V.League Lives on the Owner's Breath, and Will Die by It

On the night of June 30, 2026, I sat in a small studio in Guangzhou, the final whistle of a V.League match I had just commentated for a Chinese audience still ringing in my headphones. On the screen, the away side erupted in celebration right on the pitch of a club that had won the national title several times. Behind the goal, the stands held only a few hundred spectators, their cheers rising and dissolving at once under the roof. The scoreboard read 2-1. But what I saw on that screen was not the score. I saw a football ecosystem breathing through someone else's lungs, and those lungs were getting shorter by the season.

I have been in this business for nearly forty years, most of it spent on Asian competitions. I have sat in enough studios, read enough club balance sheets, and watched enough empires collapse to know one thing: a football ecosystem only endures when it can feed itself. V.League cannot feed itself. V.League lives on the owner's breath. And history always ends the same way for anything that lives on the owner's breath — with a quiet afternoon, when the money is withdrawn and no one has the courage to say out loud what everyone already knows.

I know I am touching a very sensitive nerve. In Vietnam, criticizing the owners is treated almost as betrayal. People call them heroes, keepers of the flame, men who reached into their own pockets so the nation's football could have a stage. I do not deny that. But I come from a place that walked this exact road — and I know where it leads.

Let me say it plainly from the start: V.League does not lack money. It lacks a structure that lets money stay. And every owner, however generous, is ultimately just a person who can change his mind.

I call this an offside trap at the macro level. The whole ecosystem is pushing its line high, charging forward with the belief that one more owner is all it takes. The assistant referee raised the flag long ago, but nobody is looking at the touchline.

Context: A football ecosystem raised on goodwill

To understand V.League, you must understand its ownership model. In most professional leagues around the world, a club is an economic entity with many revenue streams: broadcasting rights, shirt sponsorship, ticket sales, player sales, image commercialization, and a share from the league. In Vietnam, that order is almost completely reversed. The largest revenue source — and often the only one large enough to operate — comes from an individual or a corporation tied to that individual.

This structure has a name in Vietnamese that no other language can translate: bầu. Not president, not owner, not investor. The bầu is the man behind the curtain, the decision-maker, the one who pays and the one who can stop paying at any moment. In my files, the first generation of bầu tied to professional Vietnamese football emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when clubs shifted from state-managed units to corporate-sponsored enterprises.

The three names that shaped almost this entire era are names any fan knows by heart. One is tied to a commercial bank and once lifted Vietnamese football to a new level, before legal troubles left behind a lesson the ecosystem still has not fully learned. One is tied to a real estate and timber conglomerate in the Central Highlands, who built an academy regarded as a regional model. One is tied to a technology and real estate group in Hanoi, who turned his club into the dominant force of the domestic league for years.

I do not name them to judge individuals. I name them to point at a structure. Three paths, three industries, but the same formula: a wealthy individual behind a club, drawing resources from the parent company to fund it, and using the club to create intangible value — prestige, connections, brand, sometimes just the joy of seeing his name in the stands. This formula is not morally wrong. It is only structurally wrong. Because it turns a public asset — a city's club, a region's club, the club of millions — into a private asset that can be sold, abandoned, or stripped at any moment.

Look at how a V.League club operates. The budget of most teams sits in the range of a few tens of billions of dong per season, a figure that, converted into hard currency, would not cover the wages of a substitute in Europe. Within that spending structure, player salaries and bonuses dominate, followed by travel, stadium costs, and a very small slice for youth development. Ticket revenue is almost negligible. Broadcasting revenue redistributed to clubs is symbolic at best. In other words, if you remove the owner's cash flow, most V.League clubs lose the ability to pay within a single season.

I once cross-checked this against other leagues in the region. In Japan, the J.League model was designed from the start so clubs could not survive on one person's money. In South Korea, clubs are tied to chaebol but have control mechanisms and a commercial ecosystem thick enough not to depend on a single person. In Thailand, the league has built a relatively solid collective rights and sponsorship system. V.League took its own road, and the price of that road is fragility.

Core: A financial anatomy of a thin football ecosystem

I want to go into specific numbers, because this is where emotion usually drowns out fact. When I commentate for the Chinese market, viewers there often ask me the same question: why is Vietnam so strong at national-team level yet so weak commercially at league level? The answer lies in the structure of the cash flow.

An average V.League club's total seasonal revenue falls in the range of a few tens of billions of dong, of which the owner-linked sponsorship contribution accounts for more than half. Pure commercial revenue — shirt sales, image rights, independent brand partnerships — is a tiny share. The league's entire broadcasting rights pool, divided among clubs, is roughly equivalent to the ticket revenue of one big European match. That is the number that keeps me up at night whenever I think about the future of this football ecosystem.

A league whose clubs cannot pay their own players' wages out of their own revenue is not a professional league. It is a subsidized league, and subsidies always have an expiry date.

