V.League Selling Young Players to Japan and Korea: The Real Question Is Not the Transfer Fee

On a V.League terrace on a midweek afternoon, I have grown used to a particular kind of silence. The whistle goes, a few hundred people sit scattered behind the goal, and out on the pitch a group of young players are trying to prove they deserve one more season. After many years of watching Vietnamese football, I have noticed that whenever a young player boards a plane to Japan or Korea, the public chorus calls it a bleed. Some stars only burn bright where they are loved, not where the lights are brightest. And the real question for Vietnamese football lies elsewhere: how to make every departure an arrow that comes home.

V.League 1 runs with 14 clubs, organised by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) under the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF). The league's finances depend on a small group of owners: Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Song Lam Nghe An, Becamex Binh Duong, Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, and large corporations such as Viettel. Domestic broadcasting revenue is thin and shirt sponsorship modest, so most of the budget comes from an owner's own pocket.

In that model, an academy is both a badge of pride and a burden. The Hoang Anh Gia Lai – JMG Academy, founded in 2026, produced a group known as the golden generation: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan, Vu Van Thanh. As those names grew up, the road abroad proved shorter than the road to a stable starting place in the V.League. Nguyen Cong Phuong went to Mito HollyHock in J2 in 2026 and later Incheon United; Luong Xuan Truong to Gangwon FC; Nguyen Tuan Anh to Yokohama FC; Doan Van Hau to SC Heerenveen; Nguyen Quang Hai to Pau FC. The summer transfer window is a stage where clubs buy stars and sell patience. I am an Englishman living in Busan, reading Asian football with an outsider's eye, yet I read the V.League closely enough to see that this story reaches beyond one league.

Watching V.League matches, I always record three numbers before writing anything: minutes played by players under 23, PPDA — the passes an opponent is allowed before each defensive action — and chance conversion. What I keep finding is a paradox.

The V.League does not lack good young players; it lacks the space for them to grow. Among clubs fighting relegation, the pressure of results pushes coaches towards proven foreign strikers and veteran midfielders, while young players usually enter after the 75th minute. PPDA in most matches I watch sits high, meaning far less pressing than in the J.League or K League; Vietnamese football defends in a low block and attacks in fast transitions, and that style quietly rewards experience over invention. A 20-year-old midfielder may dribble past three men, then be substituted after one misplaced pass in the middle third.

That is the real reason young players go abroad. In Japan or Korea, a club can give a 19-year-old 25 starts in a season because the system tolerates error. In the V.League, one error can cost a coach his job, and no coach risks his job merely to raise a talent.

The second paradox sits in the money. FIFA's solidarity mechanism distributes 5% of a transfer fee to the clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23. For a league whose budgets come largely from owners, that 5% is one of the few revenue streams that does not depend on one person's generosity. Every overseas transfer done properly is an investment that returns to the academy. The trouble is that many V.League clubs still treat the academy as a cost centre — a line item to make an annual report look good.

Then there is fixture density. A V.League club must spread its strength across the domestic league, the National Cup, Asian competition and national-team windows. In a compressed schedule, a player can feature three times in eight days. Based on my experience of watching matches, muscle injuries in the V.League cluster precisely in those weeks. Fixture density is the single biggest cause of injury; no medical department saves a player from two games a week. When a club must sell a star to survive and also play a packed calendar to meet its targets, young players pay first: either burned out at 21, or packed up and shipped out.

Finally, the structure of development. The satellite-club system and affiliated academies let big clubs gather young players from provinces across the country, hold them on the books as satellite assets, and sell when the price rises. The satellite system lets the giants sidestep domestic training rules; a prodigy from a small province becomes an asset to sell rather than a student to teach. That is rarely written about, because it is not as loud as a transfer.

The majority say selling young players abroad is self-harm. I understand the feeling, but I read it the other way. A mature league is measured by how much it exports, not by how much it keeps. Brazil, Argentina and Croatia all sell their youth and stand firm, because they reinvest in the loop: train, export, train again. The V.League's problem lies elsewhere: it sells and does not raise. The money reaches the owner rather than the academy, the player leaves, and the next wave is unprepared.

If I am wrong, I am wrong here: suppose the transfer money truly never returns to development, then selling people is eating into capital, and every justification collapses. I am not certain, and I say so honestly. But watching how affiliated academies with foreign partners keep appearing, I lean towards the system learning to feed itself.

One thing I am more certain of: young Vietnamese players do not go abroad merely for a wage. They go looking for a place to belong — a place where one misplaced pass does not end their career. I write against the wind, but my heart never turns against football. I do not write to be agreed with. I write to wake a question that has fallen asleep: if the V.League cannot give a 20-year-old 25 starts, then who is the one abandoning him?

If I must offer a testable judgement: over the next two seasons, the number of Vietnamese players playing regularly in J1, J2, K League 1 and K League 2 will rise, and the first club to build a genuine reserve side — where a 19-year-old starts on merit rather than for lack of options — will be the first to break the sell-then-forget loop. If that does not happen, then we are not exporting football; we are exporting memory.