VFF Term 10: The Finance Vice-Chairmanship Is Where the Real Power Sits

On the morning of 21 October, I sat in a coffee shop across from Go Dau Stadium in Binh Duong and opened the candidate list for the Vietnam Football Federation leadership, term 10. Three blocks of names: three candidates for chairman, eight for vice chairman, thirty-one for the executive committee. I read from the bottom up, out of habit — the last rows are usually where names get placed before anyone has finished doing the maths.

Then I stopped at a name that appears twice. Tran Quoc Tuan, the incumbent chairman, is listed for chairman and also for the professional-affairs vice chairmanship. Nguyen Xuan Vu, the incumbent vice chairman for communications and external relations, appears in three slots: chairman, finance and sponsorship vice chairman, and communications vice chairman.

VFF statutes allow one position per person. Both men must cut something. How a candidate rearranges his own footing before a congress is the draft contract that reveals what he is afraid of.

Mistakes in reading names taught me this: look at the contract, not at the mouth. There is no transfer contract to inspect here, so I inspected the candidacy structure instead — the only document the leadership is obliged to sign and submit to the vetting panel.

The term-10 congress is expected in late December 2026 or January 2027, covering 2027-2031. The electorate is 57 member organisations: provincial federations, professional clubs and affiliated bodies. The process has four steps — member nominations, consolidation by the standing board, state vetting by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and a secret ballot at the congress for the chairman and vice chairmen.

The list published on 21 October is not final. Nomination papers from several organisations had not arrived, which means the 3-8-31 structure can still shift. For someone who reads documents for a living, that matters more than any commentary: an open list is a list whose balance has not yet been locked.

I once flew to Moscow on my own savings and came home with a source that had collapsed. The lesson was not to trust nobody; it was to know which step of the decision chain you are standing on. In a VFF congress, the vetting stage is the least illuminated step, and it can strike names off before delegates ever hold a ballot.

In 2026, with stadiums empty, I built indices at home so I could hear football inside my head. When there is no match to watch, people judge an organisation by its structure, not by its promises. A candidate list is structure.

The three chairman profiles represent three kinds of capital.

Tran Quoc Tuan, born 2026, has held the chair for a full five-year term. His strongest asset sits outside VFF: seats on the AFF competitions committee, plus positions at AFC and FIFA. Those seats give Vietnamese football a voice in regional and continental rooms, something a new chairman would need years to rebuild. Anyone who has watched a seeding slot or a qualifying schedule get settled in Kuala Lumpur understands the value of institutional relationships.

Nguyen Duc Thuy, born 2026, is a construction and banking businessman with two club episodes behind him: Sai Gon Xuan Thanh from 2026 to 2026, a club that was later dissolved, and Ninh Binh from 2026. At the start of the 2026-2026 season he transferred the Ninh Binh chairmanship to his daughter, Nguyen Ngoc My Anh.

Nguyen Xuan Vu, born 2026, is the incumbent vice chairman for communications and external relations, a bank board member, and chairman of the Vietnam Table Tennis Federation. His is a relationship profile: cross-sector, comfortable in many rooms, and the youngest of the three.

Institutional capital, financial capital, relational capital. The 57 votes will pick whichever kind they believe the next four years require.

The chairman race is the visible part. The finance and sponsorship vice chairmanship is where power actually sits, because that seat controls the money flowing into the entire sport. Two names are attached to it: Nguyen Xuan Vu and Nguyen Duc Thuy. Nguyen Trung Kien, who currently holds the finance portfolio, remains on the vice-chairman slate, and the new executive committee will allocate portfolios after the congress.

Read side by side, the two profiles sell different things. Vu sells access: banking relationships, cross-sector contacts, media links. Thuy sells capital: construction money, banking money, and the experience of funding a club himself.

The most telling detail is not on the candidate list at all. It is in Ninh Binh. Handing the club chairmanship to a family member before a congress cycle is the classic move that separates personal holdings from public office, pre-empting conflict-of-interest questions. It may also simply be statutory compliance, if federation rules bar club owners from holding office. Either way, people tidy the house when they expect guests.

