Vietnamese Football Does Not Lack Money — It Lacks a Patient Enough Structure to Keep Its People

I was sitting in a cafe on Nguyen Hue Street in Saigon last March, rewatching a V.League match. At the next table, three university students were arguing about a newly emerging striker. One of them blurted out: "Send him to Japan, staying here wastes his youth." The other two nodded as if they had just discovered a truth. I said nothing and poured more tea. But in my head, that seemingly harmless sentence framed the problem wrongly from the start. When grey hair talks about football, do not rush to cover your ears — because the fire is still red. And my fire today does not burn over "go or stay", it burns over this: who is holding the structure in which Vietnamese players grow up? I have reported on eight Olympics, eight World Cups and many cycling tours across Europe. Enough to know one thing: surface results always run ahead of infrastructure by some distance. Vietnamese football is sitting exactly in that distance. The national team has just come through a rare period of success. AFF Cup titles, deep runs in Asian competitions, a generation born after 2026 recognised across the continent. Every V.League season throws up a few new names that make people excited. But behind the applause is a club system that is financially thin, unstable in governance, and overly dependent on a handful of emotional owners. On the pitch, young players are better, faster, bolder. Off it, contracts are shorter, wages arrive later, and leadership changes with every season. Fans see goals; managers see numbers. The paradox is this: Vietnam's small clubs are celebrated as symbols of "beautiful football with identity", yet they are the ones most likely to lose their pillars, most likely to sell their cheapest twenty-year-old players, and most likely to disappear from the map if the owner stops funding. That story is not new. I have seen it in many places. And here is where I want to be blunt: the biggest problem in Vietnamese football is not a lack of money, it is the lack of a structure patient enough to keep people. The young look at transfermarkt; I look at a player's eyes when he walks onto the pitch. And those eyes in Vietnam in recent years have usually belonged to a man about to leave. In terms of talent flow, Vietnam is exporting more and more, but mostly exporting early. Nguyen Cong Phuong went to Japan, then Belgium, then South Korea. Nguyen Quang Hai went to France. Doan Van Hau went to the Netherlands at twenty. It sounds beautiful. But if a player leaves before he has a hundred professional matches behind him, he does not carry playing capital with him. He carries hope. And abroad, hope does not score goals — only experience scores goals. This is what football nations like Japan and Korea learned long ago: keep young talent long enough for it to ripen, and only then send it abroad. As a result they sell players at higher prices, and those players survive better. In Vietnam I see the opposite signal. Clubs need cash immediately, so they sell young players to cover operating costs. That creates a spiral: the more a team sells, the weaker it gets; the weaker it gets, the more it has to sell; and the more it has to sell, the less time it has to build a successor generation. Look at the cash flow of a mid-tier V.League club and the balance is easy to read. Broadcast revenue is low and mostly shared equally, so it creates no competitive edge. Commercial revenue depends on the owner and ticket prices. The wage bill dominates costs. Which means internal revenue is barely enough to run the team, let alone invest in an academy. When internal revenue is insufficient, transfer decisions become survival decisions, not strategic decisions. And when transfers are survival, you do not keep people — you sell them. This explains a phenomenon fans often complain about: Vietnamese young players shine and then vanish. They do not vanish because they are weak. They vanish because they are placed in too big a role too early, then sold before they can complete themselves. At twenty-one, a midfielder needs roughly fifty to seventy top-level matches to understand the rhythm of the game. In Vietnam, very few young players get to live through that period in one club's shirt. I must add one beautiful illusion: the story of the small town beating the giant. Every season, Vietnamese fans get a few such stories to be proud of. And yes, those wins are beautiful. But they conceal a financial gap that is not small, and a sustainable operating reality that very few small clubs achieve. A small club winning one match is a story of the week. A small club surviving ten years is a story of structure. V.League 1 currently has fourteen teams, and only a few Asian competition slots. That means most teams play an entire season with no continental target and no real relegation fear. Between those two poles, competitive incentive weakens, and when incentive weakens, investment in young players becomes harder to justify to a board. In the transfer window I see another problem: noise. Every day there are dozens of rumours. Rumours are wind, but I am old enough to know where the wind blows from. When a club needs money, rumours of selling a player appear before any formal offer — that is how agents create price. When a young player has just shone, rumours of a move abroad appear within forty-eight hours — that is how leverage is created for a contract. If you can read the wind, you will not panic with the news. And in the recent transfer window, I noticed a familiar pattern: big V.League clubs buy young players from small clubs, then a few years later sell them abroad. This pattern is not bad economically — it is normal business. But it means small clubs become unofficial academies, bearing development costs, yet not receiving a fair share when the player is sold. This is where FIFA's training compensation mechanism ought to work better for Vietnamese clubs. But reading the wind helps nothing if you have no structure. Because even when a rumour is true, Vietnamese clubs are usually passive: they have no three replacement options, no pathway for young players, no long enough contracts to negotiate from strength. There is one more paradox few mention: Vietnam's women's team has just reached a World Cup for the first time, a historic achievement. But that achievement raises the same question on a smaller scale: without investment in the women's league and women's academies, that success will be only a single peak. Now comes the part where I may be wrong. There is a counter-argument worth weighing: in a football economy where domestic wages are low and the competitive environment is not harsh enough, going abroad early may be a better medicine than staying. If a Vietnamese player stays in the V.League until twenty-five, he may only top a league whose defensive quality is not enough to train him. Abroad, even sitting on the bench, he trains with better people every day. That is a real argument. I have also been wrong before when talking about cycles. Nobody believed Croatia back then, except me and a few drinking buddies — but that was a national team that already had a golden generation. Vietnam does not yet have a golden generation that deep, and comparing the two cases is something I need to warn myself about. But even accepting the counter-argument, I still do not see it breaking the core point: a player leaving because his club is forced to sell is entirely different from a player leaving because his club has prepared a pathway for him. The difference is not in the destination, it is in whether the people left behind have a system. I also remind myself not to side with Japan just because I was born there. Japanese football has a habit of keeping people longer, but Japan also has money and a strong enough league to hold them. Vietnam does not have the same conditions. What Vietnam can learn is not patience itself, but how to build a structure that makes patience feasible: fairer revenue sharing, better protection of young players' contracts, and a real role for academies in club strategy. Fifteen Zoom sessions during the pandemic taught me that football does not need a stadium, only people to watch together. But they also taught me that a community is only strong when there are people who stay and organise. Vietnamese football is missing exactly those people who stay. Goc Nong is not the name of a podcast, it is the way I stand before the storm — and the real storm in Vietnamese football is not on the pitch, it is in the accounting room. Three years from now, if the V.League keeps the same broadcast revenue sharing and the same dependence on owners, I predict at least three more clubs will fall into selling their pillars to pay wages. Conversely, if a few academies are properly invested in and keep players long enough, we will see a generation of Vietnamese players move abroad at twenty-three or twenty-four and survive far better. The difference between those two scenarios is not talent — Vietnam has proved it has talent. It is patience. And patience, in football, is always the most expensive thing. Storms may stop, the ball may roll slowly, but we are still here. The question is not whether Vietnamese players are good enough to leave. The question is: when they leave, who stays behind to look after the next one?