Honda Center, the VNL and the 12 Olympic slots for 2028: where Vietnam's volleyball sits on the balance sheet

The dress rehearsal for an Olympic Games is usually discussed as a dry technical concept, but for volleyball it has a specific address: Honda Center, 2695 Katella Avenue, Anaheim, California. The arena opened in 2026, is the home of the Anaheim Ducks in the North American professional ice hockey league, holds roughly 17,000 seats for hockey, and can be expanded to nearly 18,000 for basketball, concerts and indoor sports events. When the Los Angeles 2028 organising committee confirmed Honda Center as the indoor volleyball venue, the address was not the most interesting part. The interesting part is that the arena will be stress-tested with an international event about a year before the opening ceremony, acting as a full dry run for the entire Olympic volleyball operating chain.

In the industry, people call this the dress rehearsal phase. For federation executives, it is a checkpoint for spectator flows, camera positions, international signal transmission, lighting, playing surface and even the handover time between matches. For national team coaches, it is a mark on the calendar. For me, it is an indicator of where the real power in this sport currently sits.

There were nights when I stayed up until two in the morning in Hai Phong to watch a Volleyball Nations League pool round live, not because my team was playing, but because I wanted to count how many ranking points were being handed out that night and who was collecting them. Anaheim is more than 13,000 km from Hai Phong. But the way an ice hockey arena in California becomes an Olympic volleyball arena has a direct connection to a Vietnamese women's national team dreaming of an Olympic ticket.

The arena is a contract; the rest is just seating

To understand why Honda Center was chosen, you have to look at the financial philosophy of Los Angeles 2028. The LA28 organisers have gambled on a very specific claim: no new permanent sports venue will be built. All infrastructure will be drawn from the existing venue stock of the metropolitan area, including professional team stadiums, major universities and convention centres. Within that approach, Honda Center is a near-perfect candidate: an arena that has operated for three decades, has staged thousands of events, has parking, medical systems, press rooms, broadcast areas, and most importantly has an operator that pays an operating crew all year round.

Comparing the history of Olympic volleyball venues reveals a clear curve. London 2026 used Earls Court, a converted exhibition hall. Rio 2026 used Maracanãzinho, an arena inside the Maracanã complex. Tokyo 2026 built Ariake Arena entirely new, in keeping with Japan's tradition of infrastructure investment. Paris 2026 returned to the temporary model: an arena erected inside the Porte de Versailles exhibition complex. Los Angeles 2028 chose a third model: reusing an existing professional arena.

These three models are not merely technical choices; they are accounting choices. A new arena in Tokyo leaves an operating legacy for the host city's residents. A temporary arena in Paris leaves a demolition bill. A reused arena in Anaheim leaves a low cost line and a lease agreement already negotiated with the City of Anaheim as owner. Every match is a disguised merger — it has a balance sheet and shareholder pressure. The Olympics are the same, only with a larger balance sheet and a shareholder base that includes taxpayers.

The second point, and the one least discussed in Vietnamese coverage, is the broadcast contract. NBCUniversal signed a deal with the International Olympic Committee worth roughly 7.65 billion US dollars for a run of Olympic Games extending to 2032. Once a sum at that scale is locked in, pressure on the organiser shifts from pleasing the on-site audience to protecting the broadcast window. An indoor sport with a dense schedule, multiple matches per day and fast turnover is a highly efficient television product. Honda Center, with lighting and transmission infrastructure already standardised for North American televised hockey, is the risk-minimising broadcast choice, not the athlete-optimal one.

Those three layers of decision — the reuse philosophy, the construction bill, the broadcast contract — settled the venue. What remains unsettled is who will stand on the other side of the net.

Twelve slots and a gate that is far too narrow

Since Tokyo 2026, the Olympic volleyball tournament has kept a structure of twelve teams per gender. Twelve teams. Six men's slots, six women's slots. With more than 200 national federations and territorial associations under FIVB, the path into one of those twelve places is a pipeline with a valve.

That valve is made of two parts. The first is the world ranking, calculated through a points system tied to FIVB events and continental championships. The second, and increasingly the more important, is the Volleyball Nations League. The VNL launched in 2026, replacing the men's World League and the women's World Grand Prix. It began with 16 teams per gender and has since expanded to 18 per gender in the most recent season, with a promotion and relegation mechanism.

That structure sounds like a generous expansion. In practice it is a mechanism that locks in power. The eighteen teams holding a VNL seat play roughly fifteen elite matches per season, each match carrying ranking points, each match produced and distributed globally. The rest of the world plays regional events with fewer matches, weaker opponents and lower points weighting. The gap between the seated group and the unseated group is not a gap in talent; it is a gap in the number of scored matches.