The professional-affairs vice chairmanship is the only technical hinge in this entire personnel puzzle. That seat decides who appoints national-team coaches, which youth-development philosophy prevails, and how competition regulations are written. Three candidates are listed: Tran Anh Tuan, Tran Quoc Tuan and Tran Huy Duc.

Tran Anh Tuan holds the seat and also chairs VPF, the entity that runs the professional leagues. One man sitting simultaneously at the body that writes the rules and at the body affected by those rules is a structural conflict of interest that deserves to be named, even when it has run quietly for years. Keeping Tuan preserves the club-federation interface; replacing him signals a governance reset.

The 31-member executive committee includes 18 club-linked candidates: 12 from V.League, five from the First Division, one from the Second Division. Club interests hold a numerical majority in the highest decision-making body. Any reform agenda must clear the V.League gate before it reaches the national team or the grassroots. Anyone discussing reform without discussing the interests of the top 12 clubs is discussing nothing.

Five vice-chairman candidates come from business backgrounds: Vu Quoc Khanh, Nguyen Trung Kien, Le Van Thanh, Tran Anh Tuan and Nguyen Duc Thuy. A commercially oriented leadership is a rational choice for a term that needs revenue — broadcast rights, shirt sponsorship, competition systems. It also raises a question of priorities that only four years will answer.

Two women appear on the executive committee slate: Nguyen Thi My Dung and Bui Thi Hien Luong. Dung is a member of FIFA's Disciplinary Committee, a rare international credential in a committee whose profiles are largely domestic.

I do not count keep-ups; I count the times a player gets squeezed by the system. At federation level, the squeeze is not a formation — it is the fixture calendar, the foreign-player quota, the way broadcast money is distributed. Every administrative decision is a line in someone's payroll.

And here I have to be blunt about one line in the original report: the claim that Nguyen Duc Thuy enjoys considerable support is the author's opinion, unsupported by data. No poll, no delegate breakdown, no vote count. In my trade, a sentence like that is a hypothesis until someone casts a ballot.

A secret ballot means 57 member organisations decide for themselves, and the outcome is not contained in the candidate list. Vietnamese sports congresses have historically been settled by provincial and club blocs rather than by newspaper narratives. The 3-8-31 list I read on 21 October describes people, not blocs.

Another blind spot: Thuy's club-management record. Sai Gon Xuan Thanh ended in dissolution. The candidate list does not evaluate that past, and nobody has asked. If the criterion is football-operating competence, a club that disappeared is data; if the criterion is capital mobilisation, it is irrelevant. Choosing the criterion is the real content of this election.

One gap bothers me more than the rest: nobody has published VFF's financial position. No income statement, no revenue breakdown by broadcast and sponsorship, no long-term commitments. An incoming leadership may be inheriting a well-kept house, or a house with a loan nobody mentions. What I believe only starts when money changes hands — and here, nobody has shown the money.

The procedural risk is clearer. The dual nominations of Tuan and Vu create a question the documents do not answer: when the choice is made, who confirms it, and what happens if neither man chooses. State vetting can strike names, which means the outcome may be settled before the congress opens. Nothing about that is irregular, but it makes every prediction fragile.

An expensive name looks good on a shirt, not in a payroll. At federation level the equivalent is: a good name on a list is worth something only when attached to a signed financial plan.

If I had to bet my own money, I would track five signals over the next three months. Whether the final list keeps the 3-8-31 structure. Whether state vetting removes anyone. Whether Thuy publishes a concrete platform or stays silent. Whether Tuan withdraws from the professional-affairs race — the clearest indicator of how confident he is about the chair. And whether a congress date is fixed or slips again.

Term 2027-2031 will begin with a vote about people, but it will be decided by a drier question: who will open VFF's books for all 57 member organisations to read. Whoever answers that gets four calm years. Whoever dodges it gets four years of questions.