Vaping is silently 'taking down' the young athlete generation before they even step onto the pitch

Hook: When a 16-year-old football player in Hanoi suddenly stops in the middle of practice, hands on knees, gasping for air like he just ran a marathon, his coach thinks it is a fitness issue. But the real culprit sits in his pocket — a vape pod. At age 16, he has been loading nicotine into his body for nearly three years. No need to wait for an early death; his sporting future is being stolen right now. I have spent over two decades watching elite sport to realize that it is not injuries or tactics shaping the next generation of players. It is an entire nicotine industry silently recruiting young talents before any football academy even sees them.

Context: Three research papers presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Barcelona draw a very different picture from what sports fans once knew. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) umbrella review screened more than 14,000 articles and included 81 studies. An Irish cohort study followed 3,380 people aged 13–25. And a physiology study was published in ERJ Open Research. The common thread: vaping has replaced traditional cigarettes as the main gateway to nicotine among young people. By age 25, 38% of the Irish cohort were using e-cigarettes, while only 25% were smoking. That is more alarming than any club standings table, because it speaks about the people who will walk into youth academies within the next 5–10 years.

Core: Behind those statistics, I see a brutal tactical transition taking place in the public-health battle. In sports analysis, we talk about a team shifting from defense to attack. Here, the nicotine industry has shifted its strategic state: from selling conventional cigarettes — long banned from public advertising — to vapes, designed with young aesthetics, enticing flavours, and the deceptive reputation of safety. The RCPCH data link vaping directly to cough, wheeze, bronchitis, asthma flares, and nicotine dependence. That is not even the scariest part. The scariest part is the relationship between vaping and the likelihood of subsequently starting conventional cigarettes. A kid puffing a strawberry-flavored cloud today is significantly more likely to transition to cigarettes within five years. In football terms, this is a loan deal with a forced-buy clause — and the price is an entire athletic career.

On physiology, the ERJ Open Research study uncovered something coaches never see in medical reports. Young people who vape or smoke show a 15% reduction in physical capacity — the difference between a midfielder being left behind in the first 30 meters and one who keeps pace. They have reduced oxygen retention, less efficient CO2 elimination, and even signs of vascular inflammation at rest. In football, 15% is the gap between an average winger and a Champions League-level star. But nobody sees it on a screen because it lives deep inside the respiratory system.

Contrarian: I keep asking myself whether I am overstating this link. Now look at the other side: harm-reduction advocates argue that vaping helps adult smokers quit, and that argument deserves respect. But in the 13–25 population segment, it falls apart. They are not vaping to quit cigarettes; they start with vaping. The data show earlier onset ages and a very high share of never-smokers who begin vaping. I could be wrong if these young users simply quit when they reach adulthood — yet the research itself shows that behaviors formed in adolescence tend to persist or expand. The crowd believes a penalty kick is the most dangerous moment, but sometimes a throw-in becomes the losing goal because spectators fail to see how the ball is developed.

A financial lens makes the story even darker. Football stopped in 2026, and I lost money but won a lesson about cash flow: sponsorship revenue from the traditional tobacco industry has collapsed among young people, while profits from new nicotine products are soaring on the back of fresh user acquisition. These studies do not disclose financial figures, but it takes no genius to understand that this contract has a devastating long-term clause: hooking a 15-year-old is equivalent to massive lifetime value for the industry, and they execute it more cleverly than the best football academies in the world.

Takeaway: So the real question is not 'Is vaping as harmful as cigarettes?' — but rather, 'Are we losing an entire player generation before they even enter qualifying rounds?' The UK and Ireland have already called for tighter advertising controls and taxation on these products. And Vietnam? We are still watching from the sidelines while the next batch of national-team prospects might be quietly gasping in the dressing room.

The Vikings don't need a map. They only need a reckless man to show them the wrong way. And in this case, the wrong way is a candy-flavored vape pod sitting in a tenth-grader's backpack. Numbers don't lie, but the people who read them are masters at convincing others to believe the very opposite. Let that 38% wake us up before it is too late.