V.League 1 Is Selling Its Own Lifeblood, and Every Owner Knows It

On the morning of January 8, 2026, I sat in a coffee shop about two hundred metres from Nha Trang Stadium and read that a nineteen-year-old striker had just boarded a plane to Thailand. The transfer fee was not disclosed. His former club posted a thank-you line on Facebook with a photo of him holding his new shirt, and then everything closed quietly. Nobody asked where the money went. Nobody asked how many children were left in that club's academy.

I have followed Vietnamese football for nineteen years, long enough to understand that transfers like this are no longer news. They are breathing. And nobody puts breathing on the front page.

What made me open my black notebook was something else. No one, from the club board to the league organiser, forces the money from selling a young player to return to where it came from. The whole of Vietnamese football is running a talent-production system with no return pipe. We develop, we sell, and we forget.

I call it the pipe disease. It does not appear in the league table, it does not show up in a possession chart, and that is exactly why it survives so long.

Context: a financial structure nobody dares publish

V.League 1 has fourteen clubs in the top tier, and most of them live on the money of one person or one group of people. League broadcasting revenue is modest once divided among the clubs; commercial rights money flows mostly to the big clubs; and provincial clubs exist around a fragile line.

I spent many evenings looking for wage-to-revenue figures at V.League 1 clubs. I could not find them. There is no mandatory disclosure, no standard that obliges clubs to say what they pay players. In Europe that ratio is public, and it decides whether a club can enter European competition. In Vietnam it is the owner's private business.

And the owner is the centre of everything. In this model, the right to sign players, the right to choose a coach, the right to sell or keep a young player usually sit with one person. It works in the short term, because every owner wants to win and they spend to win. But it also means no mechanism checks patience. Patience depends on the mood of the person signing the cheque.

In that situation, selling young players becomes the release valve. When the owner's cash flow tightens, the club sells. When a season ends with a hole in the budget, the club sells. The valve works too well, and because it works well, nobody sees a reason to repair the pipe behind it.

One level up, AFC Club Licensing is the real gate for an AFC Champions League Two place. Those criteria cover academy requirements, facilities and governance structure. It is the only binding checkpoint in the system. But the criteria say a club must have an academy. They do not say the money from a sold player must flow back into the academy that produced him. The gate is only as high as what people write on paper.

The core: where the money goes after the player leaves

I once held a loan contract in my hands. In 2026, an agent showed me paperwork for striker Nguyen Duc Anh, shirt number 9, with a twenty-billion-dong buy-out clause. At the last minute the club withdrew for budget reasons. My article "Nha Trang lost twenty billion in one night" forced local leaders into an emergency meeting. But what I learned most from that case was not the twenty billion. It was this: nobody in the meeting room knew how much money the club's academy had for the following season.

That money, had the deal gone through, would have gone where? Into paying old wages, into covering the season's costs, into keeping the club alive one more month. It might have bought the coach one more foreign player. It almost never reached the fifteen-year-olds training on the side pitch.

In 2026, male colleagues laughed at me for taking meticulous notes at a training session in Nha Trang. I noticed young midfielder Pham Gia Hung, shirt number 10, with unusual through-balls into the channel. I wrote about him and was told a woman knows nothing about tactics. Three months later Hung was called up to the Vietnam U23 team and scored twice at a regional tournament. The lesson from that year still holds: the distance between looking with curiosity and looking with prejudice is greater than any data table. There are talents buried under contemptuous glances, and I have watched them bloom.

Every contract is a life turning a page, so do not ask only for the price. But at V.League 1 we do not even know the price, because most sales of young players abroad are never disclosed. No fee, no revenue, no reconciliation. No reconciliation, no accountability.

For the player, going abroad is usually the right choice. Thai, Korean and Japanese football pay more, are organised more professionally, and at least offer a clear route to the national team. Over the past decade the flow of Vietnamese players to regional leagues has been almost one-directional. Every youth department knows it, though few say it aloud.

But this is the part that unsettles me most. When a young player leaves, he carries part of the club with him: the dressing-room atmosphere, the trust of local fans, a glimmer of hope that a twelve-year-old in the stands is clinging to. None of that appears on a balance sheet. It is not valued, so it is treated as zero.

Based on my experience watching matches at Nha Trang Stadium across many seasons, I learned something uncomfortable: the local stands remember a young player's name longer than a board remembers its own academy's name. I have seen a youth class in central Vietnam close for lack of funds, and three years later the same club signed an older imported midfielder. Nobody called it a contradiction. It was the owner's decision, and the owner has the right.

Tactics will go out of date, but the story about trust will not. I am not writing this to claim that selling players is wrong. I am writing because I think we agreed far too quickly that it is normal.

The other side: perhaps I asked the wrong question

Now comes the part where I have to interrogate myself.

There is another reading, and it is uncomfortable enough that I have to take it seriously. Selling young players abroad is rational economic behaviour. For a provincial club with thin revenue, selling beats keeping a player until his contract expires and losing him for nothing. No V.League 1 club survives on its academy, not even the most committed. Criticising clubs for selling is like criticising a farmer for selling rice at harvest.

That is true. And precisely because it is true, I began to see the real problem lies elsewhere.

If selling is rational, the question must be: are we selling at the right price? In V.League 1, most youth transfers to the region are done with the earliest bidder, not the highest bidder. There is no valuation system, no public database, no auction. The agent is often the only person who knows the market price, and he has no reason for the club to know more than he does.

In other words, the pipe does not leak at the outlet. It leaks at the valve.

People call me a contrarian; I call myself someone who finds things. But this time I have to be blunt: if there is a place I can be wrong, it is in lumping every club into one story. Some V.League 1 clubs have kept a relatively stable academy pathway for years, and the fact that they do not publish numbers does not mean they are not doing it right. I can only observe what is published, and I do not want to turn a hypothesis of mine into a verdict on an entire football nation.

Takeaway: a testable experiment

I am not demanding a revolution. I am demanding one piece of paper.

One mandatory clause would be enough: any money received from selling a player under 21 must be publicly recorded, with a percentage set aside for the academy that developed him. Nothing complicated. Just a pipe. Just three years.

My prediction, for you to verify: if V.League 1 cannot publish a wage-to-revenue standard before the 2028 season, then by that season the number of under-21 players starting regularly in V.League 1 will be smaller than the number of Vietnamese under-21 players playing abroad. When that happens, we will have a more mature league, and a poorer football nation in the long run.

Data gives me the number, but an empty stand gives me the question. This time the question is simple: after that boy boarded the plane, who teaches the next one how to split the channel?