Vietnam Sports Market Trends: Football, Esports and the Rise of Digital Platforms
A domestic app company made a deal to reach 1.87 billion viewers worldwide. This includes a Premier League broadcasting agreement. Five years ago, no Vietnamese platform would have dreamed of achieving this. FPT Play secured the Premier League rights in Vietnam until the 2030/31 season.
This means the platform will show nearly 200 matches this season and around 1,900 matches over the next five seasons. The platform has 35 million registered users now. It plans to reach 1.5 million paid subscribers in the next year. This goal is notable because Vietnam’s population is around 100 million.
Watching football often goes hand in hand with betting, even if broadcasters don’t always admit it. In many cases, one will find a betting site Vietnam where people can bet on football alongside live scores, and nobody sees anything odd in it. Betting and watching football used to feel separate. Now, they act as one. This change means that platforms must adjust to meet new demands.
Domestic football tells a messier, more layered story
Lower down the table, the picture stayed considerably more interesting, and arguably more representative of where the league actually stands right now:
- The third-place race among Hà Nội FC, Thể Công Viettel, and Ninh Bình was extremely tight since all three sides were only separated by a few points.
- A new rule made the old play-off system used to determine the team going down a thing of the past; the two lowest-placed teams would be automatically relegated without any second chance.
- Nam Định, double winners last two years in a row, ended up in fifth position – a difficult year compared to their previous standards.
Domestic league revenues cannot even begin to match those earned by the Premier League at the moment, nor are they likely to do so for some time to come. However, both attendance numbers and domestic sponsorship deals have shown steady improvement through the past few seasons. This would indicate that Vietnamese football does not necessarily require external entertainment in order to thrive.
Esports grew from almost nothing, and fast
Garena took the AIC 2025 tournament, which is considered the most important one for the game Лиан Куан Мобильный every year, for the first time entirely within Vietnam, hosting the semifinals in Hanoi and the finals in Ho Chi Minh City. Twelve teams from three different regions participated in this tournament, and it is worth noting that even two years ago, such a competition would be a challenging task for a local organizer.
Also, the tournament got rid of the outdated Swiss system, choosing simple group stages instead, and this decision was made only because non-gamers could not understand the system during live broadcasts. In the final of the tournament, Full Sense easily defeated Flash Wolves with a score of 4-1.
| Event | Prize pool | What changed |
| AIC 2025 | Undisclosed, regional | First full tournament hosted entirely in Vietnam |
| APL 2026 | $500,000 | Added 1v1 solo mode, introduced first Female Showdown |
| Esports World Cup 2026 | $3,000,000 | First AoV crossover event with Honor of Kings |
In the APL 2026 season, there are sixteen teams competing against each other in the two cities of Ho Chi Minh and Da Nang. There are two changes in format that have never before been seen in any other season: the first is the appearance of a 1v1 match that features an individual competitor, while the other change is the addition of a separate female event titled Female Showdown.
Betting platforms sit right in the middle of both worlds
Whether it’s a Premier League football match or an AIC bracket match being tracked, more often than not, both people will be using exactly the same kind of app in exactly the same hour and even on the same device and within the same session of web browsing. Melbet online casino now exists in the same shared space as score trackers and fantasy football apps instead of occupying its own dedicated corner of the internet devoted exclusively to gambling content. This is definitely a change from how things looked a decade ago when betting content was mostly offline or existed in niches of the internet where normal sports fans wouldn’t venture.
There are changes in the league system for Arena of Valor too, but these are substantial changes. Beginning Spring 2026, promotion and relegation will no longer be part of the process, as the participating teams will be selected based on a franchise system that ensures their participation without having to earn it through competition. The bounty-style prize pool, something adopted from the competitive league of another competing game title, comes into play in the form of financial incentives that were not present before in this tournament’s previous iterations.
What this actually adds up to
It is not as if fans are choosing between traditional football and online esports tournaments the same way that the old school marketing analytics will suggest. The two are going through the same few platforms that are usually switched back to back in the same evening viewing session with much less friction between the two compared to the friction that currently exists in the industries themselves. The same viewer who watches Premier League highlights on FPT Play would statistically look like the same viewer looking at the bracket for an AIC tournament from their smartphone an hour later.
The infrastructure that was designed for the other audience is now being used by both, even if the companies behind those platforms did not plan so from the start. It is the streaming sites, leagues, and the gambling apps that realized this trend and moved ahead. All others are just catching up.