Costs, meanwhile, move in the opposite direction. Top domestic players in V.League can earn several hundred million dong a month, plus match bonuses, plus signing fees. For some stars, the signing fee alone can equal several years of average worker income. Title-chasing clubs routinely spend far beyond their earning capacity, covering the gap with the owner's money. This mechanism creates an arms race no one wins: the champion spends the most, the relegation-threatened side overspends to avoid the drop, and the whole league runs at a loss.

What I want to stress is that this structure does not distinguish between strong and weak clubs. It is a shared trap. When a big club has a budget three times that of a small one, the gap in the table reflects the gap in spending, not the quality of youth work or tactical thinking. And when every club depends on one person, sporting competition is distorted at the root: people compete over who has the richer owner, not who runs football better.

I have followed many V.League seasons as a commentator for foreign markets, and what surprised me was not the technical quality — that is rising — but the concentration of economic power. A handful of conglomerates control most of the strong clubs. When those conglomerates hit trouble, the whole league shakes. I have seen this at a larger scale, and I know how it ends.

The Evergrande collapse is not just a story about Chinese football. It is a warning to every football ecosystem building a house on sand. When Evergrande collapsed, I was not sad that they lost money. I was sad that they forgot how to play. Money can buy stars, but it cannot buy a football culture. And when the money leaves, all that remains is an empty lot.

V.League is not yet in Evergrande's position. But it is walking the same road, just a few years behind. Clubs still exist, owners still pour money in, and everything looks fine. But that fine is built on one assumption: that the payer will never change his mind. History does not support that assumption.

Core: The academy — light in a dark room

If there is one thing that makes me optimistic about Vietnamese football, it is youth development. And this is also where the story gets most complex, because it holds both the miracle and the fear.

Vietnam's golden generation — the generation that took the national team to heights the region had never seen — came out of a single academy, built on an international partnership model. It was a long-term gamble: selecting children from across the country, feeding and schooling them, training them in a closed environment, and waiting ten years to harvest. When the first graduates stepped onto the professional stage, the country was stunned. They played technical, confident football, and above all, different football.

But look at the back half of the story, the part the media rarely mentions. One excellent academy cannot save an entire football ecosystem if the surrounding ecosystem is not thick enough. When the golden generation matured, they needed a league strong enough for further development, a transfer market transparent enough to price them correctly, and a club system stable enough that no one had to worry about their future each time a season ended. V.League could not fully provide those things.

The result is a paradox I have seen in many small football ecosystems: the best players are not sold at the peak of their value, because clubs need them to chase results and because there is no clear profit-sharing mechanism. They stay, age, and their value evaporates with their years. A few go abroad, but often to leagues whose level of competition does not help them improve further. This is a talent leak no balance sheet records.

I must add something I know will annoy many people. The youth scouting system in developing countries has a dark side that people often ignore. The scouting network in developing countries both finds geniuses and creates football lottery tickets and broken families. Behind every youth player brought to the city is a village betting on its child, and not every bet wins.

I have talked to scouts, and they told me about families selling land to send their children to trials, about children abandoned when they did not meet the standard, about promises never kept. This is the flip side of the football dream, and it exists everywhere, not just in Vietnam. But where protection mechanisms are weak, it is crueler.

What is worth noting is that while the big academies operate relatively professionally, most V.League clubs lack a strong youth system. They buy players from academies or other clubs and live day to day that way. When an academy produces a new generation, that generation scatters across teams, and no club is patient enough to build a truly genuine next crop. The result is that Vietnamese football has dazzling peaks but no continuous foundation. It is like a mountain range with a few towering summits but valleys too deep in between.

Core: The national team — a mirror of the underlying worry

Vietnam's national team is the pride of the country, and it is no surprise that any analysis of Vietnamese football must start there. But precisely because the national team succeeds, people often forget that this success stands on a fragile foundation.

For more than a decade, Vietnamese football went through a rare cycle of success at national-team level. A regional title, deep runs in continental competitions, a generation of players known across the region. Behind that success was a convergence of factors: a talented generation emerging at once, coaches who knew how to use them, and a wave of fan support never seen before.

But look closer and a problem appears. The national team depends on a narrow group of players, and that group is aging. As the golden generation enters the twilight of its career, the question of succession becomes urgent. V.League does not produce enough quality players to replace them seamlessly. Academies do create talent, but not in numbers sufficient to offset the departure of a generation.

I have followed Vietnam's national-team matches for years, both as an analyst and as a fan, and I noticed a pattern. Each time the national team succeeds, the domestic ecosystem enjoys a short burst of excitement. But that burst is not converted into sustainable investment. People celebrate the win, then everything returns to normal. The structure does not change. Clubs still live on the owner. Academies still operate under-resourced. And when the next generation fails to match the previous one's results, people blame the coach.

The coaching carousel is a clear symptom of the structural disease. Over roughly a decade, Vietnam's national team went through many coaches, from domestic to foreign, from builders to destroyers. Each coaching change brought expectations of a revolution. But the real revolution is not on the bench. It is in the league's structure, in the cash flow, in how clubs are organized.

When a football ecosystem blames the coach for the problems of an entire system, that is not impatience. That is avoidance. People change the guide because they dare not change the road.