While tracking the Vietnamese women's national team in Asian competitions and international invitationals, I noticed a recurring pattern: the team starts well in the first set, holds the rhythm in the second, then falls away in the third and fourth. The cause is not purely physical. It lies in the number of times the team is placed in decisive situations against opponents of comparable level with points at stake. A team playing twenty elite matches a year handles a fourth-set situation very differently from a team playing six.

Fans watch the spike; I watch the person signing the broadcast contract at four in the morning. Because what determines how many elite matches a national team gets to play is not a coach's decision. It is the decision of a league secretariat, backed by sponsorship contracts, television contracts and ticket revenue in the host city.

Vietnam appeared in the VNL in the most recent season and struggled in the lower half of the table. Read purely as sport, that is a disappointing result. Read as business, it was the first time the Vietnamese women's team entered the room where ranking points are distributed at the highest weighting. A VNL seat is not a reward for results; it is an asset. And assets have to be held.

The promotion and relegation mechanism: world volleyball's hidden contract

FIVB runs the VNL on a business model proven across many sports: a fixed core group generating a stable television product, a promotion door to keep competition alive, and a relegation door to put pressure on the bottom group. For a national federation, holding a seat in the core group means holding a revenue stream and a points stream.

For rising volleyball nations such as Vietnam or the Philippines, that door only opens under one of two conditions: either win at the lower tier to be invited up, or buy the slot by spending on hosting and investing in infrastructure to meet the league's standards. Both conditions are investment conditions, not luck conditions.

This is where the Honda Center story swings back at Vietnamese volleyball. FIVB sets a technical standard for arenas hosting VNL: compliant flooring, ceiling height, lighting systems built for high-definition broadcast, international television areas, athlete lounges and recovery zones, and the capacity to service multiple matches across consecutive days. Vietnam's largest multi-purpose arenas currently hold between five and eight thousand people, were built for mixed purposes, and most have never undergone a strict inspection from a top-tier world event.

Upgrading an arena to that standard is a capital expenditure line. But here is the misconception I often encounter: people treat it as a cost of national prestige. From an operating standpoint, it is the cost of building a product that can sell tickets, sell sponsorship and sell rights for at least ten years. A world-standard arena does not serve one VNL week. It serves every Asian and world event Vietnam wants to host over the next decade.

A healthy volleyball nation is not measured by trophies, but by the number of arenas it does not have to rent in order to pay its players. This is precisely the lesson Vietnamese football learned with money and time, and volleyball is facing the same invoice with a shorter runway.

Where Vietnam sits on the ranking table and on the revenue table

Vietnamese women's volleyball has made real progress in recent years. The team has beaten Thailand in some regional arenas, won medals in Southeast Asian competition, and appeared more regularly in Asian events. Core players such as Tran Thi Thanh Thuy and Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen have become commercially valuable names domestically, appearing on billboards and carrying personal followings that would have been unimaginable for a Vietnamese volleyball player a decade ago.

But one thing the victory headlines usually skip needs to be stated plainly: Vietnam's women's team sits in the world's top-thirty band, and the distance from thirty to twelve is not closed by one elite tournament or one training cycle. It is closed by the number of consecutive years spent inside the points-distributing group.

Look at Thailand to see the realistic length of the journey. Thai women's volleyball has sat in Asia's competitive group for more than two decades, runs a professionalised domestic championship with stable sponsorship contracts, draws solid in-arena audiences, and most importantly has become a brand that foreign cities are willing to pay to host. Part of the Thai federation's revenue comes from ticketed international friendlies. That is a model Vietnam can copy structurally, though it needs time to reach the scale.

Look at Japan, my home country, to see an entirely different model: corporate volleyball. Japan's strongest teams are owned by large conglomerates, players are company employees, and payroll comes from marketing budgets rather than ticket revenue. This model produces enormous stability and a continuous youth development system, but it also makes Japanese volleyball less dependent on mass audiences than the sport's actual potential warrants.

Vietnam has no conglomerate willing to fund a volleyball payroll from a marketing budget at Japanese scale, and does not yet have a league strong enough to sustain itself on tickets the way European models do. The realistic path lies in between: a national league with a clear rights structure, plus the sale of international hosting slots to provinces as a sports tourism product.

This is the point where I want to linger a little longer. Vietnamese provinces currently compete to host international volleyball events using event budgets. That money is usually booked under local image promotion. If it stops there, each tournament is a one-off cost. If it is tied to a ticketing system, seasonal sponsorship packages and the sale of replay rights to digital platforms, each tournament becomes an asset with a cash flow. The difference between these two approaches is not the money spent up front; it is who owns the rights after the tournament ends.

The 0.1-second gap and the trap of the Olympic story

Two years ago, when Spain won the European Championship with Lamine Yamal in the squad, I wrote a piece comparing football and esports, arguing that both were shifting into a meta I called the 0.1-second generation — where the gap between teams no longer lies in physicality or basic technique but in decision speed inside a window shorter than one breath. A veteran journalist pushed back on me fairly sharply, and that debate taught me something about how to write.

