Bau Duc Before the 2026–2030 VFF Congress: To Reach the Next Level, Vietnamese Football Must Learn How to Generate Money

2 a.m. The phone rang, and a fact broke open. On the other end was a football man I have known for more than a decade, someone who once helped draft the budget for a V.League club. He did not ask me about the squad, or about foreign signings. He asked one thing: would anyone dare to speak plainly about money ahead of the 2026–2030 VFF Congress.

Days later, the answer arrived from a man who needs nobody's permission. Doan Nguyen Duc — Bau Duc, chairman of HAGL, former VFF vice chairman for finance — said Vietnamese football must know how to generate money. He spoke of businessmen who can create cash flow, who understand governance and who, above all, dare to spend, being placed inside the VFF apparatus.

In a football culture where money is usually discussed in circles, a statement that blunt, delivered at that exact point in the congress cycle, carries its own weight.

A congress is where power and money get divided

For national football federations, an elective congress distributes three things: decision-making authority, control over resource allocation, and the pace of development for the next four years. For the VFF, the 2026–2030 term falls at a moment when Vietnamese football has just produced a substantial run of results, from U23 level up to the senior national team.

Results deliver something very concrete: political capital. When the on-pitch output is good, the argument that things are fine as they are weakens, and reformers gain volume. Bau Duc is spending exactly that capital.

From my own years watching V.League matches, what stays with me is not the derbies. It is the evenings sitting beside a youth coach, listening to him read out the names of boys who left football because their families ran out of money. Vietnam has never lacked people who can play. It lacks the structure to keep them.

The structure of cash flow, rather than the account balance

What stands out in Bau Duc's remarks is that he demands a mechanism, rather than stopping at a request for more money.

He calls the VFF a social-professional organisation. That label carries a hard legal constraint. A social-professional entity does not operate on equity or profit logic, so every move toward a corporate governance model has to pass through amended statutes rather than a single resolution.

He also states plainly that Vietnamese football cannot depend on a handful of academies or a handful of patrons. That line deserves to be read slowly, because the man speaking is the archetype of the model he is warning against.

This system concentrates both capital and talent inside a small circle of names, and an insider has just admitted it cannot scale. The HAGL Arsenal JMG academy, founded in 2026, teaches football alongside schooling and foreign languages, and produced Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh and Hong Duy. That is a genuine achievement. In investment language, though, it is a long-cycle, slow-payback commitment dependent on one individual's financial endurance. When an entire football nation has only a few such projects, what it owns is luck, not a system.

Another signal sits inside Bau Duc's own words: he says he had to pay the price for his investment decisions. For a man who has spent more than twenty-five years in football, that is data on the balance-sheet risk of the patron model. The person who puts up the money absorbs every swing in cash flow, and when that person stalls, the club stalls with him.

Set that against the ambition of reaching a World Cup and competing at continental level, and the picture sharpens. Continental ambitions require infrastructure, coaching staff, nutrition, conditioning and data, all of them large fixed costs. Meanwhile the commercial base of the V.League, broadcast revenue and club valuations remain thin. The gap between ambition and resources is the hardest risk to see, because it does not show up as one specific failure. It shows up as quiet slippage against the rest of the region.

They call me a heretic, but I only see what they refuse to look at.

Where I might be wrong, and where the statement falls short

Bau Duc is right on direction. But the statement carries no numbers, and without numbers there is no governance.

There is no broadcast revenue figure, no club budget, no wage bill, no share of spending allocated to youth development. A correct diagnosis that cannot be quantified remains a diagnosis. To know how much money Vietnamese football needs, you must know how much it has, and at present neither figure is public.

The argument that you should not talk about reaching the top without money is resource determinism. It holds for infrastructure and youth development, but it underweights non-monetary variables. Coaching quality and tactical organisation have repeatedly lifted modestly funded Asian football nations. Money is a necessary condition. Tactical organisation is not covered by any cheque.

Then there is the delicate part. The man proposing that businessmen enter the federation's financial machinery also owns a club. A conflict of interest need not exist, but the perception of one will, and in a contest for leadership seats, perception carries the same weight as fact.

That night I stammered, but history did not. I once hesitated to say out loud that Vietnamese football's biggest problem has never been its players. It has been the people who sign the contracts, approve the budgets and decide who gets trained.

What is worth testing

If the 2026–2030 VFF Congress does not produce a financial disclosure mechanism and a framework for allocating resources to youth development, the next term will bring someone else saying the same sentence in a different voice. What needs answering sits elsewhere: who gets to decide how that money is spent, and on what grounds.