V.League: End-of-Season Cash Flows, Youth Academies and the Blank Cells on the Bank Statement

V.League: End-of-Season Cash Flows, Youth Academies and the Blank Cells on the Bank Statement

On June 30, 2026, when the final match of the V.League 1 season ended, the stadium scoreboard displayed a thank-you message to the sponsor. In one corner of the stand, a group of supporters rolled up their banner, stuffed it into a backpack, and walked out through the gate in silence. None of them knew that on the lower level of Stand A, the organising committee's office lights were still on, and on the desk lay a file more than two hundred pages thick: the season's final accounts. I was watching from London at seven that evening, the final league table in my left hand and a revenue summary I had built myself from scattered announcements by the league, the federation and individual clubs in my right.

The two sheets did not match. They failed to match in the most serious place: the total revenue the league announced for the entire competition did not equal a fraction of the revenue of a mid-table Championship club in England. That is something I have known for years. But this time I did not want to write about the gap between V.League and European football. I wanted to write about the gap inside V.League itself: between the figure displayed on the scoreboard and the figure that actually moves through the accounts of fourteen clubs.

Context: a league with fourteen different creditors

For the past decade I have followed V.League along two parallel paths. The first path is the screen: matches, bulletins, post-match press conferences. The second path is paperwork: annual reports, club licensing files, player registration lists, and the sponsorship announcements clubs post on their websites and then delete a few weeks later. If you look only at the first path, V.League appears to be a rising league: the national team reached the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, won the 2026 AFF Cup, and appeared regularly at Asian Cups. If you look at the second path, the picture is very different.

V.League 1 operates with fourteen clubs. Most of them are owned by a company or a conglomerate, and most of those companies operate in real estate, construction, energy, materials or agriculture. That means club revenue does not come from spectators, does not come from television rights, and does not come from player sales. It comes from the parent company's cash flow. When the parent company is healthy, the club spends. When the parent company struggles, the club goes quiet for a few months, then pays wages late, then appears in short news items about players posting complaints online.

I once spent three consecutive seasons cross-referencing. The average revenue structure of a V.League 1 club is almost unchanging: roughly sixty to eighty per cent comes from sponsorship tied to the parent business, with the remainder split among tickets, player sales, prize money and a small share of centralised television rights. Ticket prices run from a few tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand dong, and average attendance across the league sits frequently between four and six thousand per match, with some games drawing only a few hundred. In other words, spectators contribute a very small part of a club's balance sheet.

This is the key point from which any analysis of V.League must begin: this is not a league that sells a product to viewers. It is a league in which businesses use football as a branding channel and a relationship channel. Understanding that is the only way to understand how a club can spend more than a hundred billion dong in a season while its ticket revenue does not cover the stadium's electricity bill.

The core: tracing the money through five stages

The first stage is broadcasting rights. This is the stage that took me the longest, and the stage with the least public data. V.League broadcasting rights are sold as a collective package, usually over a multi-year cycle, and the money is redistributed to clubs according to a formula the organisers rarely publish in detail. When I add up the scattered figures mentioned in the press over many years, the contract value falls somewhere in the range of a few hundred billion dong per cycle, divided among fourteen clubs, then reduced by operating costs, taxes and other allocations.

The final amount a club receives, calculated per season, is usually enough to pay one or two high-end domestic players. This explains a paradox I have heard many times in conversations with people inside Vietnamese football: the league has commercial value, but broadcasting money changes nothing. No club survives on broadcasting money. And when a revenue stream is not large enough to change the behaviour of its recipient, it becomes an administrative flow rather than a strategic one.

The second stage is sponsorship. This is where the largest money flows. A sponsorship contract in V.League usually has three layers. The first layer is the contract between the parent business and the club, sometimes no more than an internal transfer between two legal entities inside the same group. The second layer is the contract between the club and an external sponsor, usually tied to stadium naming rights, shirt logo rights, or appearances in media activities. The third layer is smaller, dispersed sponsorships, sometimes paid in kind rather than cash: cars, equipment, medical services, accommodation for players.

I once spent three weeks cross-referencing a club's sponsorship announcements over a single season against the sponsor list printed on the shirts and on the advertising boards around the pitch. The number of sponsors appearing in the announcements exceeded the number appearing on the shirts. The number on the shirts exceeded the number I could verify as belonging to an operating legal entity. That gap is not necessarily a sign of fraud. It is usually the consequence of a football economy in which contracts are signed on trust, renewed through relationships, and paid according to flexible schedules. But it also means that if a sponsor withdraws mid-season, the club has no mechanism to replace it.

The third stage is the wage bill. This is the stage I consider the most important, and the most obscured. In V.League, a club's wage bill can account for forty to seventy per cent of total costs. Within that bill there are three groups of different natures. Young domestic players on long-term, low-wage contracts with performance bonuses. Domestic players at their peak, on high wages, often with a one-off signing fee. And foreign players, usually paid by the season, with release clauses, and the only group a club can cut quickly if the owner's cash flow stops.

