Vietnamese Football and the Financial Purge: Who Is Pretending to Be Rich?

Vietnamese Football and the Financial Purge: Who Is Pretending to Be Rich? Introduction: When a Golden Trophy Cannot Pay the Bills On the night of January 5, 2026, at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Vietnam beat Thailand to win the ASEAN Cup for the third time. The whole country poured into the streets. But only weeks later, when I reviewed the payrolls of V.League clubs, the picture turned bleak again: many teams were still behind on player wages, behind on food and accommodation costs for their youth squads, and waiting on cash injections from their owners just to keep operating month to month. This is not the first time I have seen the gap between on-pitch results and the financial health of Vietnamese football. But this time the gap has become impossible to ignore. After a transfer window full of expensive foreign signings, people started asking a question few had dared to ask directly: where is the money coming from? The answer lies where few care to look: not in revenue, but in the owners' pockets. Context: A Market That Runs on Faith V.League 1 currently has 14 clubs, operated under the management of the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) and supervised by the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF). On paper, it is a professional league with all the structures of a modern competition. But economically, most clubs remain personal projects bankrolled by one or a few parent companies. I have spent years standing between transfer valuations, and what I have learned is this: to understand a football ecosystem, do not read the table, read its revenue structure. For the V.League, that structure has three tiers, and every tier has problems. The first tier is broadcasting rights. This is the largest revenue source for top European leagues, but in Vietnam the value of V.League broadcasting rights remains modest relative to a population of more than 100 million. The reasons are many: the habit of watching football on unofficial platforms, the fragmentation of broadcasters, and the pricing approach of the league itself. The second tier is sponsorship and advertising. This is where clubs can earn from shirts, stadiums, and sponsor contracts. But most of these deals are tied to personal relationships between club owners and companies inside the same ecosystem, rather than pure commercial agreements based on brand value. The third tier, and by far the largest, is owner money. This is the real lifeblood of V.League clubs. When owners are generous, clubs live. When owners hit trouble in their core businesses, clubs fall into crisis overnight. This is why the financial story of Vietnamese football cannot be separated from the story of the real estate, construction, and agriculture conglomerates behind it. Compared with regional peers, the gap is even clearer. The Thai League has long built a relatively stable rights and sponsorship system. Japan's J1 League and Korea's K League are decades ahead in club governance. The V.League, despite large crowds and a talented generation of players, has not converted that advantage into sustainable cash flow. At the institutional level, the AFC operates a club licensing framework requiring clubs entering continental competition to meet standards on infrastructure, finance, and governance. It is an important tool, but it only pressures a small group of clubs aiming for the AFC Champions League or AFC Champions League Two. The rest of the league still runs its own way. Foreign Players: A Costly Gamble and Some Blind Investment In football, foreign players are a peculiar asset. They usually carry no resale value, no training compensation value, and rarely any local commercial value. Their worth sits almost entirely in on-pitch performance. Yet V.League clubs routinely spend large sums on foreign signings they cannot properly value. I have watched many times how Vietnamese clubs recruit foreigners. The process usually goes like this: an agent introduces a player via video, the coaching staff watches, sees a few good moments, and signs him on trial. If he scores in a couple of friendlies, a permanent deal follows. Very few clubs have an analytics department strong enough to assess a foreign player before signing. The result is a familiar paradox: the same money spent on a mediocre foreigner buys only a few short-term goals. Spent on youth development, that money could produce a generation of players over ten years. The problem is that youth development delivers no immediate results, while a foreign signing delivers an instant sense of security for the coaching staff and the crowd. This is the biggest blind spot in the Vietnamese transfer market. Clubs are not short of money; they are short of a system for valuing human assets. They pay for feeling, not for data. And in football, the feeling of security is usually the most expensive thing of all. I once thought power lay in the signature, until I watched a promise dissolve in the rain in Paris. That lesson repeats in Vietnam in a different form: a foreign contract signed one afternoon and terminated a few months later, leaving a loss nobody dares to book. Academies: The Real Value Engine If there is one place Vietnamese football is doing it right, it is the academies. Hoang Anh Gia Lai, PVF, Viettel, and a few other centres have produced generations of players capable of competing at continental level. These are the true assets of the ecosystem, because a player developed in an academy delivers double value: he plays for the club and can be sold to generate revenue. But the paradox is that academies are the easiest department to cut when a club hits financial trouble. Youth development is a sunk cost, its results arrive years later, and nobody claims credit while a player is still too young. Spending on foreigners, by contrast, is a cost that can be presented to fans immediately. This is the wrong trade-off for the long term. The value of a player is just a number; the value of a club is the story it dares to tell. And the most compelling story Vietnamese football can tell in the next decade is not blockbuster signings, but a player-production line strong enough to export talent across the region and the continent. The case of Nguyen Quang Hai is worth reflecting on. When he moved to France to play for Pau FC in Ligue 2, it was a symbolic step. But behind that personal story is a systemic question: how many Vietnamese players are eligible to go abroad, and what mechanism does the game have to turn such moves into stable revenue? Shirt Advertising: When Global Brands Drift From the Community One of the biggest changes in Vietnamese football over two decades is the arrival of global sponsors. Club and national-team shirts are now covered in international logos. Commercially, this is good news. But in terms of identity, it