Vietnamese Tennis: The Court-Fill Equation and the Gap After Ly Hoang Nam

In November 2026 I stood at a sports complex north of Thu Dau Mot, Binh Duong, looking at the last four courts in a row. The white tennis lines were still there, but smaller rectangles had been painted on top of them, lower, closer to the net. The owner is someone I have known since the years I consulted on communications for a provincial football club. He did not talk about sport. He talked about time slots.

"Weekday tennis runs about three tenths full. Pickleball runs nine tenths full."

I opened my notebook. Six courts. Hourly tennis rental in this area runs 100,000 to 150,000 dong. A standard tennis court fits three pickleball courts, each renting for 60,000 to 80,000 dong an hour. Same area, same hour, revenue up 60 to 80 percent. Conversion cost, re-lining and lowering nets: under 20 million dong per court.

I did not need more data to understand what was happening to those four courts. I did need data to understand what was happening to Vietnamese tennis. Those are two different questions, and confusing them is why I am writing this.

Vietnamese tennis is losing courts, but the cause is not pickleball. A weekday occupancy rate around three tenths is a pre-existing condition, and pickleball is only the diagnosis written down afterwards.

The power structure of a sport with no domestic product

To understand why a court owner in Binh Duong changes the function of four courts in one afternoon, you have to understand how Vietnamese tennis is organised.

At the top sits the Vietnam Tennis Federation, which manages the national tournament system, the Davis Cup team, and SEA Games and Asian Games squads. Below that is the domestic system: the national championship, age-group junior events, and a handful of mass-participation tournaments funded by corporate sponsors. At the international layer, Vietnam held a place in the ATP Challenger system for roughly a decade, with events hosted in Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, Da Nang and Hai Phong, alongside dozens of ITF World Tennis Tour events at M15 and W15 level scattered across provinces.

That structure sounds complete. But there is a large gap in the middle: no domestic tournament generates enough income for a player to make a living.

I once sat and counted spectators at a Challenger semifinal at a club in Ho Chi Minh City. The main stand holds a few thousand. The actual number of people seated, counted by hand, hovered in the low hundreds, most of them academy students, parents, and invited amateur groups. Paying spectators at a Vietnamese Challenger semifinal were the smallest group in the stand.

Based on my experience tracking matches over many years, I regard this as the single most important indicator in Vietnamese tennis, more important than any ranking. A sport with players but no paying spectators, at domestic level, is a sport whose revenue sits on the supply side, not the demand side.

The arithmetic of hosting a Challenger in Vietnam

To put some numbers on it, take a typical case: an ATP Challenger at the lowest tier, the kind with a prize purse in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The cost structure for such an event in Vietnam, based on figures I have collected across several seasons, usually includes: prize money and mandatory payments under ATP rules; sanction fees and related administrative costs; accommodation and meals for players, officials and technical staff; court rental and temporary infrastructure; international officials, chair umpires and supervisors; communications, video production and hosting; and general operations.

My experience tells me real total costs for a Challenger in Vietnam typically run three to four times the published prize purse. If the purse is published in the tens of thousands, total cost can pass one hundred thousand dollars, and for events staged in major urban centres with higher infrastructure demands, it can approach two hundred thousand dollars.

Revenue runs the other way.

Ticketing: negligible, because paying spectators are few, as noted.

Domestic media rights: effectively zero. A Challenger in Vietnam rarely sells a rights package with commercial value. If it is broadcast at all, it is usually free or treated as community-service content in exchange for visibility.

Prize money backflow: none. There is no mechanism returning ATP revenue to the host.

Sponsorship: the only meaningful revenue line, and it does not operate as an investment with a return. It operates as prestige spending. A province wants its name on an international banner. A company wants visibility at an event featuring foreign players. A brand wants access to the high-income households living around the club.

Hosting a Challenger in Vietnam is not an investment. It is marketing paid up front for a product with no revenue. That is not strategically wrong, but it must be called by its right name, because calling it wrongly leads to allocating wrongly.

I once watched a province commit a budget equal to several years of its junior development funding to a one-week international event. After the event, not one junior from that province moved up a single step in the international system. But the province had images, banners, and a report.

That is a rational decision inside administrative logic. It is only irrational inside the logic of building a sport.

Court supply: where the real money flows

Now back to those four courts in Thu Dau Mot. Because if you want to find where Vietnamese tennis actually has money, you have to look at the player layer, not the spectator layer.

