When the Beat-Keeper Leaves: Kim Sang Sik's Return to South Korea and the Week No One Watches

On Tuesday morning, I sat in the corner of the secondary stand of a training pitch I have known for many years. Not Camp des Loges. Not a European training centre. Just a well-mown patch of grass where the monsoon wind still sweeps through every late afternoon. On the pitch, the players warmed up according to the familiar routine. Thirty minutes passed. Forty. No one stood where you usually see him stand. The beat-keeper was absent, and the whole team still had to keep the exact tempo of the music. I have attended many such training sessions in my life. In Belgrade at nineteen, in Barcelona in the nineties, in Tokyo, in Paris, in Kazan. But the void a person leaves on a training pitch — that void always has its own shape. People can talk about results, about league tables, about goals. As for me, I look at the void. That morning, the void had a Korean nationality. And the real story began there. The news came from the Vietnam Football Federation early in the week. National team head coach Kim Sang Sik had returned to his home country, South Korea, to mourn his father. His father, an eighty-four-year-old man with health problems that had dragged on for months, had passed away. Mr Kim is expected to stay home for about a week to handle the funeral and comfort his family before returning to Vietnam. The President of the Vietnam Football Federation encouraged him to go home: go home, look after your father, then think about football. People remember the goals. I remember the silences between two beats of the ball. And this week — the week in which the Vietnam national team prepares for the ASEAN Cup 2026 — is precisely such a silence. I am not here to report on a death. I am here to record what the bulletins usually omit: how a collective learns to live when its conductor is forced to put down the baton. At the ASEAN Cup, a tournament that runs from the twenty-fourth of September to the fifth of October, Vietnam is in Group A alongside Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan. Thailand is regarded as the main rival. The Philippines is rebuilding with a new generation of naturalised players. Pakistan, on paper, is the weakest side. On paper. I learned in Russia in 2026 that the phrase "on paper" has never saved anyone in a short tournament. To understand why a one-week absence of a coach deserves two thousand words, one must recall something basic about Southeast Asian football. Regional tournaments do not have the preparation rhythm of a European club season. There are no three months of friendlies. No pre-season tournament for experimentation. National teams gather in short blocks — a few days to a few weeks each — and then separate again. The entire philosophy of play, every set piece, every press-escape pattern, must be compressed into a very narrow window. In such a narrow window, each day of training is a page that cannot be rewritten. And this is where the bulletins often oversimplify. People say Mr Kim is "away for a week". But where exactly does that week fall in the schedule? If it falls in the phase where players have just reassembled, just become reacquainted after months playing for different clubs, then it falls in the phase where the head coach's presence matters most. Not because he runs the drills — the assistants can do that. But because he is the only one who tells the whole team what football we are playing, for the Thailand match, for the Philippines match, and why. Sitting on the training pitch that morning, I remembered the summer of 2026 in Paris. I was fifty-nine then, sitting in a corner of Camp des Loges, meticulously recording the combination drills of Marquinhos and Presnel Kimpembe. That season PSG had Neymar and Mbappé, had four goals past Barcelona in the first leg of the Champions League, and then lost 1-6 at Camp Nou. No one in the press room could understand it. As for me, I went to the groundskeeper. He told me that on that night, in the tunnel at Camp Nou, the PSG players stood in silence for twenty minutes. No one said a word to anyone. That silence was the thing truly written into history, not the scoreline. I retell that story for one reason. A football collective does not operate through tactical meetings. It operates through small habits repeated daily — the way the head coach stands at the touchline, the way he stays silent when a player errs, the way he claps when a player does the smallest thing right. When that person is absent, the collective does not lose its ability to run. It loses its echo. And the echo, in football, is what defines style. At the Vietnam national team, Mr Kim Sang Sik has held the reins since May 2026. In that period, he has led both the U23 and the senior national team, achieving notable results in regional and continental competitions. He is described as a man deeply focused on his work, committed to both levels of the national team. That is an unassuming record. No shocking statements. No significant dressing-room conflict leaking out. Only the work, repeated, daily. In seven seasons sitting in press areas and at training touchlines, I