Free Agents, Under-the-Table Fees and the Shadow of Vietnam Football's Dual Contracts

In 2026, at 26, I had just left the pitch in Binh Duong to work as a trainee journalist. One afternoon, a former teammate opened his laptop and showed me a PDF file with no official name. The declaration sent to the league operating company stated a monthly salary of 55 million dong. The second document, used for actual payment, stated 115.5 million dong. I asked why there were two prices. He only said: one version for the governing body, one for the truth. People call it a dual contract; I call it the first lesson learned on the home pitch. I kept the file for three months, checking it against payroll sheets, meeting minutes and sponsorship contracts. I wanted to write a small investigation. The editor in chief told me not to waste my time. I did not publish, but I wrote detailed notes. Seven years later, when free-agent deals became common in V.League, I realized what I saw in 2026 was not an isolated irregularity. It was the blueprint for a new channel of money: expired contracts, zero transfer fees, and the real money rebranded as signing bonuses, support payments or agent commissions. Based on my experience following the Vietnamese transfer market, I argue that the fees paid to free agents are more toxic than ordinary transfer fees. When a player is under contract, the selling club must declare the transfer fee. That number goes through administrative systems, contracts and banks. When a player expires, the new club does not have to pay the old club. The money that used to sit inside the transfer line is now split into several payments made directly to the player, the agent or an intermediary company. These payments do not appear in player registration documents, are not included in the payroll presented to the league, and are not subject to any mandatory disclosure rule. Looking at the hype cycle in Vietnamese football, I see a repeating pattern. In 2026, people told me that dual contracts were just private arrangements between a club chairman, a player and the tournament organizer. In 2026, I compared several transfer documents and noticed that many agency commissions were paid through companies without any sports function. In 2026, when the pandemic left stadiums empty, I sat in a deserted stadium and realized the money flow had not stopped. The ghost season of 2026 taught me that people in power rarely stand in the center of the storm. They stand beyond the touchline, yet their names still appear on the scoreboard of the transfer market. The core issue is not how much money a club pays a player. The core issue is the separation between actual costs and public records. An expiring player can receive a signing fee worth two or three times his old salary. That fee is neither salary nor a transfer fee, so it escapes every monitoring mechanism. In a league that has never built a central database of contracts and agency commissions, nobody can distinguish a healthy deal from a dual-price deal by simply looking at the number in the registration form. Imagine a typical deal I once examined. Club A wants player X, whose contract expired at his old team. Instead of paying a transfer fee, Club A signs X to an employment contract with a monthly salary of 80 million dong. Outside that contract, X receives an additional 1.5 billion dong signing fee. The intermediary receives 500 million dong as a consulting fee. These three numbers are scattered across three companies and three types of documents. If you only inspect the employment contract, everything looks legal. If you add the real cash flow, Club A's total first-year cost is much higher than the number Vietnamese football publicly reports. The problem is not the 1.5 billion or 500 million by itself. The problem is that no one is obliged to add them together. I do not believe in instinct; I believe in a number that is half a cent off in a transfer ledger. In 2026, FIFA recorded total global transfer spending above 9.63 billion USD and warned about money flowing through intermediaries. In Vietnam, the market is far smaller, but the risk structure is similar. When free-agent contracts are not registered in a shared data system, everything becomes a chain of private deals. Players struggle to compare true market values. Clubs cannot prove transparency. Regulators only see the surface while real money is pushed outside the stadium. I also understand why many insiders defend this model. For an expiring player, having control over his own career is better than being trapped by a club holding his contract. For a small club, avoiding transfer fees reduces short-term cash pressure. In a season where many clubs owe salaries, letting a player leave on a free transfer and receive a signing fee may be the only way to provide him with immediate income. That is the reasonable part of the picture. The problem begins only when these legitimate arrangements are deliberately hidden. Without disclosure standards, the concept of a market is distorted. A player may receive more money not because of superior talent, but because his representative understands the unspoken rules better. When I talk to young players in Binh Duong, they often ask whether they should sign long-term or short-term contracts. That question reminds me of the afternoon in 2026. A player is never wrong for wanting a good income. The mistake lies in a system that makes them accept off-books terms as a default condition. As long as signing bonuses are treated as normal, honest clubs are punished. They have to compete with rivals who use undeclared money. Every scandal has one thing in common: the person with power stands outside the touchline but still writes his name on the score sheet. The biggest question is not whether free agents have become a channel for financial evasion. For me, that was already answered in 2026. The real question is why such an obvious lesson has been ignored for a decade. The league operator could build a central database for contracts and agent commissions. The federation could require all player-related payments to pass through dedicated accounts. Sponsors could refuse to fund clubs that do not publish financial statements. But to do these things, league executives must accept an uncomfortable truth: Vietnamese football does not lack legal frameworks. It lacks the will to turn a camera toward the money flow. I am no longer the trainee reporter of 2026. I no longer feel surprised when a contract has two values. What troubles me is that young players today are being taught to ask for money first and paperwork later. If they only learn how to demand signing bonuses without learning how to check who is paying, they will repeat the same trap I saw on the home pitch. The challenge is not confined to tightening one type of contract. It is about building a market where every amount of money can be explained in a simple sentence. Until that happens, every free-agent transfer window will simply be a new version of the dual contract that Vietnamese football abandoned in 2026.