Cinema Opens the Door, Football Walks In: Reading the Soft-Power Machine Vietnamese Sport Still Ignores

In September, a fifth European film festival closed in Pakistan. Its final stops were Jamshoro and Hyderabad. Before that, the screenings had travelled through Quetta, Gujrat, Lahore, Gilgit, Karachi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Multan and Sialkot. No goals were scored there. No yellow cards were shown. Yet when I read back how the event was organised, I thought about football more than about any transfer story of the week.

I am not confusing two fields. I have lived through too many transfer windows to know that silence is sometimes the most valuable source. When Cong Phuong was at Mito, I learned that silence is a source too — the gap nobody confirms says more than any rumour. And a cultural event can, at times, say more about sport than a match can. The truth beneath this story is neither cinema nor diplomacy. It is a machine: a machine states use to open markets, to generate goodwill, to make people remember them without a single advertisement. Football runs that exact machine, differing only in scale.

What matters in this festival is not the line-up — sixteen European short films, eleven Pakistani shorts, a documentary strand and a children's strand. What matters is who staged it: the European Union Delegation to Pakistan, working with Olomopolo Media as co-curator. Dutch Ambassador Robert Jan Siegert, Austrian Deputy Head of Mission Hannes Machor and curator Kanwal Khoosat all appeared as spokespeople, speaking of a culture that "transcends geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries."

That is not an idle line. It is a policy statement wrapped in the language of art. In football we hear the same line whenever a European club lands in Asia, whenever a national team plays a friendly in a new market, whenever a tournament is awarded to a country that has never hosted one. Organisers call it "growing the global game". Insiders never say everything, but they leave fingerprints on every negotiation.

Look at the structure. The event began as a single screening and grew into a multi-city chain. That is the curve every sports marketer recognises: start small to test the response, expand once there is data, and finally plant a flag in smaller cities such as Sialkot, Gujrat or Jamshoro. In football we call it "going down to the grassroots". But let me be blunt: sometimes "grassroots" is just a polite term for taking a niche market before a rival gets there.

I once sat in a meeting room in Hanoi, listening to a club executive present a plan to take the team on a foreign tour. He did not talk about football. He talked about "brand reach", "target audience segments", "media value conversion". His presentation was identical to how a diplomatic delegation explains funding a film festival. Same language. Same logic. One side uses a ball, the other uses a reel.

The Price of a Success Without Numbers

In the festival report, one detail made me pause. The organisers spoke of "large, enthusiastic crowds". But there was not a single figure: no ticket count, no attendance, no occupancy rate. Success was asserted, not measured. In football we see this every week. A signing is billed as "the deal of the century" before a single official minute. A national team is "in great form" after two wins. In Russia in 2026, Neymar never broke his foot, yet the rumour broke the entire commentary box — and a national broadcaster confused what was being told with what had been verified.

That is the blind spot of every media machine: when numbers are not published, emotion takes the place of numbers. In sport this is more dangerous than in cinema, because behind a ticket is a market, and behind a market is a life. Behind every contract is a fate, not a figure. When a film festival claims "success" with no numbers, it only damages its own credibility. When a club does the same with a signing, it damages a human being.

When the Stand Becomes a Negotiating Room

Football is never only football. A friendly in a new market seeds a fan base, and that fan base years later pays for broadcast rights, shirts and tournament tickets. That is why big clubs never skip Asia, never skip North America, never skip places they had never set foot in a decade ago. Just as the EU Delegation did not choose Pakistan because Pakistani cinema was booming, but because planting goodwill in a young market is the cheapest long-term investment there is.

This explains a mechanism Vietnamese fans know well. European clubs and national teams come to Vietnam for pre-season tours. The stands are always full. But the question few ask is: who pays for the trip, and what do they expect back? An appearance fee for a big club can reach several million dollars a match, plus organisation, rights and security. That money does not vanish. It converts into brand reach, audience data, and a future shirt-and-merchandise market.