Elite volleyball is about ten years ahead of football in this story. At the current speed of world women's volleyball, the time from the ball leaving the server's hand to the ball hitting the floor on a fast attack can be short enough that spectators in the arena cannot identify who blocked whom. At that level, the quality of a rally is decided by reading the situation before the ball is set.

Set against Vietnamese volleyball, the gap is not height or vertical jump. It is the number of times each player is placed in a situation requiring a decision within a tenth of a second, against opponents good enough to punish every wrong decision. That number is proportional to the number of elite matches, and the number of elite matches is proportional to the team's position in the competition system. The circle is closed, and it only opens through intervention from outside the purely competitive system.

That is why I read the Honda Center news differently from most coverage. The coverage talks about an arena. I read about a valve.

The counter-intuitive angle: a venue rehearsal is not a ticket rehearsal

This is where I want to raise a doubt about the very framing the media is using. The prevailing framing is: the 2028 Olympics are approaching, the venue is prepared, Vietnam needs to prepare. That framing implies that if the arena is ready, part of the door has opened for rising teams.

No part has. The rehearsal in Anaheim is an operational test for the organiser, carried out for the benefit of the broadcast contract and the local spectator experience. It does not create an extra Olympic slot. The twelve-slot structure and the points-sharing mechanism do not change because someone test-ran the lights in Anaheim a year early.

The second trap is subtler: the Olympic story is being used as a ticket-selling tool for domestic events. That is commercially sensible, and I do not object to it. But it has a side effect. It makes audiences, and part of the professional community, believe the Olympic target is achievable through competitive effort, when in reality it depends on commercial decisions made in another city by people who will not watch a single volleyball match in Vietnam all year.

For a team outside the top twelve, the realistic path in the next cycle carries a low probability. That does not mean abandoning the target. It means redefining the target in measurable units. Holding the VNL seat is a measurable target. Hosting a VNL week at home is a measurable target. Twenty high-quality international matches a year is a measurable target. The Olympic ticket is a derivative of those three, not a shortcut to them.

One more point about reading international announcements. When a major event publishes its venue, most of the output is images of the arena and its capacity. The more important part sits in the annexes: who holds the signal production rights, who distributes digital content, how much the host city pays for hosting rights, and how ticket revenue is split. Those four lines determine how much money flows to national federations and how much stays at the organising layer. For rising volleyball nations, the amounts received from that distribution layer are usually far smaller than public perception suggests.

A paradox that takes five years to confirm

I do not believe in cheap paradoxes manufactured for controversy. But there is a paradox in Vietnamese volleyball I have watched long enough to dare to write down.

Domestic events draw very good audiences on television and digital platforms, especially matches involving the national team or the strongest clubs in the national championship. At the same time, clubs operate on small budgets, short player contracts, and cash flows dependent on local sponsors rather than product revenue. In other words, audience attention already exists, but the mechanism to convert that attention into revenue has not been built.

Here is the paradox: Vietnamese volleyball has an audience faster than it has a business infrastructure. Vietnamese football was in the same position during the golden era of youth tournaments and national teams, and it took years and repeated failures in league commercialisation before the system took shape. Volleyball benefits from being able to observe the mistakes football made, and suffers from not having a similarly long runway, because regional rivals such as Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia are investing at the same time.

Empty stadiums, but shareholder minutes are never empty — that is what COVID taught people working in volleyball, and it is also what most tournament announcements do not tell you.

What comes next, and a question about the target

Over the next three years, I expect three categories of news concerning Vietnamese volleyball and the 2028 Olympics, and they are very easy to confuse with one another.

The first category is results at Asian events and international invitationals. These have high media value but low ranking impact, because their points weighting is far below that of FIVB system events.

The second category is competition structure news: VNL participation slots, promotion and relegation regulations, and the Olympic qualification format FIVB publishes for the coming cycle. Few people read this category, but it determines everything else.

The third category is infrastructure and commercial news: arena upgrades to meet international standards, national broadcast rights contracts, and the sponsorship structure of the national championship. This category is dry and visually unappealing, but it is the only one capable of changing the outcome of the first category.

Place those three categories on a single axis, and a sensible strategy for Vietnamese volleyball in the coming cycle becomes fairly clear: hold the seat in the top competition at all costs, turn one international week at home into a profitable product, and build a domestic league with enough matches for players to make decisions under real pressure.

None of those three things gets solved in Anaheim. But the way people tell the Anaheim story will determine whether anyone in Vietnam is willing to put money into those three things.

I am not asking whether Vietnamese volleyball can reach the 2028 Olympics. I am asking whether Vietnamese volleyball is building a business strong enough to pay for a ticket when the door opens — and if the answer is no, then every ticket starts from a balance sheet, not from an arena in California.

That is the difference between football and volleyball, and it is also what both sports relearn every season: a title can be bought with one training cycle, but a system can only be bought with many consecutive business cycles.