V.League Does Not Lack Money — It Lacks Books

2 a.m., the phone rings. On the other end is a man who played nine seasons in V.League 1 and now sells building materials in central Vietnam. He called because he had just read that his old club was three months behind on wages. He was not asking me to write anything for him. He asked me a question I could not answer: “Do you know how much that club actually spends in a season?”

I do not know. And I am writing this precisely because I do not know. In twenty-two years on the job, I have sat in press rooms in Hanoi, in Chengdu, in Doha; I have watched back thousands of hours of match tape hunting for a single missed detail. But when someone asks me the real revenue of a V.League club, I have to stay silent. Vietnamese football has scorelines everywhere and books almost nowhere.

People call me a heretic, but I only look at what they refuse to see.

A 14-team league and three sources of money that never balance

The 2026-2026 V.League 1 season features 14 clubs playing a double round-robin. As a sporting system, it has run steadily for more than two decades. Hoang Anh Gia Lai have won it twice. Becamex Binh Duong four times. Song Lam Nghe An three times. Hanoi FC are the most decorated with six titles. National Cup, Super Cup, AFC Champions League and AFC Champions League Two slots — the competitive infrastructure is all there.

The financial infrastructure is not. A V.League club’s revenue comes from three groups, and those groups are nowhere near balanced.

The first is owner money. A company, a conglomerate, an individual pours money into the team as a marketing line item, or as an obligation to a locality. This is the biggest source. At many clubs it is not merely the biggest source — it is the only genuinely significant one.

The second is sponsorship: shirt deals, stadium deals, title naming. But the league has changed title sponsors several times within a single decade. Every time the name changes, I have to rewrite the note in my own file. A league that cannot hold a commercial name through two contract cycles cannot price itself high.

The third is broadcast rights and tickets. I have spent many hours reviewing tape on this. I see the stands — some games full, some empty. I do not see where the ticket money goes, and I am not the only one who cannot see it.

And this is where the story turns paradoxical. This football nation has a spectacularly successful national team. On January 5, 2026, Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 at Rajamangala Stadium, 5-3 on aggregate over two legs, to win the 2026 AFF Cup. Nguyen Xuan Son scored in the second leg. The whole country took to the streets. That is exactly when I worry most.

National-team success does not flow into club books

National-team success and the financial health of the domestic league are two curves that barely intersect. I consider this the single most important data point in Vietnamese football, and it is rarely said plainly.

Follow the money after a title. Fans buy shirts. Shirt sales spike for two weeks. But most V.League clubs have no retail system, no warehouse, no official distribution channel. Shirts are sold mostly through informal shops, and that money never reaches the club. In accounting terms, the revenue bump exists in the fans’ feelings, not on a balance sheet.

Next, national-team sponsorship. After the AFF Cup, sponsors flow to the Vietnam Football Federation. But the Federation is a different legal entity from the fourteen clubs. Money going into the national team does not automatically go into the league. That structure is normal in many countries, but in developed football economies clubs still survive on the other three streams. In V.League, those other streams are far too thin to compensate.

Third — and this is the part I have reviewed on tape the most — player value. An AFF Cup title lifts the market value of an entire generation. But converting that value into cash requires a functioning domestic transfer market: clubs selling players to clubs at real prices, with contracts, with fees, with youth-development compensation shared out. In Vietnam, most domestic moves are free transfers after contract expiry, or an undisclosed fee. No price means no asset. No asset means a club has nothing to mortgage, nothing to sell, nothing to raise capital against.

Look at the export pipeline and the picture sharpens. Nguyen Cong Phuong to Sint-Truiden in Belgium in 2026. Doan Van Hau to SC Heerenveen in the Netherlands the same year. Nguyen Quang Hai to Pau FC in France’s Ligue 2 in 2026. Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan — the list of Vietnamese players going abroad is not short. But look behind it: most of these deals were loans, short contracts, nominal fees. The clubs that developed them collected almost nothing meaningful.

An academy spends ten years; the club receives a fee that will not cover one month of first-team wages. That is why nobody wants to run a serious academy, and why this football economy depends on the goodwill of a few individuals.

There is one other place where the money is forced into the open: the Asian Football Confederation’s club licensing file. To enter the AFC Champions League or AFC Champions League Two, a club must pass financial, legal and infrastructure criteria. Hanoi FC, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Cong An Ha Noi, Thep Xanh Nam Dinh — the sides that have represented Vietnam on the continental stage — have all been through that process. It is the only point in the entire system where numbers must exist in writing. It is no accident that this is also the point of maximum pressure, and where unpaid wages, tax debts and ownership changes usually surface publicly.

The contrarian angle: the problem is not a lack of money, it is that money has no memory

I want to say plainly what I know will irritate a lot of people in the game. V.League does not lack money. It lacks memory.

A football economy that publishes no audited financial statements cannot be valued. A club that cannot be valued cannot be sold. A club that cannot be sold attracts no investor, because nobody knows what they are buying. And with no investors, the only remaining door is the current owner — someone who may love the club, may treat it as a social duty, but may also grow tired and stop on a Monday morning.

I have been wrong many times in this job. One night in Luzhniki I mispronounced a player’s name three times in the first half, and I paid for it with months of mockery. I went back to the tape, I corrected it, and I took one lesson: when you are wrong, you say clearly where you were wrong. So here I will say clearly where I might be wrong.

Perhaps this informality is rational. Vietnamese football may not be a sports economy at all, but a patronage economy — and it has produced good generations of players. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy, the Viettel centre, the development pipelines in Nghe An and Nam Dinh have achieved what many countries in the region have not. Look at the 2026 AFF Cup winning squad: mostly domestic products, plus one naturalised striker in Nguyen Xuan Son. That is a real achievement.

But that achievement does not pay the wages of fourteen clubs. And it creates no mechanism to replace an owner when the owner stops.

Let me put it another way. Vietnamese football is good at producing players and poor at producing institutions. Those two things do not automatically travel together. A country can win a regional title while its domestic league is behind on wages, and that has happened, repeatedly.

What to watch, and one verifiable prediction

I am staking my reputation on three things, and all three can be checked.

One: within the next three seasons, at least one V.League 1 club will publicly pass or fail the financial stage of continental club licensing. Two: there will be at least one mid-season ownership change, announced in a single short line on an official website. Three: the metric worth watching is not points, but the owner-dependency ratio — the share of a club’s budget coming from a single source. When that number is published, Vietnamese football will begin to have memory.

2 a.m., the phone rings, and a truth cracks open: a league can count its goals for twenty years and still fail to count its money for a single season.

That night I stammered, but history did not.