have drawn an observation that may seem strange to many. The coaches who leave the deepest marks are usually not the ones who talk the most. They are the ones who repeat the most. They create rhythm. And rhythm, one only notices when it is interrupted. The training pitch never lies. It only whispers to those who choose to sit and stay. This week, I stayed, and I heard the whisper in the gaps between the drills. So what is actually happening during that week? There are three layers of events, and if one looks only at the first layer, the whole thing will be misread. The first layer is personal. A sixty-year-old man, living far from home, receives news that his father has died. The father was eighty-four, with longstanding health problems. This is a personal loss, and I have no intention of turning it into a commentary piece. But I record one detail sometimes overlooked: when a man has known for months that his father is gravely ill, he has already begun psychological preparation. What the psychological profession calls "anticipatory grief" softens the shock, so it is not as intact as when news arrives suddenly. That does not make the loss lighter. It only means he may already have a portion of equanimity with which to handle the work. The second layer is organisational. The Vietnam Football Federation reacted quickly. The Federation President directly encouraged Mr Kim to go home. The official statement released to the public used balanced language: condolences, no result pressure, no accompanying expectation about the return date. This is the kind of handling that football governance circles call "managing collective emotion". It is not entirely out of kindness. It is also out of long-term interest. A coach forced to remain in his seat while his father dies will never forget. A coach given the conditions to go home will remember forever. Here, I want to draw a comparison I have witnessed many times. There are federations that handle personal situations as if they were logistical problems. They send a condolence letter, send a wreath, and then implicitly pressure the coach to return in time for the tactical drill day. That kind of handling leaves a very long crack. And there are federations that handle things as if the person matters more than the schedule. They say: go home, look after your family, we will mind the team. That kind of handling also leaves a mark — but in the opposite direction. It creates loyalty. I do not know what specific conversations took place inside the Vietnam Football Federation. I only know what the public statement showed: they chose the second kind of handling. The third layer is technical, and this is the part I want to spend the most time on. Because of the three layers, this is the least analysed. Let us begin with a basic question. What actually happens when the head coach is absent for a week during the pre-tournament phase? The naive answer — which many would give — is: "It's fine, the assistants can manage". That answer is not wrong. But it is not complete. In professional football, assistant coaches usually know the curriculum well. They know the fitness schedule, the combination drills, the set pieces. What they cannot replace is the decision-making authority. A head coach does not merely "run a training session". He makes decisions every day. Do we train high-intensity pressing today, or conserve energy for a friendly? Does Player A get tried in a new position, or stay nailed to his old one? Should we switch from four at the back to three at the back in the next two days, or wait until the squad is fully available? Those decisions are small, but they accumulate. A week may include five, six such small decisions. Added together, they form the team's direction for the whole tournament. In the case of the Vietnam national team, one factor makes everything more complex. The team is in the same group as Thailand. This is not just a strong opponent. This is the opponent that an entire football industry analyses more thoroughly than any other in the region. Matches against Thailand are usually decided by small details — a counterattack, a corner kick, an offside trap sprung at the right moment. Preparing for such a match requires more than physical training. It requires video sessions, scenario simulations, individual training for each player on his direct opponent. That is the kind of work only the head coach can do, because it is tied to his philosophy. An assistant cannot tell a player: "I choose to play this way". Only the head coach has that authority. And when he is absent, those video sessions may still happen, but they become data presentations rather than the shaping of an idea. Of course, there is another reading. Some will say: one week does not change the essence of a national team that has trained together for months. The key players already know the system. The assistants are already familiar with the philosophy. When the head coach returns, he only needs ten days to make the final adjustments. This reading is also reasonable. The truth — as in most football questions — lies in the middle. A one-week absence does not collapse the system. But it removes a layer of