Viettel

Mỹ Đình National Stadium seats around 40,200 and belongs to the national team as much as to any club, which is exactly the arrangement Thể Công–Viettel FC has lived with in Hanoi: a tenant with no ground of its own.

The club began in 1954 as Thể Công, a football side raised inside the Ministry of Defence, and for decades that origin shaped everything about it — the nickname 'The Soldiers', and later the red shirts that gave rise to 'The Red Tornado'. It went through the name Câu lạc bộ Quân đội for over twenty years before returning to Thể Công, then folding in the Viettel telecoms sponsorship that eventually took over the name outright, before the military heritage was restored to the title in 2023.

On the pitch, the club's peak came at the turn of the millennium: four straight national titles from 2000 to 2003, a fifth added in 2004, and a run so dominant it still anchors the club's claim to being the most decorated in Vietnamese football history. The domestic cup has been less kind — five finals, five defeats, the last of them in 2023.

Continental football arrived late and briefly: a group-stage exit in the 2021 AFC Champions League, then back-to-back semi-finals in the AFC Cup's ASEAN Zone in 2022 and 2023, ended each time by a single opponent standing in the way. Inside Hanoi, the fixtures that matter most are against Công An Hà Nội and Hà Nội FC, the Capital Derby matches where the city's football rivalries actually live, since the stadium itself belongs to everyone and no one.