I have asked myself many times why V.League clubs fall so easily into collective wage arrears, when European football also has many indebted clubs. The answer lies in structure, not in personal morality. In Europe, a club has collateral: a stadium, rights, player contracts with transfer value. In V.League, most clubs do not own their stadium in the sense of a tradeable asset, have no significant rights, and domestic player contracts usually carry no international transfer value. That means when the owner's money stops, the club has nothing to sell.

The fourth stage is transfers. This is the stage Vietnamese media covers most, and the stage with the least verifiable data. Most domestic transfers between V.League clubs do not disclose a fee. When a player moves from club A to club B, the information is usually "free transfer" or "contract termination". In reality, money may still change hands between the two clubs, but that money does not pass through any disclosure system, does not appear in annual reports, and is not checked by anyone.

I once followed a young player through three transfers in four years. The common thread across all three: the developing club received no significant training compensation, an intermediary club received a sum, and the player's employment contract was always re-signed at the moment his market value peaked. Added together, those three moves let me draw a path for the money. But I could not prove whether it was lawful or unlawful, because no document was ever published. That is the biggest blind spot in Vietnamese football: the domestic transfer money flow is a black box, and the black box is never opened because no one has a duty to open it.

The fifth stage is academies. This is the stage I care about most, and the stage with the most paradoxes. Over the past two decades Vietnam has genuinely built an academy system: an academy run by an agricultural conglomerate in Gia Lai, an academy run by a telecommunications group, an academy run by a Hanoi club, and federation training centres. These academies produced the generation of players the whole of Asia knows by name. That is a real achievement, and I have no intention of denying it.

But if you look at the money, the academy is the weakest stage. The cost of developing a player from age eleven to eighteen, including board, schooling, coaching, medical care and competition, is usually estimated by academies at several hundred million to more than a billion dong per player. When that player signs a first professional contract, the academy usually receives nothing commensurate. When the player moves abroad, FIFA's training compensation mechanism may produce a sum, but that sum is small and depends on whether the new club chooses to pay.

There is a sentence I always keep in my notebook: "An academy can produce talent, but it cannot produce honesty." I wrote it not to criticise academies. I wrote it to say this: the academy is where value is created, but that value is siphoned out at the next stage, and the academy has no tool to keep its share. A development system that is not paid for developing will soon become a charity system. And charity depends on the donor, not on the system.

Where money disappears from the published figures

After years of working with spreadsheets, I have learned one principle: never look for money where it is announced. Look for it where it is avoided. In V.League there are three such places.

The first is bonuses. Vietnamese football has a very strong culture of spot bonuses: for a win, for a title, for breaking a record, for a spectacular goal. These bonuses are not in the employment contract, not in the wage bill, and not in the club's final accounts. They are a horizontal flow, from businesses or individuals directly to players. That flow drives motivation, but it also distorts income structure: the player does not know what his real income is, the club cannot control real costs, and the tax authority has no basis for cross-checking.

The second is derivative rights. When a league has value, that value does not lie only in the television contract. It lies in players' images, in mobile applications, in data packages, in short-form content rights. In V.League, most of these branches are not commercialised, or are exploited at too small a scale to be tracked. The result is that the league's added value leaks away, flowing neither to clubs, nor to academies, nor to supporters.

The third is the club licensing system. This is the most important tool Vietnamese football currently has, and the tool operated most loosely. Continental club licensing requires criteria on finance, infrastructure, youth development and staffing. Those criteria, if enforced strictly, would force clubs to become transparent. But when licensing is both a condition of entry and a commercial barrier for an entire league, the pressure to loosen always exceeds the pressure to tighten.

I once mispronounced the name Perišić, but I am never wrong about what I have witnessed. I put that sentence here because it reminds me that in this profession people will forgive a mispronunciation, but they will not forgive a wrong fact. And the fact I am most certain of regarding V.League, after years of cross-referencing, is this: revenue is small, but costs are not. That gap is covered by the owner's cash flow. When the owner's cash flow stops, the gap becomes debt.

In the lower divisions, people do not need glory; they need a roof when the rain comes. I wrote that line after a night reading the files of six lower-division clubs excluded from a support list because of administrative errors. Those clubs had no large academy, no beautiful stadium, no million-dollar sponsorship. They had a team, a handful of semi-professional players, and a support payment they never received. When people talk about Vietnamese football, they talk about the national team and the big clubs. But the real system of Vietnamese football lives in the lower tiers, and the lower tiers are the most fragile.

The counterintuitive angle: the reasonable part of what gets criticised

It would be lazy to write only that Vietnamese football lacks transparency and leave it there. I have spent years arguing against myself, and there are three things I must concede.

First, the corporate-owner model is not a mistake. In a league whose internal revenue cannot feed its clubs, having a corporate backer is a condition of survival. European clubs once passed through a similar phase, when local industrialists kept clubs as a civic duty. The problem is not having a corporate owner. The problem is that when that business leaves or weakens, the club has no buffer to stand on. In other words: the model is acceptable, but the accompanying conditions have never been built.