cohesion. And that layer of cohesion, in short tournaments, is the thing that separates the team that advances from the team that goes home after the group stage. Here I want to tell another story. In the summer of 2026, I was in Kazan following the France national team. I discovered something strange: Benjamin Pavard, then still young, often stayed on the training pitch until nine in the evening, practising high balls on his own. I counted fourteen shots from outside the penalty area per session, over three consecutive days. When Pavard scored a crucial goal against Argentina in the round of sixteen, I wrote a piece about "the nine o'clock detail in Kazan". Not to praise an individual. But to explain that the goal was the product of a process repeated in silence. That story relates to Vietnam's week in a direct way. Who observed those training sessions during the past week? Who counted how many times a player stayed out an extra half hour? Who noticed that a full-back was changing his stance while the team defended? Those details do not appear in the official statement. But they are the raw material of a real analysis. During the week of the head coach's absence, there is a kind of hidden labour. It is the labour of the assistants. They work more, carry more responsibility, but no one writes about them. In seven seasons at the touchline, I have learned that assistant coaches are the class most forgotten by football history. They prepare the drills, they guide the substitutes, they analyse opponents, they keep the phone line open with the head coach during his days away. But when the team wins, people call the name of the man in charge. When the team loses, people also call the name of the man in charge. In between, silence. There is a question I kept asking myself throughout that week. If Vietnam plays well at the ASEAN Cup, the story of this week will become a story of overcoming adversity. If the team does not play well, the story of this week will become an explanation. Both are wrong. Both are simplifications of a complex process. And this is where I move to what I consider the most important part of this piece: the part that contradicts common feeling. When news of the head coach's absence breaks, the media's first reaction is usually worry. "Will the team be affected?" "Will the preparation plan be disrupted?" "Will the players lose focus?" Those questions are emotionally reasonable but not necessarily technically correct. Because there is a paradox I have observed many times: a short absence of a leader sometimes makes a collective tighten, not loosen. The paradox works as follows. When the head coach is present, players know the decision-making authority lies with another. They can focus on execution. When he is absent, each player must ask himself: what am I doing, why am I doing it, and am I doing it right. That is a process of self-discipline, and it can produce a new mental state — what sports psychology calls "diffused responsibility". Responsibility is no longer concentrated in one person but distributed across the collective. In football, that state has a certain value, but only for a short time. If it drags on too long, the collective disintegrates for lack of a director. But over about a week, it can generate a kind of positive energy invisible to outsiders. This does not mean I dismiss Mr Kim's absence. Not at all. That absence has real technical value. But that value does not lie in players losing focus. It lies in tactical decisions being postponed. Those are two very different things. Here I want to offer an observation I have pursued for many years. Sports bulletins tend to overrate collective emotion and underrate process detail. When a team loses, people talk about spirit. When a team wins, people talk about character. Very rarely do people talk about a small decision made on the correct Tuesday of last week, a decision that only three weeks later becomes a consequence on the pitch. In the case of the Vietnam national team, what is the notable process detail? It is the preparation schedule for the Thailand match. Not the three group matches in general. Precisely the Thailand match. Because that is the match that decides top spot, and top spot decides the bracket for the semi-finals. In a short tournament, bracket structure can matter more than squad quality. The strongest team is not the champion. The team that avoids the toughest opponent in the semi-finals is the champion. The Thailand match usually requires ten days of preparation, not one meeting. That includes individual video analysis, training-ground scenario simulations, testing options for dealing with the opponent's characteristic style. During the week Mr Kim was away, those tasks were compressed or postponed. When he returns, he will have about ten days to squeeze those postponed tasks back into an already full schedule. That is an optimisation problem, not a morale problem. This is the point I think is the biggest blind spot of the conventional reading. People usually fear the team will lose spirit when the head coach is away. In reality that is rarely the case over a short period. The greater worry is that the team loses