The limits of Vietnam’s long-standing development logic

An upcoming 135,000-seat stadium exposes the risks of chasing global visibility before resolving domestic realities

In late 2025, Vietnam officially broke ground on a new stadium designed to hold 135,000 spectators. If completed in 2028 as planned, it would become the second-largest stadium in the world, surpassing iconic venues such as Maracana, Wembley, and Camp Nou.

For international readers, this detail matters. The project is not merely about sports infrastructure; it is a statement of ambition. Vietnam is signaling its desire to position itself as a global hub for major cultural and sporting events, capable of hosting spectacles on the world stage.

The groundbreaking ceremony on Dec. 19 was attended by the prime minister and senior corporate leaders. Yet beyond its scale, another detail drew public attention: speed. From the moment the project was publicly announced to the first shovel hitting the ground, only a few weeks passed.

For some, this speed symbolized decisiveness and national confidence. For others — particularly farming communities whose land was rapidly reclaimed — it raised unease. Everything seemed to happen too quickly for ordinary lives to adjust.

This tension points to something deeper than a single project. It reflects a long-standing development mindset in Vietnam: build first, think later.

A familiar mindset

For much of the past few decades, Vietnam was not known for fast-moving projects. Delays, stalled construction, and unfinished works were common, caused by funding shortages and bureaucratic bottlenecks. The ability to build quickly is, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging mainly over the past several years.

This acceleration coincides with a period of rapid economic expansion driven largely by public investment. Large-scale infrastructure — transport corridors, urban projects, industrial zones, and landmark facilities — has become a central engine of growth.

In this context, speed has increasingly been treated as a virtue in itself, a visible sign that development is finally “working.”

However, as Vietnam enters a more complex stage of development, this emphasis on speed and scale has begun to reveal its limits. Execution is increasingly replacing strategy, while harder questions — actual demand, long-term operation, and social adaptation — are postponed or left unanswered.

What once felt like catching up now risks turning into overheated growth, where construction moves faster than institutional capacity and social readiness.

Vietnamese media have long described this pattern with phrases such as “overheated development,” “investment by momentum,” or “term-driven planning.” In international urban studies, the same phenomenon is often labeled the “build it and they will come” fallacy — the assumption that large infrastructure alone can generate sustainable economic and social life.

When development moves faster than people’s lives

The problem is not the construction itself, but the order of thinking. When decisions are made at breakneck speed, there is little room for meaningful public consultation, livelihood transition, or serious evaluation of long-term use.

One farmer whose land was reclaimed for the stadium project expressed it bluntly:

“Development is good — it means the country is growing. But what about us? We have farmed this land for decades. How can we change our livelihood in just a few weeks? It feels like we were ambushed.”

This sense of being “ambushed” captures the human cost of thinking later. Development decisions are finalized elsewhere, at a pace ordinary lives cannot match.

These concerns are not hypothetical. Vietnam has already experienced similar outcomes with projects far smaller than a 135,000-seat stadium.

A striking example is Bach Mai Hospital 2 and Viet Duc Hospital 2 in Ha Nam province. Launched in 2014 with investments totaling billions of dong, the two hospitals were intended to ease overcrowding in Hanoi.

More than a decade later, they remain largely non-operational. Government inspectors later concluded that the projects resulted in over 1.2 trillion dong (US$45,680,350) in waste, citing serious flaws in planning and execution.

Modern hospital buildings rose quickly — but never fully integrated into Vietnam’s healthcare system.

Another recurring example can be found in Hanoi itself. Over the past decade, the press has repeatedly reported on “ghost” apartment blocks and under-occupied urban complexes. While young workers struggle to afford housing, entire residential towers remain empty or sparsely inhabited.

Homes were built before the most basic question was answered: who would realistically live there?

In both cases, the pattern is identical: structures were completed before social life could form around them.

A global warning

Vietnam’s dilemma is not unique. After the 2004 Athens Olympics, many venues were left unused, while facilities built for the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2010 FIFA World Cup struggled with maintenance costs and limited post-event use. These cases underline a simple lesson: mega-structures do not guarantee lasting relevance without strong domestic demand and long-term planning.

Against this backdrop, Vietnam’s new stadium becomes more than a landmark — it becomes a stress test for its development mindset.

A difficult reality must be acknowledged. Vietnam is not a country with globally dominant domestic sports leagues, nor does it yet hold strong international influence in cultural or artistic industries. This means the stadium is not being built primarily for existing domestic demand, but for international events.

Developers have openly spoken of ambitions linked to the Olympics or even the World Cup. In effect, the project aims to attract the world to Vietnam, hosting events that are created elsewhere.

Yet the global event market is already crowded. Even within Southeast Asia, Vietnam must compete with Singapore, which has spent decades building a comprehensive ecosystem for international events.

Beyond the region, countries such as Japan, South Korea, and major Western nations offer not just stadiums, but entire value chains connecting sports, media, tourism, and global branding.

A stadium, no matter how large, does not create international appeal on its own. Mega-events are awarded based on organizational capacity, infrastructure integration, institutional reliability, and audience reach — not seating capacity alone.

A case for cautious optimism

To be fair, the stadium does carry potential benefits if accompanied by the right conditions. A well-managed venue of this scale could help professionalize Vietnam’s event industry, improve standards for crowd management and logistics, and gradually position the country as a more credible host for regional tournaments and large cultural events.

If integrated into a broader urban and economic strategy, the stadium could also create jobs, stimulate surrounding services, and offer a shared public space for moments of national celebration. In that sense, the ambition behind the project is not misplaced.

The problem is not what the stadium could become, but whether planning has seriously addressed how those benefits would materialize. Without clear answers on sustained demand, governance, and post-event use, potential gains remain hypothetical rather than guaranteed.

The 135,000-seat stadium could become a new national symbol. But it could also become the clearest warning yet about the limits of Vietnam’s long-standing development logic.

Ambition is not the problem. Sequence is. Sustainable development requires societies to think through how people will live, work, and participate before monumental structures rise. If that order is reversed, yesterday’s record-breaking projects risk becoming tomorrow’s unanswered questions.

Vietnam’s challenge is no longer whether it can build big, but whether it can think deeply before building at all.

By Alex Hoang – Union of Catholic Asian News – January 6, 2026