Here, Vietnamese sport usually plays the buyer, rarely the organiser. We pay to bring foreign teams in, but seldom build a product we can sell back out. That asymmetry is what I have watched for years. A football nation that wants to grow must learn to become the host of a story, not merely a guest in someone else's.

Consider how that festival worked: it did not bring an enormous European film industry. It chose sixteen short films, paired them with eleven local shorts, and took them into schools and smaller cities. Its strategy was not to display cultural power but to create a stage where locals became co-authors. That is exactly what good football academies do: they do not merely teach technique, they turn local players into representatives of their own community.

ESG, Sponsorship and Forgotten Stages

There is another layer rarely discussed. Cultural events like this usually sit in a diplomacy budget, and in an era when every institution needs a "social responsibility" story, they become convenient ESG decoration. A delegation can report: we brought art to small cities, we reached young people, we bridged cultures. Those reports look beautiful. But I always ask: when the applause stops, what remains?

In football, the same mechanism appears in women's sport. Many women's competitions are used by sponsors as a line in a sustainability report, as proof they care about gender equality. That sounds positive. But when prize money stays low, when broadcast rights stay cheap, when female players still need second jobs to live, that ESG medal is only a shell. Women's football does not need to be "celebrated", it needs to be paid properly. And a festival in small cities is the same: it needs real screenings reaching real audiences, not just a prettier annual report.

I once argued that goalkeepers whose basic reflexes have declined are still priced highly thanks to their distribution — a sanctification of a secondary skill to mask a fading primary one. The soft-power machine runs the same way. It highlights a secondary metric — number of cities, number of films, number of guests — to hide the core question: how much sustainable value is there? Insiders know. They simply choose not to say.

Cultural Agents and Player Agents

There is a parallel I cannot ignore. A film festival always has a central figure who coordinates: the curator. Kanwal Khoosat, in this case, decides which films screen, which cities are visited, which stories are told. That role is identical to a player's agent in the transfer market: they do not produce the product, but they shape how it is perceived.

And this is what I always warn about: player agents, with the noise they generate, are the largest hidden cost of the transfer market. They can turn a mid-tier player into a hot name, push the price up, then walk away when the deal collapses. A cultural curator can do the same with a programme: brand it "event of the year" before the first screening. The difference is the consequence. A failed film programme is forgotten next week. A failed transfer leaves a human being hung on the scales of numbers.

That is why I never describe a player as a tradeable good. I can analyse price, terms and motives, but I must not forget that behind it all is a family, a career, a life waiting on a signature.

The Counter-View: Do Not Turn Silence Into Assertion

I must remind myself of something in this very article. I am using a cultural event to talk about football. That is an analogy, not evidence. If I turned the organisers' silence into an assertion that "they are hiding something", I would betray my own principle: cross-check before you believe.

Silence is only a signal, not a conclusion. When there is no attendance data, the correct thing is to say "not enough data to judge", not "certainly a failure". I have seen too many colleagues turn gaps into clickbait, and I do not want to be one of them. A community leader must stay sober even when the public demands a clear answer.

For the same reason, I do not conclude that sport should stage film festivals. What I take away is narrower but more practical: sport should learn to read the soft-power machine before becoming a cog inside it. Because when you are only a guest, you get applause. When you are the host, you get a market.

The Next Dominoes

The transfer market has no away games, only people who cannot read a map. And the map of modern football is not drawn with touchlines but with brand lines, market lines and goodwill lines. A country that can stage an event where locals become the protagonists will gain more than a country that only invites others to perform.

The machine is not built overnight. It is assembled bolt by bolt through small, patient, long-term events. A film festival is one example. A friendly is another. And when COVID closed the stadiums, the V.League heard debt ringing louder than the whistle for the first time — that is also an example, a painful one, of how much a football nation without foundations loses when shock arrives. At this age I no longer hunt news; I hunt the truth beneath the rumours — and the truth now is this: we already have the materials to be the host. What is missing is someone to put pen to paper, and a pen clear enough to draw our own map.