Building a standard outdoor tennis court in Vietnam, based on figures I have recorded in recent years, costs roughly 300 to 600 million dong, depending on surface material, drainage and foundations. A covered court pushes that to 1.5 to 3 billion dong. Surface maintenance, including resurfacing every five to seven years, is a recurring cost many owners under-budget when planning.

Revenue per court depends on three variables: hourly rate, occupancy rate, and the number of sellable hours in a day.

Hourly rates in Vietnam are clearly tiered. In central Ho Chi Minh City and parts of Hanoi, the common range is 150,000 to 300,000 dong an hour, higher with covered courts and bundled services. In provinces and peri-urban areas, the common range is 70,000 to 150,000 dong an hour.

Occupancy is the decisive variable, and this is the weak point.

Tennis is physically demanding, requires baseline technique, and needs at least two players of similar level. The result is demand concentrated in a narrow window: weekday evenings and weekend mornings. Measured against all sellable slots in a day, an average weekday occupancy around three tenths is a figure I have encountered repeatedly across different clubs, from Binh Duong to Dong Nai, from Long An to the outer districts of Ho Chi Minh City.

Pickleball breaks that structure at its weakest point. Smaller courts, slower balls, baseline skills learned in about twenty minutes. Beginners can join immediately. Older players can play longer. Four people share one court instead of two or four sharing a large one. And most importantly: demand spreads from morning to night rather than bunching into a three-hour window.

Revenue per square metre is the only metric a court owner cares about, and on that metric tennis loses not because pickleball is better, but because tennis leaves most of the day empty.

I do not have reliable nationwide data on the total number of tennis courts in Vietnam, and I will not give a figure I cannot verify. Estimates I have seen vary widely, concentrated mainly in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong and Dong Nai. What I can observe is the direction of travel, and it is clear: tennis floor space is contracting at commercial clubs while pickleball floor space expands.

The junior pipeline and the negative-cost equation

Parallel to the court story is another one rarely discussed: the cost for a young Vietnamese player to enter the international professional system.

The ITF World Tennis Tour is the lowest rung of professional tennis, with M15 and W15 events carrying 15,000 dollar purses. A champion at such an event receives a few thousand dollars before tax. A first-round loser often receives an amount that does not cover one night in a hotel.

On the cost side, a young Vietnamese player wanting a full ITF World Tennis Tour season, roughly fifteen to twenty events across Asia, needs 30,000 to 60,000 dollars a year for flights, hotels, meals, a travelling coach, conditioning and physiotherapy. That figure excludes year-round academy training at home.

On the revenue side, such a season typically returns under 15,000 dollars in prize money, even for a player with decent results.

That gap is covered by three sources: family, small personal sponsors, and a managing body. In Vietnam, most of the burden falls on the family. This is the structural reason the junior pipeline narrows not at the entry level but at the transition from eighteen to twenty-two.

I have followed a few groups of players in that age band over several years. The pattern repeats: a player reaches a good national standard, plays a few international events, recognises the financial gap, and pivots. Some go to the United States through the college route and compete in the NCAA system, where scholarships cover most costs. Some stay as coaches, with steadier income than competing. Some leave the sport.

There is no domestic professional tour thick enough to keep them. The national championship happens once a year. There is no year-round national ranking system with a dense enough calendar to generate income. There is no event at which a player ranked two hundred at home can live on prize money.

A sport without a professional middle tier will always either import stars or export talent, and neither keeps value at home.

Do stars create markets?

This brings us to Ly Hoang Nam.

According to ATP ranking data I have checked, Ly Hoang Nam reached a career-high singles ranking of 231 in the world in August 2026. That is the highest ever recorded by a Vietnamese male player in the professional ranking era. He was also a long-standing pillar of Vietnam's Davis Cup team and posted strong results at regional Southeast Asian level.

The question I want to ask is not how good he is. The question is: how many new tennis players in Vietnam did a world ranking of 231 create?

From my observation, the answer is far fewer than expected. During the period of his peak ranking, enrolment at some urban tennis academies rose, but the increase was not proportionate to the media coverage. More importantly, that increase concentrated among high-income families who already intended to put their children in tennis, not among entirely new players.

I once made a wrong prediction about this. I predicted that a Vietnamese player breaking into the world's top two hundred would create a new wave of tennis participation in the provinces, the way a successful SEA Games creates a wave in athletics. That prediction did not materialise at the scale I expected. The reason I found afterwards: tennis has a far higher cost of entry than athletics, and that barrier does not fall because a star appears.

