Bóng đá Huế

Sân vận động Huế still goes by its old name among locals, Sân vận động Tự Do, and holds close to 28,000 people who watch Bóng đá Huế play in white shirts trimmed with blue. The ground has outlasted every version of the club that has used it, which says something, because the club has gone through several.

It grew out of the Bình Trị Thiên side of 1975, taking its own identity a year later. For a stretch through the 1990s, playing as Thừa Thiên Huế, it came closest to the top of Vietnamese football, finishing runner-up in the V.League 1 in 1995. Sponsorship money from a local brewery then gave the team the name Huda Huế, a period that carried the club up and down between divisions — promoted in 2004 and again in 2007, relegated in the years between. When the sponsorship ended after 2011, the club rebuilt under its current name, Bóng đá Huế, and the nickname that had followed it all along, Đội bóng Cố đô, the Ancient Capital Team, stuck.

The Second Division title in 2013 marked the clearest point of that rebuild. None of it has matched 1995. Games against SHB Da Nang carry extra weight, a fixture known locally as the Hai Van Pass Derby, named for the mountain road separating the two cities.

The academy has kept producing players — Trần Danh Trung finished as the club's top scorer in 2019 before his move on — but money has rarely stayed long enough to keep them.