Vietnamese Football: A Talent Exporter Without a Foundation

In V.League 1, there is a paradox that repeats every season and is rarely named correctly. A club can sell a young player to the J.League or the K.League for a fee that silences the boardroom, and a few weeks later that same club is scrambling to plug a gap with a short-term contract. The money comes in, but the system does not follow. The talent leaves, and the foundation stays somewhere between a contract and an unfinished promise. I have followed Vietnamese football long enough to know this is not one club's story. It is the story of an entire model. And that model now faces its biggest question: when you can export talent but cannot hold a foundation, are you building a club, or a transit station? To answer that, you have to start with structure. Professional football in Vietnam operates under the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF), which runs V.League 1 and V.League 2. But unlike European leagues, where broadcasting and commercial revenue are the pillars, most V.League clubs live off one or a few owners. The benefactor pays the wages, chooses the coach, and often decides on transfers the coaching staff has not even proposed. That structure produces a double effect. First, clubs can react very fast — signing a foreign player in days, sacking a coach after two defeats. Second, clubs have almost no incentive to build long-term systems, because long-term systems do not deliver the immediate results owners need. This is where many fans mistake a money problem for what it really is: a decision-making problem. With that structure, the export route to Japan and South Korea becomes both a safety valve and a trap. For a young player, a move to the J.League or K.League is a clear step up: a more professional environment, higher physical demands, better income. For the parent club, it is one of the few revenue streams that does not depend on the benefactor. FIFA's training mechanism also guarantees that clubs which developed a player between the ages of 12 and 23 receive a share of future transfer fees. But here is where I want to be blunt: exporting talent, if it stops at selling, does not automatically upgrade a football nation. In the short term, it only upgrades the balance sheet of a few clubs. The real question is where the money goes — into academies, facilities, analytics departments, or into an expensive foreign signing to chase this season's results? I once wrote about a costly foreign transfer at a leading club while domestic talent waited for a chance. Based on my experience watching matches, what I learned was not that foreign players are bad. Many of them are very good. The lesson was elsewhere: a team cannot buy identity through a contract. Identity comes from giving young players opportunities and tolerating their mistakes for a few seasons. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai academy is worth revisiting, not to praise it but to draw a lesson. A generation of well-trained players, once seen as the future of Vietnamese football — names such as Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh and Luong Xuan Truong — grew up and shone at national-team level. But as they reached their peak years, their paths split: some went abroad, some stayed, and very few enjoyed a domestic environment competitive enough to keep developing. That is the paradox: successful development, but no way to keep its results at home. At national-team level, the cycle tells the same story. Vietnamese football has had memorable milestones — the 2026 AFF Cup title under coach Park Hang-seo, and the 2026 ASEAN Championship title under coach Kim Sang-sik, with naturalised striker Nguyen Xuan Son as the spearhead of the attack. Those peaks prove Vietnam can compete regionally when it has the right people and organisation. But between the peaks lie the silences. After every major tournament, the familiar question returns: where is the next generation? And the answer usually lies in the V.League itself — where young players need to play, but often have to make way for short-term, reactive signings. This is the loop no national-team coach can break alone. There is another, more counterintuitive view. Many assume the V.League's problem is a lack of money. I do not think so. The problem is how money is spent and who is accountable for spending it. A league can be revenue-poor yet still run healthily if decision-making is transparent, if contracts are judged on data rather than instinct, and if coaches are genuinely empowered. Conversely, a league can pour in money and still build nothing durable, because every season restarts from scratch. On the transfer market, reputation is the most easily laundered currency. A name that once played in Europe can be priced above its real value simply because it sells tickets and reassures fans. That is why I always look at minutes played, physical indicators and age before I look at the name. But I also admit my blind spot: if I rely only on data, I may miss what data cannot measure — dressing-room atmosphere, the family pressure on a young player, or the patience of an owner under pressure from supporters. And this is where I may be wrong. Perhaps the benefactor model is not the weakness; perhaps it is the thing keeping the V.League alive while domestic revenue remains thin. Perhaps exporting players, however imperfect, is the most realistic path for a Vietnamese player to reach international standards. If so, the answer is not to dismantle the model but to reform it — turning the owner from sole decision-maker into a long-term goal-setter, while handing the football side to people trained to do it. One thing I am sure of after years of watching: crises, whether a pandemic, a relegation or a financial scandal, do not destroy sport. They break the old model to make room for whoever moves fastest. Vietnamese football proved this once when the pandemic forced leagues to adapt, and new content and esports models emerged in the gap. The V.League can take the same road, if someone is brave enough to change how decisions are made instead of just changing the coach. I was born to say what others think but do not dare to say, so I will say this: an easy hot take is to blame the foreign coach or the naturalised player. That is a lazy view. The problems of Vietnamese football are systemic, and systemic problems are not solved by one contract or one press conference. They need a decade of patience, a long enough dataset, and a generation of leaders willing to be criticised for decisions that do not pay off immediately. People need data to predict. I only need to look at the crowd and walk the other way. But this time, going against the crowd does not mean denying what Vietnamese football has achieved. It means refusing short-term satisfaction. A regional title is a joy, but it is not a foundation. The foundation lies in less glamorous things: an academy with a pathway, a genuinely competitive league, a data system used to make decisions, and a mechanism that returns money from player sales to the players themselves. What is unusual about Vietnamese football is not that it exports talent. Many small football nations do. What is unusual is that it exports talent while it has not yet finished building the system to keep the best at home. When that gap closes, the V.League will no longer be a transit station. It will become a league attractive enough that a young player wants to stay a few more years before leaving — and that is the true measure of maturity. The final question is not for me, but for those holding the keys: if money cannot buy a system, who will take responsibility for building it? Because in football, as in everything else, you can buy the person standing next to you, but no one can buy time.