A wrong prediction is not a failure. It is free data for the next calculation. My next calculation produced this conclusion: the impact of a star on a sport depends on that sport's cost of entry. In sports with low entry cost, a star creates a wave. In sports with high entry cost, a star creates demand to watch, not demand to play.

The contrarian view: Grand Slams are not the foundation of Vietnamese tennis

This is the point I want to make most clearly, because it is commonly misread.

Tennis is a heavily watched sport in Vietnam. Grand Slam tournaments draw large audiences, especially in the later rounds, and pay-TV operators in Vietnam have for years bought rights to broadcast them. Looking at those audiences, it is easy to conclude that Vietnam has a tennis market.

But the economic value generated by those audiences does not flow to Vietnamese tennis. It flows to Grand Slam organisers, to international tournaments, to global brands buying airtime in those slots, and to broadcasters reselling channel packages. Vietnamese tennis sits outside that flow.

In other words: Vietnamese people watch a great deal of foreign tennis, but almost never pay to watch Vietnamese tennis. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people do pay substantially to play tennis: court rental, rackets, balls, coaching, academy fees, apparel.

I estimate the player market in Vietnam is many times larger than the domestic spectator market. I will not put a specific figure on it because public data is insufficient to pin it down, but the direction of the gap is clear. And that direction means: if you want to build Vietnamese tennis, you build from the player layer, not the spectator layer.

This is also where I think the common framing goes wrong. People say Vietnamese tennis is weak because it lacks a star of real magnitude, lacks a big event, lacks media rights. In my view, what is missing first is a system that makes ordinary players pay regularly, with a ranking, a calendar, and a next target. A world number 231 cannot create that system. A system can.

New media does not kill brands; it exposes brands with no substance. This is true of Vietnamese tennis in a specific sense: when every club can post information, publish rental prices, and post public reviews, clubs with real customers become visible and clubs living on reputation are exposed. The same is happening at the tournament and academy layers.

Behind the court war: three scenarios for the next five years

I do not have enough data to declare which scenario will happen. But I can build three possibilities and state the assumptions behind each.

Scenario one, which I consider most likely as of now: tennis floor space in major cities continues to contract, shifting to uses with higher revenue per square metre. Tennis moves to two poles: premium clubs serving high-income customers, and small courts inside schools and residential areas. In this scenario total player numbers do not fall sharply, but the number of regularly paying players does.

Scenario two: pickleball supply overshoots demand, rental prices fall, occupancy falls, and some floor space converts back to tennis or to other uses. I assign this a lower probability than scenario one in the short term, but cannot rule it out in the medium term, because the history of mass-participation sports in Vietnam shows boom and bust cycles often shorter than expected. The assumption is that pickleball court supply keeps growing faster than the number of new players.

Scenario three, which I rate highest in value and hardest to execute: a group of organisers, whether a federation or a private company, builds a mass-participation tournament system with a national ranking, entry fees, a monthly calendar, level-based divisions, and centralised player data. This model has worked in many mass-participation sports markets, where revenue comes from entry fees, consumer-goods sponsors, and ancillary services.

Let me be explicit about the limits of this analysis: I do not have sufficiently detailed data on the cost structure of each club, no official published figures on total tennis participation in Vietnam by year, and no data on capital flows into pickleball infrastructure. Those gaps could significantly distort the conclusions above. I am recording them so the next revision has a comparison point.

Back to six courts in Thu Dau Mot

The owner said one thing before I left. He said he is not abandoning tennis. He keeps the two end courts for tennis, because the regular morning group and a few junior students still play. The other four are pickleball.

I asked what happens if the pickleball boom ends. He laughed and said he would re-line the courts.

That is the whole story at the micro level: flexible, pragmatic, and completely unrelated to the honour of any sport. At the macro level, the story is different. A sport cannot run on the logic of re-lining courts. It needs a structure that makes ordinary players pay regularly to have a court, an opponent, a tournament, a ranking, and a reason to come back next month.

If I were reallocating Vietnamese tennis budgets over the next five years, I would take most of the money earmarked for one international hosting and move it into building a system of twenty to thirty ranked mass-participation tournaments, run monthly, with entry fees, across four regions, with player data centralised digitally. The goal is not to produce a world number two hundred. The goal is to build a paying player base large enough that anyone wanting to invest in Vietnamese tennis sees revenue rather than prestige.

The question I leave behind, and the one I ask myself: if a weekday occupancy rate of three tenths is the right number, is the problem of Vietnamese tennis the product, the price, or a structure that gives a beginner no reason to come back after the third session?

I do not have a certain answer. But I have a calculation to start with, and that is all I need for the next check.