Vietnamese Martial Arts in the Commercialization Era: What Identity for the Ring?

That night at the end of the month, in an arena on the outskirts of Bangkok, I sat in the seventh row and watched a Vietnamese fighter collapse right after the bell of the second round. He had not been knocked down. His legs simply gave way, as if someone had drained every breath from his body days earlier. I know that feeling not because I have ever stepped onto the ring, but because fourteen years seated at the edge of the ring have taught me to see the same story repeat itself in countless different forms. People remember the winner's name; I remember the way a human being collapsed, and the way a system pushed him there with no one willing to take responsibility.

That story does not stand alone. Over roughly the past five years, Vietnamese martial arts have witnessed a wave without precedent: mixed martial arts gyms have sprung up in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City; domestic promotions have, for the first time, secured major sponsors; and a generation of young fighters has begun competing abroad in regional events. At the same time, Muay Thai from Thailand continues to expand its influence, professional boxing has found a foothold among younger audiences, and traditional disciplines such as Vovinam are forced to question their place in a market being reshaped.

At the regional level, Vietnamese martial arts occupy an awkward middle position. Above sits Thailand, with a mature Muay Thai ecosystem where a fighter can make a living from a dense competition calendar and a traditional stadium system. Below sit younger markets such as Cambodia or Laos, where martial arts remain tied mainly to festivals and local tradition. Vietnam has a young population, a growing middle class, and a generation of audiences willing to pay to watch quality bouts - yet it still lacks the infrastructure to turn that demand into a sustainable industry.

This shift carries both opportunity and cost. When money starts flowing in, the way a bout is organized, a fighter is paid, or a star is built also changes. And when the way things operate changes, the values lying beneath - identity, endurance, the self-respect of those who train - are dragged along, sometimes in directions no one intended.

I have followed this change from both sides of the border. In Vietnam, I see gyms opening at five in the morning, coaches who teach martial arts while driving motorbike taxis to support their students. In Thailand, I see Muay Thai camps surviving on contracts with sponsors and betting houses, where one win can change a life but one injury can erase everything. Those two settings tell me the same thing: when martial arts become an industry, the person who steps into the ring bears the most risk, and is mentioned least when people count the revenue.

I once mispronounced a fighter's name on a live broadcast, and that was the first time I understood what my profession actually is. Getting a name wrong, to me, is not a small error - it is a sign that I was looking at a person as a label rather than a living being with a story of his own. Since then, I have learned to remember every name, and to see the system behind each name.

To understand what is really happening, I divide Vietnam's martial arts market into four operational layers, each carrying its own problem.

The first layer is human resources. Here the issue lies in the fact that gyms and training camps still lack a structured development process. A young fighter typically enters the professional ring after less than two years of training, whereas in developed martial arts nations the average is five to seven years. The foundational phase - the thing that determines a fighter's career longevity - is shortened, and the price paid is usually injuries arriving early, before the fighter has had a chance to build a career.

I once sat down with a coach in central Vietnam who taught martial arts for free to more than thirty students under a corrugated-iron roof. He said something I wrote down word for word in my notebook: "Here, we teach the martial art before we teach these kids how to protect their own bodies." That sentence haunted me for months, because it exposed a truth that no record board can reflect.

The second layer is event organization. Domestic promotions today rely mainly on local sponsors and ticket revenue, while income from broadcast rights remains largely untapped. This creates a paradox: a promotion needs stars to draw audiences, but does not have enough money to nurture stars. As a result, the best fighters tend to leave, seeking markets that pay more in Thailand, Singapore or Japan, leaving behind a thinning next generation.

The third layer is revenue structure. Looking at how a martial arts promotion operates, three main streams of money are visible: direct ticket sales, brand sponsorship, and betting. In Vietnam, the betting stream remains outside the legal framework, preventing promotions from tapping it transparently - even though it is the largest source of income for many international promotions. This absence means a domestic promotion's total revenue is only a fraction of its real potential, and it makes organizers ever more dependent on short-term sponsorship that can snap at any moment.

The fourth layer, and the one least discussed, is the legal and governance framework. Medical supervision before and after bouts, rules on safe weight-cutting, and mechanisms for resolving disputes between fighters and organizers still contain many gaps. I have witnessed bouts in which a fighter stepped into the ring in a state of severe dehydration, with no one holding the authority to intervene and stop it. When a system has no protective mechanism, risk is not distributed - it is simply pushed toward the weakest party.

On the health side, this is where the risk becomes clearest. A fighter's brain suffers cumulative damage across bouts, while mandatory rest periods after a knockout loss are still not strictly enforced. Rapid weight-cutting - a common method for reaching a competition weight class - can cause dehydration, kidney failure and even death. The youngest and least experienced are usually the ones who endure this the most, because they do not have enough of a voice to refuse a bout.

What is worth noting is that these four operational layers do not stand independently at all, but interlock into a chain in which the weakest link is always the person who trains.

When development is weak, the quality of bouts declines. When bout quality declines, audiences turn away. When audiences turn away, sponsors withdraw. And when sponsors withdraw, fighters - those at the end of the chain - are the ones left behind, with short careers and no safety net to catch them. I have seen this spiral repeat in no fewer than three countries in the region, and each time it repeats, I ask myself whether anyone truly wants to break it.

What I have learned after years of watching is this: a martial arts scene cannot mature if it is measured only by medal counts or viewership. It matures when people begin to ask about the fate of those who have left the ring - those whose names no longer appear on the electronic scoreboard.

But there is a paradox few want to face: the very narrative of identity and tradition that we use to promote Vietnamese martial arts is sometimes the thing holding it back from developing healthily.

When a martial art is marketed as a symbol of national pride, the pressure placed on fighters' shoulders becomes heavier than any strike. They no longer compete for themselves, but for a collective expectation that does not permit failure. And when failure is seen as betrayal, people begin hiding injuries, ignoring safe weight-cutting, and pushing their bodies to the limit only so as not to disappoint anyone.

I do not believe commercialization is the enemy. The real enemy is half-hearted commercialization - when people want the money of professional sport while keeping the management style of amateur sport. A contract is not a transaction, but a conversation about the fear of being forgotten: the fighter's fear that youth will pass without anyone remembering, and the organizer's fear that a star will leave without leaving anything behind.

Every time I sit at the edge of the ring, I remind myself that what I am recording is not wins and losses, but the way a society treats those who dare to put their bodies on the scale. Where Vietnamese martial arts go from here depends on whether we choose to build a system that protects those who train, or continue to let them carry all the risk while others count the money.