V.League Doesn't Lack Money to Buy Players, It Lacks a Mechanism to Sell Them

Three in the morning in London. I brew a strong coffee, open the V.League stream on an old laptop, and wait. On screen, the away side has just gone 0-2 down at home. The commentator delivers the line I have heard a hundred times in my life: "This team lacks a top-class striker." I mute it. Not out of irritation. Because in ten minutes, someone on social media will post that exact sentence, with a few thousand likes and a few dozen angry replies. At 42, I still write as if every match is the last one I get to live. But after twenty-six years watching Vietnamese football from a distance, I have learned one thing: the attack is only the symptom. The disease sits somewhere nobody wants to look — the domestic transfer market.

V.League 1 currently has 14 clubs. Most clubs' revenue comes from owner sponsorship and a modest slice of broadcasting rights. Average attendances at many matches run to a few thousand, occasionally under a thousand. Meanwhile the national team keeps delivering euphoria: the AFF Cup titles of 2026 and 2026, the U23 Asian Cup runner-up finish in Changzhou in 2026, a quarter-final place at the 2026 Asian Cup. Those peaks convinced the public that the whole game is rising.

At club level the picture is very different. Saigon FC dissolved. Than Quang Ninh withdrew over unpaid wages. Can Tho lurched from crisis to crisis. Club licensing has become a fight for survival every season rather than an administrative formality. A league where clubs ask to lower targets, ask for delays, ask for extensions year after year cannot discuss tactics before it discusses existence.

So how do Vietnamese clubs actually buy and sell players from one another? Mostly for free. A player's contract expires, he moves to another club, his old club receives nothing. A player falls out of favour, goes on loan elsewhere, and his parent club still pays most of his wages. Deals with a real transfer fee, a permanent contract, a sell-on clause — they barely exist.

Vietnamese football does not lack the money to buy players. It lacks a mechanism to sell them.

That sounds like a small point. Its consequences are large enough to shape an entire ecosystem. When a club cannot sell a player, it has no exit liquidity. An academy cannot fund itself from player sales. Youth development therefore remains a charitable act dependent on an owner's goodwill, not an investment with a return. And when youth development generates no return, it is always the first line cut when budgets shrink.

Look at how the big academies operate. The HAGL JMG academy was once held up as a model, producing a generation of players the whole country knows by name. But when the parent company tightened spending, the academy had to shrink too. PVF and Viettel are the same: the resources come from a corporation, not from the market. In football economies with a working transfer market, an academy is a profit centre — sell one young player for a few million, and that money funds the next cohort. In Vietnam, an academy is a cost centre. Costs can always be struck out.

Based on my experience following matches, I always notice one small detail on the team sheet: how many players under 21 are registered for the squad. At ambitious V.League clubs that number is often surprisingly low. They buy players aged 26 to 29 because they need results now, because there is no time, because the head coach has six months left on his contract. That spiral feeds itself: the more you need short-term results, the less you invest long term, the less you have to sell, the less you have to buy.

Look abroad and you see the opposite. In 2026, Nguyen Quang Hai joined Pau FC in France on a free transfer, after his contract with his previous club expired. In 2026, Doan Van Hau went to SC Heerenveen in the Netherlands on loan. Nguyen Cong Phuong moved to Japan and then South Korea, mostly on loan as well. Which means: when a Vietnamese player goes abroad, his parent club collects almost nothing.

Comparatively, a few Thai or Indonesian clubs have completed deals selling young players abroad for six-figure dollar fees. Vietnam's column is almost blank. This is not a question of talent. It is a question of contracts, negotiation, and the people sitting at the desk.

Another rarely discussed cause: V.League contracts are usually short, usually renewed late, and usually lack clear release clauses. When a contract has one year left and neither side negotiates, the club is in an absolutely weak position. It must sell cheap, or lose the player for nothing. Most choose to lose him for nothing, because selling cheap still means splitting the money several ways, whereas losing him at least preserves relationships with agents and players.

Then there is one more layer: the agent ecosystem. In a mature market, agents push prices, create competition, and force clubs to value their own assets correctly. In Vietnam, the number of professional, properly practising agents is very thin. Most deals happen through personal connections, through a referral, through one phone call. No valuation file, no data, nothing to reference against.

Then comes naturalisation. Nguyen Xuan Son, Nguyen Filip, Jason Pendant Quang Vinh — these names give the national team something domestic academies have not yet produced. But at club level they create a paradox: a high-quality naturalised player has enormous use value for the national team, while his international transfer value is close to zero. The club pays for an asset it cannot sell.

And finally, substitutions. The five-substitution rule turns the last twenty minutes into a war of attrition. In a league where the gap in squad depth between the league leaders and the bottom club is absurdly wide, that rule rewards the rich. A team with five bench players capable of changing a game has substitutions as a weapon. A team with only three players good enough to start uses substitutions merely to protect a scoreline. Anyone who has watched V.League long enough knows: the second half of many matches is no longer football, it is fitness management.

Now to where I could be wrong. There is a counter-argument worth taking seriously: the problem is not the transfer market, it is that there is no market to speak of. If every club runs a deficit, nobody has money to buy. Building a transfer mechanism before building club revenue is putting the cart before the horse. You cannot sell in a room with no buyers.

I accept that point carries weight. But I hold my position: both jobs must be done at once. Revenue comes from crowds, from broadcasting, from commercial deals — all of which take time and require trust. Transfers do not have to wait for anyone. They only need contracts drafted properly. If I am wrong, I will admit it immediately, in a proper article, without deleting anything and without making excuses.

I have been wrong in other ways too. In 2026, I said Argentina would be eliminated in the group stage, and Messi taught me a lesson I still retell. A correct hot take does not make a reputation. A wrong hot take, at the right moment, becomes legend. But there is a different kind of wrong: being wrong because you refused to read a balance sheet. That is the kind I try hardest to avoid.

My falsifiable prediction: by the end of 2028, V.League will record at least one sale of a domestic player abroad for a fee of 500,000 USD or more. The club that does it will not be the richest in the league. It will be the club with the best academy and a technical director who reads contracts before reading matches. If it does not happen, I will write the retraction. If it does, remember that someone said it first.