Second, financial disclosure is not only a club's problem. If a club publishes full figures, it immediately suffers a disadvantage in transfer negotiations and in commercial competition with clubs that publish nothing. Vietnamese football is in a collective situation: if only one club is transparent, that club loses out. Only when transparency becomes a condition of entry does the pressure shift from the club to the system. A rescue package only truly exists when someone dares to ask: where is the money? And that question must be asked at league level, not at individual club level.

Third, technical quality and financial transparency do not always travel together. I have watched V.League matches with better tactical quality than many leagues in wealthier countries. Those teams defended as a block, transitioned quickly, exploited half-space gaps in a very modern way. That quality comes from coaching work, not from money. But coaching work also needs to be paid, and paid on time, in order to be sustained. In other words: transparency does not make football better immediately, but it makes football quality last longer.

On VAR, I hold a view I know is unpopular. VAR does not reduce controversy. It only moves controversy from the pitch to the review room, and from the referee's decision to the interpretation of the grey areas of the law. In V.League, when VAR arrived, I expected fewer disputes over sensitive incidents. The opposite happened: disputes moved to questions about the standard applied, about consistency between matches, and about operating costs. For a league with a tight budget, every investment in technology is a decision to forgo another investment. I am not against VAR. I am only saying that technology does not solve an institutional problem.

What the numbers cannot say

I have received many messages from Vietnamese supporters over the years. Most of them do not ask about tactics. They ask about tickets, about kick-off times, about why their club changed its name, its owner and its city three times in ten years. There is one message I still remember. A supporter in central Vietnam wrote that he had followed his club since he was in secondary school, and by the time he turned thirty the club no longer existed. He asked me: where did the money go?

I did not answer immediately. It took me two weeks to find an answer, and the answer I found did not satisfy me. The money did not disappear at a single point. It disappeared gradually, across many seasons, along many lines: a wage debt rescheduled, a sponsorship renewed and then cancelled, an internal loan between two companies in the same group, a foreign-player slot bought and sold back within a single transfer window. Each individual line could be explained. Added together, they produced an outcome no one could explain.

That is why I always tell young editors: do not write about a missing sum. Write about a sequence of sums moving through. Football does not end at the ninetieth minute; it runs all the way to the last line of the bank statement.

Who is being silenced in this story

In my investigative projects I always ask one question: who is being silenced in this story?

In V.League, the most silenced people are young players. They sign contracts at eighteen, usually without a professional agent, usually without reading carefully the clauses on compensation and release. When they play well, their value rises and their contract is re-signed — but not always with a commensurate improvement. When they are injured, the club can cut their wages, and they have no protection beyond the contract.

The second silenced group is grassroots coaches. This is the group I consider the most important and the worst paid in the whole system. A youth coach at grassroots level may teach twenty children a week on an income that is not enough to live on, while a famous player can earn hundreds of times that in a single season. If there is one place Vietnamese football should pour money into, it is here. But investing in grassroots coaches produces no media imagery, no viral moment, no sponsor. So it is not invested in.

The third silenced group is the supporters. Supporters are the ones who pay, but they are usually the last to see the books. They buy tickets, buy shirts, buy streaming rights, and they have no right to ask the club where that money went. Under the current model, supporters are customers when it comes to spending, but not stakeholders when it comes to governance. This is the largest governance gap, and also the easiest to fill.

What will happen next season

I cannot predict the outcome of a season. But I can predict three things about the money.

The first predictable thing: the wage bill will continue to grow faster than internal revenue. This is unavoidable, because clubs compete on wages and players have more options abroad than before. When players have options, clubs must pay more to keep them. If internal revenue does not rise correspondingly, the difference must again come from the corporate owner. And that cycle will repeat.

The second predictable thing: small, recurring wage arrears will continue to appear. Not because clubs have no money, but because their cash flow is not synchronised with the payroll schedule. This is a cash-management problem, not a bankruptcy problem. V.League clubs do not go bankrupt the way companies do. They shrink, then continue, then shrink again. That model keeps the league alive but prevents it from accumulating.

The third predictable thing: pressure for transparency will rise, but not from inside Vietnamese football. It will come from outside: from continental licensing rules, from FIFA requirements on youth development and compensation, from banks when clubs seek loans, and from the players themselves once they realise they can move abroad and earn more.

Conclusion

I do not need to be proved right. I need a published bank statement.

Vietnamese football has shown that it can produce talent, stage matches of quality, and hold a layer of loyal supporters across generations. Those things are real, and they do not come from money.

But if those things are not paid for, they will survive only as long as someone does the work for free. And a football economy that runs on the goodwill of a few individuals will always be fragile to the economic conditions of those very individuals.

The question I leave behind is not for the league organisers, nor for the federation. It is for the person in the stand, the one who buys the ticket, the one who buys the shirt, the one who stays up late to watch the national team: if the money you spend each season were recorded as a single line in your club's final accounts, would you know where that line is?

If the answer is no, then that is the starting point.

The last line of a bank statement is not the balance. It is the signature of the person responsible.