Vietnam U23

Thailand is the fixture that gets circled first. The two sides meet often enough in age-group football that the region has a name for it — the ASEAN El Clásico — and a result against them tends to matter more than the medal on the other end of the tournament. That rivalry has shaped how Vietnam U23 is judged at home more than any single trophy has.

The side has not always finished on the winning side of it. It played its first official match in 1999, a 1–1 draw with Indonesia in Kuala Lumpur, and for years the regional record read as a string of near misses — silver at the Southeast Asian Games in 2003, 2005 and 2009, bronze in 2015. The shift came in 2018, when a team built under head coach Park Hang-seo reached the final of the AFC U-23 Asian Cup and lost to Uzbekistan in extra time, 1–2. Nguyễn Quang Hải finished that run as top scorer with five goals, and the run itself is what turned "Golden Star Warriors" — a nickname pulled from the star on the national flag — into a phrase people actually used.

What followed was less dramatic but more consistent: Southeast Asian Games gold in 2019, 2021 and 2025, and the AFF U-23 Championship won three times running, in 2022, 2023 and 2025, under Kim Sang-sik. A bronze medal at the 2026 AFC U-23 Asian Cup, with Nguyễn Đình Bắc as top scorer, added to that run without matching the height of 2018.

Home games are played in Hanoi, at the Mỹ Đình National Stadium, a ground built to hold just over 40,000 and one that fills closest to capacity whenever Thailand is the name on the other team sheet.