. I had always thought that his Barcelona team was a miracle of luck to have not only him but the set of players that they had - which led me to believe that Pep might not be able to work it out elsewhere. But he proved me wrong and I'm happy to say that I have been learning from him and his assistants, his players everyday now.

- Rafa Benitez, probably because I used to be a Liverpool fan, and together with Mourinho he brought in a more organised way of playing to EPL in the 2000s. Good memories of his Liverpool with the unthinkable 2005 Istanbul game and the 2007-2009 period.

- Johan Cruyff, because I like to think of myself as one of his disciples.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

Johan Cruyff said many things that is unbelievably philosophic, one of which was "Football is a very simple game, but to play it simple is the most difficult thing to do". The game is a metonymy of life, no?