a layer of preparation that cannot be rewritten. As I said at the start of this piece: in a narrow preparation window, each training day is a page that cannot be rewritten. That week is a blank page, and when Mr Kim returns, he will either have to accept that or find a way to write it in. I have watched four generations of players. They differ in their legs, they resemble one another in their loneliness. And that loneliness is not only the players'. It is the coach's too. When Mr Kim sat on the plane back to Korea, he was not only a father who had lost his father. He was a head coach thinking about the Thailand match while weeping beside his father's coffin. That is the particular loneliness of this profession — a profession in which one is forced to divide one's mind between two things that cannot coexist: private grief and shared responsibility. And that is also why I want to devote the next part of this piece to an aspect I think has been entirely overlooked in analyses of this event: the long-term effect on Mr Kim himself. When a coach goes through a major personal loss, there are two directions of development. The first is that he returns to the work treadmill with greater intensity, more focus, as if trying to prove something to himself. Many athletes and coaches choose this path. They turn work into a refuge. The second is that he returns with a slower rhythm, a different composure, a somewhat more cautious way of making decisions. Both directions can lead to success, but they produce two very different leadership styles. I do not know which direction Mr Kim will choose. No one knows. But I know that this is a factor outside analysts usually fail to consider when assessing a coach. We usually assess coaches by match results, by post-match statements, by personnel choices. But we rarely assess coaches by their mental state in the aftermath of loss. Yet that state can change the way he treats players, the way he handles pressure, the way he makes decisions in the final minutes of a match. A coach in a state of deep calm tends to choose safe options. A coach in a state of determination to prove himself tends to choose risky options. Both are consequences of the same emotional shock. Neither option is absolutely right or wrong. There is only the option that fits or does not fit a specific team at a specific moment. Here I want to recall the story of Paris in the 2026–2026 season. That was the season I lived alongside PSG in the first year of Neymar and Mbappé. After the 1-6 collapse at Camp Nou, the head coach of PSG at the time — I will not name him — walked into the press room looking quite different. He did not talk about tactics. He talked about "collective feeling". People judged that as weakness. I thought it was the moment when a coach was truly enduring what his team was enduring. When a collective is collectively wounded, the leader cannot pretend to be unharmed. And that night, he did not pretend. I retell that story because I believe that during this week, something similar is happening in a very different place on the football map. It is not a collective defeat. It is the personal loss of the leader. But the psychology operates the same way. When the leader suffers, the collective can react in two directions — tighter, or disintegrating. And which direction occurs depends on the quality of communication within that collective in the days that follow. If within the Vietnam national team there are veteran players who step up to organise small conversations, if the assistant coaches communicate with players clearly and calmly, if the team can say to one another "we will do this for the boss", then the absence can become fuel. If the team merely endures in silence and waits, the absence can become an iceberg. This is why I say the story of this week is not the story of a coach's absence. It is the story of how a collective reacts to that absence. And that story has no ending yet. Seen from afar, from a training pitch in Paris, I notice something easily misread. People can read the news of Mr Kim's absence and think: "It's only a week". But in Southeast Asian football, a week is a lot. A week can be the only period in which a national team has its full squad to train together before a tournament. A week can be the period in which a young player impresses the head coach to earn a place. A week can be the period in which a tactical option is tested and either kept or discarded. Of course, I am not saying the absence will destroy the tournament. That reading is exaggerated. I am only saying that in a tournament structure where preparation days are already tightly compressed, each day has its own value. And we should be honest with one another about that rather than deny it because we do not want to add pressure to a man in mourning. The beautiful thing about football is this: in such situations, the collective often responds by surpassing itself. I have watched teams play better after their coach suffered a personal loss. Not because they played with grief. But because they played with a new awareness — the awareness that this match is not only for themselves, but also for someone thousands of kilometres