Bau Duc Ahead of the 2026-2030 VFF Congress: Vietnamese Football and the Money-Making Problem

Doan Nguyen Duc — the man all of Vietnamese football calls 'Bau Duc' — does not draw a 4-3-3. He does not dissect a high press. He does not mention a single pass. He puts one short sentence on the table, enough to heat up a forum that supposedly deals only in football craft: 'Vietnamese football needs to know how to generate money.' The statement landed right before the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) Congress for the 2026-2030 term — the moment when every seat, every strategic direction and every money flow in Vietnamese football will be reshaped for the next four years.

The pitch is not where this story happens. This is a battle about structure. And its spokesman is a businessman who once held the VFF Vice Chairmanship for Finance, who has poured money into football for more than two decades, who built the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Arsenal JMG academy in 2026 and watched it produce Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh and Hong Duy.

At 61, I no longer have time for polite football on paper. The story Bau Duc has placed before the VFF Congress is not polite. It is about survival.

Context: when results hide the invoice

Vietnamese football is living through the finest stretch of its modern history. From U23 titles up to the senior national team, fans have been given evenings when supporting was a joy rather than a duty. Those results are real, and I do not diminish them. But results are the tip. The rest is the invoice.

The 2026-2030 VFF Congress is not a four-yearly ritual. It is the moment when the financial structure, the governance model and Vietnam's standing on the continental map get locked in. Bau Duc is not running for a seat — at least not openly. He is arguing. And in a football nation where the voice of club patrons often outweighs the voice of the system, a well-timed statement can redirect an entire term.

He came to football through money, through an academy, through twenty-five years of patience. He also came to football through the times he 'had to pay the price for investment decisions' — his own words. That is the most important point in this whole story. The man telling Vietnamese football to learn how to generate money is a man who once burned money and says himself that he paid the price. That experience is worth more than any financial report nobody has published.

The Hoang Anh Gia Lai Arsenal JMG academy opened in 2026 with a rare philosophy: combining football with culture and foreign languages. It was a holistic model of human development, in line with international academy best practice. But look at the timeline. The academy was founded in 2026; its first cohort broke through around 2026. Seven years. Seven years before that investment returned an image. Anyone who has done finance understands that seven years is long enough to go bankrupt three times.

Analysis: the patron model and the debt called patience

Here is what I want to say plainly. Vietnamese football is running on a model of near-total concentration of risk: a handful of academies and a handful of patrons carry almost the entire talent-production layer and the entire capital-supply layer. Bau Duc calls it a problem. I call it a time bomb.

Separate the two layers. Talent layer: most of the bright faces of Vietnamese football over the past decade emerged from a small number of academies, with HAGL as the flagship. Capital layer: clubs live on the personal wallets of their patrons. Both layers share one lethal trait — they depend on individuals, not on a system. When an individual hits financial trouble, when they tire, when they die, an entire production line faces the risk of drying up.

I have followed football for more than four decades. In England — where I grew up — people learned this lesson the most expensive way. The Premier League is not rich because it has many kind patrons. It is rich because it turned broadcast rights into a collective revenue stream, distributed by tier, and turned each match into a product that can be sold again and again. Money there does not come from goodwill. It comes from structure.

In Japan — where I live and work — people took a different road. The J.League was designed from the start as a system: clubs tied to localities, tied to corporate communities, tied to a philosophy of sustainable development rather than a generous individual. The J.League has no great patrons. It has a mediocre but durable system that has run for decades without collapsing. That enduring mediocrity, in my view, is more worth learning than generosity that flares and fades.

Vietnamese football stands between those two roads. And Bau Duc — even if he does not speak this language — is proposing the Japanese road: mobilising social resources, inviting businesses in, spreading risk away from a few wallets. He says: 'We cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons.' Exactly. That is the most important sentence in his entire statement, and it is a sentence about structure, not about money.

But one point I must be honest about. Bau Duc offers the right direction without offering a single number. He says a lot of money is needed. How much? He says businesses that know how to create cash flow are needed. What is VFF's current cash flow? He says money must be spent boldly. How much is being spent on youth training, facilities, nutrition, expertise? Not one figure has been published.

This is the core problem. You cannot govern a football nation on a feeling of scarcity. If you do not know what you have, you cannot know what you need, and you certainly cannot know whether you have spent it well. The lack of financial transparency is the biggest gap in the picture Bau Duc paints — and I suspect he knows it.

I remember 2026. At the World Cup in Russia, I wrote a piece using expected-goals (xG) data to show that Spain held 74% of the ball against the host but generated only about 0.9 xG. I declared on social media: 'Possession is an illusion; pressing and transitions are real.' Forty-seven traditional journalists attacked me. Then Spain went out on penalties. The lesson I drew was not that I was right. The lesson was: a claim without data is just a pretty opinion, while a claim with data becomes a case.

Bau Duc's statement is currently a pretty opinion. It needs to become a case. It needs numbers: VFF's total revenue, its breakdown from broadcast rights, sponsorship and ticketing; V.League clubs' wage bills; the annual running cost of an academy; and most importantly — the average lifespan of a patron.

I mean the lifespan of a patron seriously. In the current model, a club's ability to pay is bound tightly to the personal financial health of its owner. This is balance-sheet risk sitting at the heart of the system. A conglomerate hits trouble in real estate, a cash flow is squeezed, an economic cycle turns down — and suddenly a football club, an academy, a cohort of young players faces the risk of vanishing. There is no shield between the market and the pitch.