is a gamble that can backfire. The issue is that global sponsors care about exposure metrics and return on investment, not local communities. When a V.League club signs with a foreign brand, the bond between club and local fans can loosen. Fans still come to the stadium, but they no longer feel the club belongs to them the way it once did. I am not against sponsorship money. Football needs money. But I am against clubs trading identity for short-term revenue without building a long-term brand strategy. A club only has commercial value when it has a loyal community. And that community is not built by logos on shirts, but by memories in the stands. In Vietnam, clubs have a rare advantage: extraordinarily strong local feeling. Fans in Nam Dinh, Hai Phong, or Nghe An are attached to their clubs the way they are attached to their homeland. This is an asset money cannot buy. But it can be sold cheaply if management only looks at the short-term balance sheet. VAR and the Rhythm of the Game A story that seems unrelated to finance but is very much related: VAR. When the V.League adopted video assistant referee technology, the expectation was more accurate decisions. But what happens on the pitch reveals another problem: reviews that take too long are shredding the rhythm of the game. Two minutes of waiting is enough to cool a goal. And when a goal cools, the crowd's emotion cools with it. For a league trying to attract viewers and raise the value of its broadcast rights, interrupting the viewing experience is a strategic mistake. The problem is not the technology, but the process. Top European leagues took years to refine how VAR operates, and they are still arguing about it. The V.League needs an approach suited to its own conditions, rather than mechanically copying someone else's model. A slow VAR system does not make football fairer; it only makes it duller. Professionalisation and the Assembly Line There is a trend I have observed across professional football in general, and it is creeping into Vietnamese football too: professionalisation is turning players into products of an assembly line. Academies train in modules, metrics are measured daily, and individual flair is gradually smoothed away to fit the system. This has an upside: players are better coached, fitter, more tactically disciplined. But it has a downside: players who make the difference through improvisation, through hard-to-measure personal qualities, are running out of room. In an ecosystem where everything is digitised, improvisation can become a luxury. For Vietnamese football, this is a warning. This game once produced players loved for their skill and creativity. If professionalisation goes too far, if academies focus only on producing relentless running machines, Vietnamese football could lose the very thing that defines it. The Contrarian View: Those Pretending to Be Rich and the Formula in Undervalued Markets The pandemic did not kill the transfer market; it exposed those pretending to be rich. I wrote that line years ago, analysing the impact of Covid-19 on European clubs. But the lesson applies to Vietnamese football too, with a delay of a few years. In football there are two kinds of clubs. The first builds an empire on real revenue, stable cash flow, and a sustainable development system. The second inflates a hollow bubble, living on owner money and disguised loans. In good times, both look identical in the table. When crisis hits, only the first survives. In Vietnam, most clubs are the second kind. This does not mean they are bad. It means they have not yet built a sustainable business model. And when the economy tightens, when parent conglomerates tighten their belts, those clubs are the first victims. So where is the real formula? I lost faith in miracles at the Parc des Princes, but found the formula elsewhere. And in Vietnam, that elsewhere is precisely the undervalued markets few bother to scout: provinces with a football tradition but no resources, small academies that work seriously, and young players who have not yet been priced correctly. Big clubs tend to focus on buying stars. But real value lies in discovering and developing talent before the market prices it. This is the formula academies like Hoang Anh Gia Lai once applied, and it is the path some smaller clubs are quietly following. From Moscow to Clairefontaine, I recorded how the French turned tragedy into tactics. France built a youth development system the whole world studies, not because it was rich, but because it was patient. Vietnamese football can learn that. It does not need to copy everything, but it needs to absorb the principle: investing in people is always cheaper than investing in reputation. There is another blind spot in the official story of Vietnamese football. The media often praises the national team's results as proof of the whole game's progress. But national-team success and domestic-league health are two different stories. A strong national team can be built from a small group of outstanding players while the league as a whole still struggles. Confusing the two is a strategic error. I once thought football was a game of moments. But after years standing between valuation tables, I understand that football is a game of structures. Moments are just the surface. Structures decide who survives, who disappears, and who is merely pretending. The Parc des Princes may change owners, but the early lessons never appear in a contract. And the biggest lesson Vietnamese football must learn is this: there are no miracles in the transfer market, only chains of calculation that are hidden. Conclusion: The Next Domino What happens next for Vietnamese football? I believe the coming decade will be a decade of purge. Clubs that fail to build sustainable models will gradually disappear or have to merge. Those that invest in youth development and governance will rise. And the transfer market will become more transparent, not because clubs want it, but because they are forced to. The first domino has already fallen: the realisation that on-pitch results cannot hide weak books. The next domino will be players and agents starting to demand financial transparency before signing. And the final domino will be a generation of Vietnamese players confident enough to play abroad, bringing back foreign currency and experience. Vietnamese football is not short of talent, not short of fans, and not short of money. What it lacks is a system to turn those resources into sustainable value. When that system is built, those pretending to be rich will be exposed on their own. And that will be the day Vietnamese football truly grows up. The question for Vietnamese football's decision-makers is not how to win one more tournament, but how a club can survive without relying on an owner's pockets. When that question is answered, Vietnamese football will no longer live on faith, but on real strength.