I'll be honest with everyone here and go ahead and say that I don't even like soccer. I played it as a kid but as an American, on a professional level, I find it to be exceptionally boring. I realize it is the most popular sport in the world and that is just fine... we can't help our upbringing but to an American the idea of a sport that can go on for 90 minutes an end in a nothing to nothing draw is just agonizingly boring.
Despite this, I was delighted to be able to go to a professional sporting event in my home of Da Nang, Vietnam.
I gotta say that I am extremely impressed with the quality of this stadium when you consider the overall economics of Vietnam and even the city that I live in. Da Nang is one of the more affluent cities in Vietnam, but if you were to compare the average monthly income of the average person here to say, Cleveland, Ohio, you would find that your average Cleveland-ite probably makes about 5x as much as the average Vietnamese person. Therefore, to have a stadium dedicated to soccer that is much better than your average MLS team's grounds, is pretty impressive to me.
Given that there are normally 10 times as many foreigners here than there are now I was very impressed with the amount of non Vietnamese that were in attendance also. I would guess that around 20% of the overall crowd were non-Vietnamese. I think this is because of the fact that we all have to do something besides drink and go to the beach from time-to-time.
Speaking of booze: It is still possible to get a large beer while in the stands and hilariously it is served to you in a plastic bag that you keep hanging off your finger. I would imagine that is so that the bottle / can cant be used as a projectile and the most damage you could possibly do with it would be to make a really mean "water balloon" out of it and that is just wasting perfectly good beer... who wants to do that?
The only issue I had with this is the fact that this country uses way too many plastic bags and the beer also got warm very fast and there was nothing you could do to stop this other than drink it really really fast.
In the end we had a great time and when you consider that the cost of admission was a mere $2.50 per person for near front row seats, I can say with near certainty that we will be back for games in the future. Fortunately, the end result wasn't 0-0, but it was close.
Drawing with Hanoi, a much larger city, is a pretty great result
Even though I don't particularly care for this sport I gotta say that soccer, much like any other sport, is a lot more fun if you are in attendance at one of the games. I will definitely return and if you happen to be in the area I highly suggest that you do the same. I can't think of a more efficient way to have some fun with less than $5 (including beer.)