This is why I consider Bau Duc's proposal potentially groundbreaking. He is trying to drive a stake into the ground of Vietnamese football and turn it from a personal gift into a collective asset. He talks about inviting businessmen with management methods and investment thinking into the VFF. He talks about football feeding itself, unable to keep asking for sponsorship forever. That is a governance reform dressed as a financial story.

But here is where I must be careful, and where I want readers to be careful too. The VFF is legally defined as a social-professional organisation. That legal label is not a small matter. It limits how far an organisation can operate as a pure business. You can invite businessmen in, but you cannot turn a social organisation into a company simply by renaming committees. To change how it is governed, you must first change the legal mould that constrains it. And that is a far harder fight than a statement before a Congress.

Then there is the question of international standing. Bau Duc stresses that Vietnamese football needs people inside bodies like FIFA, AFC and AFF. I agree, and I agree more strongly than he may realise. Those seats are not just badges. They are rules-of-the-game levers: influence over scheduling, over allocation of qualifying slots, over the development money that continental confederations distribute. A nation with no voice in the room will always be a receiver of decisions, never a maker of them. That is part of the money problem many people fail to see.

Let me tell another story. In 2026, when the Bundesliga returned to empty stands, I collected data from 87 matches and found something striking: the home-win rate fell from 43% to 31%, while the draw rate rose to 29%. I wrote a contentious piece: 'Crowds do not cheer, they apply pressure — and home teams are losing a real advantage.' The no-crowd stadium of 2026 was a laboratory; only now are we seeing the final product.

I tell this story for a reason. It shows that when you remove a familiar variable — crowd noise, or in this case patrons — the system reveals its true nature. Vietnamese football faces a similar test. If one day the patrons withdraw, what remains? If the answer is 'not much,' that is evidence the system never existed — only individuals carrying it.

And here is what I consider the biggest asymmetry in the whole story. Vietnamese football is pursuing a World Cup-scale ambition on a thin commercial foundation. The target sits at continental and world level, but V.League revenue sits at local level. You cannot build a twenty-storey tower on a one-storey foundation and hope it stands. Bau Duc sees this asymmetry. He puts it in one simple sentence: 'Without money, don't talk about reaching the top.'

I want to push that sentence one step further. Without money, don't talk about reaching the top — true. But with money and no system, also don't talk about reaching the top. Money is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Many federations around the world have poured money into football and still failed, because they poured it into a mould that could not hold water.

The contrarian angle: where I might be wrong

This is my self-critique. If I am wrong, I am wrong in placing too much faith in the system and too little in individuals.

Bau Duc is living proof against my own thesis. It was an individual — not a system — who created the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Arsenal JMG academy, who nurtured a generation of players, who waited seven years before harvesting. If I erase the role of individuals, I am denying the very thing that produced Vietnamese football's success over the past decade. A system without individuals willing to burn money and take responsibility is just a paper machine.

There is a paradox I must admit. The people with the strongest incentive to find the right management model are precisely those who spend their own money. That is the 'skin in the game' argument Bau Duc makes, and it is not naive. Whoever spends their own money has an incentive to spend it right. The problem is this: individual incentive cannot replace collective structure, but collective structure cannot run without individual incentive either. The real question is not 'patron or system.' The real question is: how does a system keep such individuals without depending on them?

I must also admit something else. Bau Duc was once VFF Vice Chairman for Finance while also being a club chairman. When someone sits both inside the national governing body and at the head of a club, and speaks about that nation's financial model, people have a right to ask about conflict of interest. I am not saying he is wrong. I am saying a correct proposal can still be read as a self-interested one — and in a governance fight, how it is read matters as much as whether it is right.

And here is the biggest risk I see. If this whole reform is tied to a few individuals, it will die with a few individuals. A football nation reformed by the goodwill of the rich will be no more durable than a football nation living on the goodwill of the rich. The only difference is the number of rich people. That is a step forward, but not yet a solution.

I have another worry, smaller but more persistent. Framing the issue as 'money first, football craft later' may push out those who work in football for the beauty of it. Football is not only cash flow. It is technique, tactics, coach education, a philosophy of play. If an entire term talks only about money and never about how to play, we will get a richer football nation that is not a better one. And a rich football nation that is not better will eventually become poor again.

This is where I borrow an image. Tiki-taka did not die because it was beaten; it died because it was believed in for too long. The patron model in Vietnam could follow exactly that path. It has not yet died of failure. It will die of being trusted for too long — if those who believe in it stop asking questions.

Takeaway and prediction

Here is my prediction, and I am ready for it to be tested. The 2026-2030 VFF Congress will adopt language about 'socialisation' and 'mobilising corporate resources' — that is, about money. But it will not publish a full set of financial data, and it will not change the organisation's legal mould. Meaning the foundation will not be recast; it will only be repainted. And within four years, when a few patrons tire, we will sit here again and ask the same question.

I could be wrong. But if I am right, what needs to change is not the amount of money, but how Vietnamese football defines who owns it. At 61, I have seen too many revolutions begin with a fine sentence and end in a meeting. The question I leave is not 'how much money does Vietnamese football need.' The question is: when the people generating money for Vietnamese football stop generating it, who will hold the wallet next — and will that wallet belong to everyone, or to just one person?

If everything went to plan, no one would have to ask that question. But football has never gone to plan. And that is precisely why it is still worth writing about.