away. If that happens with the Vietnam national team in the coming ASEAN Cup, I will not be surprised. But I also will not confuse that new awareness with tactics. In football, emotion can open a match. But it cannot open a tournament. A tournament is opened only by correct decisions made at the right moment. Back to the story on the training pitch on Tuesday morning. The session proceeded normally. The players warmed up, ran, combined, shot. No one skipped the session. No one said a single word about the absence. Only one thing I noticed: after the session ended, two players stayed an extra fifteen minutes. They did not talk to each other. They simply stood still, looking at the pitch. I do not know what they were thinking. But I know that in such silences, a collective is asking itself one single question: this week, what will we do when the boss is not here? Russia was strangely silent. And it was precisely that silence that said the most. I wrote that line after my trip to Kazan in 2026, but it could apply to anywhere, in any season. When a collective prepares for a big match, it is usually quieter than usual. Not out of fear. Out of focus. That silence is not a sign of weakening. It is a sign of a process of internalisation taking place. The beat-keeper is absent, but the rhythm must still be held. The question is not: will the team keep the rhythm? The question is: who will be the one holding the rhythm during that week, and for whom do they hold it? I have no answer to that question. But I can say this with a certainty accumulated over seven seasons of sitting behind training sessions. The team that holds its rhythm during the weeks when the beat-keeper is absent will have a different season. Not an easier season. A more mature one. As for Mr Kim, I hope he has enough time to look after his father. Not because that is good for Vietnamese football — although it is. But because it is right. The training pitch never lies. It only whispers to those who choose to sit and stay. And this week, as I stayed, I heard the whisper in the gaps between drills, in the sound of the ball bouncing on grass, in the breathing of a collective trying to keep the exact tempo of the music when its beat-keeper is thousands of kilometres away. The ASEAN Cup 2026 kicks off on the twenty-fourth of September. Vietnam will face Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand in the group stage. It is not an easy bracket, but not an impossible one. What decides is not the total number of group-stage points. What decides is which match the team plays in its true style, and which match it merely endures. If in the next ten days, when Mr Kim returns, Vietnam's training sessions are of high quality — not loud, just high quality — then that week will not be a loss. It will be a meaningful void. And a meaningful void, in football as in life, is a form of preparation people only recognise when it turns into a result. In these days, as I sit in the corner of the secondary stand and watch the Vietnam national team train on my screen, I am not looking for goals or beautiful passes. I am looking for a very small signal: whether any player stays on the pitch an extra half hour after training. Whether any player repeats a movement more times than usual. Those are signals the cameras do not replay. But they are exactly what tells me where the team is on its journey. Keeping the beat, for me, is counting what no one hears. And during this week, I am counting. Counting the gaps. Counting the players who stay. Counting the breaths slightly longer than usual after the final whistle of training. Those numbers say nothing yet. But I believe they will speak. After the twenty-fourth of September, when the ball rolls, all those gaps will be filled with a single answer: what happens on the pitch. I do not know what that answer will be. No one knows. But I know one thing. After weeks like this — weeks when the beat-keeper is absent — football usually gives back a different image of itself. Not the image of stars. Not the image of goals. But the image of a collective standing closer together in a moment when no one forced them to. That is what I am waiting for. Not to witness a victory. But to witness that collective, after everything, still holding the right beat. And to Mr Kim Sang Sik, I can only say what any chronicler learns after years at the touchline: grief does not make a person weaker. It only makes them different. And football, with its gentle cruelty, always gives a person a chance to become acquainted with that other version of themselves. That week ends, and another week begins. He will return. The team will train. The ASEAN Cup will take place. And throughout those days, there will be a sixty-year-old man standing at the touchline of a training pitch, recording what does not appear on the electronic scoreboard. A stance. A gap. A breath slightly longer than usual. Those things, over seventy-two years, have taught me that football does not really lie on the pitch. It lies at the edge of the pitch, in the silences only the beat-keeper can hear. And this week, the beat-keeper is thousands of kilometres away. I am here. I am listening.