I remember an evening in Moscow, after Germany collapsed in the group stage of a World Cup. I said something that later became famous: when did German football die? When they believed they would win just because they always won. I think of that line every time I look at Vietnamese football. The greatest danger for a rising football ecosystem is not failure. It is success so great that people forget how they won, and believe they will keep winning without changing anything.

Contrarian: The problem is not money, it is power

This is where I want to go against what most fans believe. When discussing V.League's problems, people usually conclude the league lacks money. I think that conclusion is wrong, or at least true in a dangerous way.

V.League does not lack money at the operating level. Money still flows in, wages are still paid, matches still take place. What V.League lacks is a mechanism for distributing power and responsibility. When one individual holds decision-making power over a club's entire fate, that club has no self-correcting mechanism. No independent board, no transparent audit, no long-term strategy that outlives one person's emotional life cycle.

This is why I call the whole model an offside trap. Fans believe that more money, one more generous owner, will fix the league. They push the line high, charge forward, and fail to see that the structure itself is holding them back. The more money pours into a bad structure, the more fragile that structure becomes, because its scale exceeds one individual's capacity to bear.

I have seen this elsewhere. In China, clubs spent enormous sums to sign world stars, build dream squads, and win continental titles. Then the pandemic came, parent conglomerates hit trouble, and within a few years most of those clubs vanished or dissolved. The money spent was not small. The problem was never the amount. The problem was that no one built a system for that money to create lasting value.

In V.League, the seeds of the same story are already present. A few once-glorious clubs have disappeared from the football map, leaving behind debts, unemployed players, and abandoned fans. Each time, people say it was economic hardship, the pandemic, poor leadership. But the root cause is always the same: a club cannot survive independently of the person who created it.

The transfer market is a mirror: the rich see glory, the wise see the trap. In V.League, the transfer market reflects the power structure exactly. Big transfers usually happen between clubs sharing an owner or within the same interest group, at prices that do not reflect true market value. Players are priced by relationships, not ability. And when a club needs to sell a player to balance its finances, it often cannot find a buyer at the right price, because there is no transparent market to reference.

A football ecosystem cannot build a transparent transfer market when its clubs are not transparent about their own finances. You cannot sell an asset you dare not price.

Contrarian: Where I could be wrong

I always reserve a section to question myself, because I have been wrong enough times to know that absolute certainty is a sign of intellectual laziness.

I may be underestimating the owner's role in a development phase. In a young football ecosystem, when the market is not mature enough to sustain clubs, private money is a necessary condition for survival. Without those who spent over the past two decades, perhaps V.League would not exist for us to analyze today. Their role is real, and I do not want to deny it just to sound sharp.

I may also be overestimating the maturity of Vietnam's football market. Perhaps at this moment, calling on clubs to sustain themselves is a romanticism detached from reality. Small leagues around the world also live on a few big sponsors, and that does not necessarily lead to disaster. The difference is that those leagues have a governance system strong enough to keep sponsors in check, while V.League does not.

And I may be too pessimistic about the future. Vietnamese football is showing positive signs: new academies are emerging, some clubs are beginning to prioritize professional governance, and the next generation of young players has potential. If these signs are nurtured properly, the picture in ten years could be completely different. I write this article hoping I am wrong.

But even granting all of the above, I hold my central argument. The issue is not whether owners are good or bad. The issue is that a football ecosystem cannot place its fate in the hands of one individual, however good that individual is. I would rather be a lone eccentric in the studio than a man who speaks from someone else's script. I choose to say what I believe, even when it makes me hated.

What to watch

I am not the man who offers solutions; I am the man who asks questions. But if forced to point at signals worth watching over the next few seasons, I would choose three.

The first is clubs' ownership structure. If a V.League club can publish an independent board, an audited financial report, and a multi-year strategy not tied to a single individual, that would be a genuine sign of transformation. I have not seen it yet, but I am waiting.

The second is how clubs handle young players. If teams begin selling players abroad at fair prices and reinvesting that money into their academies, that is a sign of an ecosystem forming. If they keep players until they lose value, the talent-leak cycle will continue.

The third is the transparency of cash flow. When clubs' real commercial revenue rises and their dependence on owners falls, that is when the football ecosystem starts to mature. Until then, every success can be repossessed in a single afternoon.

Closing

I sit in a small studio in Guangzhou, writing these lines just after commentating a match from another football ecosystem. I look out the window, see the city lit up, and think about the sparse stands in Vietnam, about the children in the academies, about the fans who still patiently come to the stadium every weekend even knowing their club may not exist next season.

Vietnamese football has a big heart. What it lacks is not love, nor money. What it lacks is a frame that lets that heart beat without someone outside squeezing its hand. I believe this football ecosystem will find its way. But I also believe that way will not begin with finding one more wealthy owner. It will begin with a hard question: if the payer disappears tomorrow, what is left of our club?

When Vietnamese clubs can answer that question without glancing at the owner's seat, that is when we will know this football ecosystem has truly matured. Until then, I will sit here, in my small studio, saying plainly what many do not want to hear. Because that is my job, and because I believe a football ecosystem can only grow when someone is brave enough to ask the right question at the right time.