V.League at 18 Clubs: When the Numbers Game Overtakes Quality

In August 2026, Quang Nam had just completed their survival mission in V.League when they received the biggest shock of their season: the club's management submitted a request to withdraw from Vietnam's top flight for budget reasons. A team that just won on the pitch collapsed at the desk. The news reached me while I was sitting in a coffee shop in Shenzhen, in the middle of a scorching Chinese summer, and I realized that Vietnamese football does not lack talent, players, or fans. The only thing missing is a system that can keep clubs alive day to day. When everyone looks at talent, I look at the price the market is willing to pay. And the price the Vietnamese market is currently willing to pay for a club that just survived relegation is zero. The VFF is preparing to present a roadmap to expand V.League to 16 or 18 clubs in its 10th term. People talk about catching up with Thailand with 16 clubs, Indonesia with 18, Japan with 20. But I want to ask the reverse question: how many of those proposing this roadmap have actually examined why a club that just survived relegation had to withdraw? Why did Dong A Thanh Hoa almost collapse before being rescued by the provincial government? Why is SLNA, one of Vietnam's most famous talent factories, struggling to operate on local budgets? When I am asked whether I support expanding to 18 clubs, I always answer with a simple calculation: if three or four of the current 14 clubs are already on life support, then adding four more clubs is like adding four more patients to an already overcrowded emergency room. Supporters of expansion usually present a comparison table of regional leagues. Indonesia has 18 clubs. Thailand 16. Malaysia 12. Japan 20. South Korea 12. Singapore only 8. Looking at these numbers, one might conclude that the more clubs a league has, the more developed it is. But I have followed Asian football for 39 years, and I see something different: Japan has 20 clubs but also one of the strictest club licensing systems in Asia, together with commercial and broadcast revenue that no Southeast Asian league can match. South Korea has only 12 clubs but designs its league with a split format, generating 38 match rounds per season. Thailand has 16 clubs but only plays 30 rounds. The impressive number is not the number of clubs, but the ability to design match formats and the financial capacity of each club. Vietnamese football has a feature I call the patron survival model. Clubs are not financially self-sufficient enterprises; they are companies funded by one or two major patrons or local governments. When the patron withdraws, the club collapses. Quang Nam is the latest example. When the provincial government tightened the budget, the club had to withdraw despite surviving relegation. HAGL is another, far more expensive example. In 20 years, Mr. Duc spent about 2,000 billion VND on this club. At an exchange rate of about 25,000 VND per USD, that is roughly 76 to 80 million USD, around 4 million USD per year, a maintenance investment rather than a development investment. I need to state clearly: 2,000 billion VND is not a small number. It is enough to buy a mid-table V.League club for two decades. But HAGL, the club with Vietnam's most famous academy, has experienced a decade of continuous decline. They produced a generation of excellent players and exported some to Europe, but never sold a player at a price high enough to reinvest. A player sale only succeeds when the club uses the money to become bigger. HAGL uses money to pay debts, to maintain, to hold on. That is the difference between a football club and a subsidized charity. Now let us talk about licensing arithmetic. The AFC requires every club in a competitive competition to meet criteria on finance, facilities, medical teams, and youth development. This is the main quality filter of any league. In the current V.League of 14 clubs, we already have two clubs penalized for licensing violations in 2026 (HAGL and Thanh Hoa), and two more only granted conditional licenses in 2026 (Thanh Hoa and Hai Phong). The non-compliance rate is about 10 to 15 percent. In other words, one in seven clubs currently fails. If we expand to 18 clubs, at the same non-compliance rate, we will have at least two more clubs failing standards, roughly four non-compliant clubs in an 18-club league. At that point, organizers must choose between two impossibilities: relegating clubs mid-season for administrative reasons, or ignoring the criteria and turning the licensing system into a joke. So expanding to 16 or 18 clubs effectively increases the number of weak clubs at the bottom of the league. The four new clubs will struggle to be promoted from the First Division, and they will bring smaller budgets, poorer facilities, and thinner medical staff than the existing dying clubs of V.League. The result is that matches between 16th and 18th will no longer be top football; they will be a duel between two underfunded teams, where match quality degrades fastest at the rarest positions in Vietnamese football: goalkeeper, center-back, and creative midfielder. When the league expands, these positions will be diluted fastest, and fans will see absurd mistakes in matches they expect to be top quality. There is an alternative that I have not seen anyone mention. Instead of increasing club numbers, increase match rounds through format design. South Korea has only 12 clubs but creates 38 rounds by splitting the league into stages: the first stage is a round robin, the second stage divides groups to decide the champion and relegation. Why cannot V.League apply a similar model with 14 clubs? If we split 14 clubs into two groups after the first stage, we could create roughly 30 to 33 match rounds per season, equivalent to adding four clubs but without spending extra budget. This is the cheaper, smarter path, and it is the path those promoting expansion seem not to want to see. I understand that there are political and commercial pressures behind the expansion proposal. More clubs means more matches in the broadcasting package. More clubs means more members in VPF voting. More clubs means more provinces with teams and more local pride. But professional football cannot operate on pride. When everyone looks at talent, I look at the price the market is willing to pay. And the price the Vietnamese market currently pays for a V.League club is not enough to pay fair wages, let alone youth development costs. The deeper issue is governance credibility. In 2026, Vietnamese football witnessed the famous dispute between Kien and the sponsor group linked to Hien, when these businesses held sponsorship rights over multiple clubs simultaneously. That incident raised the conflict-of-interest question: a man who is both a football owner and someone with influence over referees and organizers is like a man playing football while blowing the whistle. Fourteen years have passed, and that problem remains unresolved. When I write about league expansion, I cannot separate it from the story of conditional licensing, from the two clubs that violated in 2026, from Quang Nam's withdrawal. The credibility of a league cannot increase by adding clubs; it can only increase by handling cases like these transparently. I call this a credibility cycle, not a results cycle. A successful season can bring temporary joy, but if cases like Quang Nam's withdrawal, Thanh Hoa's bailout, and HAGL's decade of decline keep repeating, the league's credibility erodes season by season, case by case. When credibility erodes, sponsors withdraw, broadcasters hesitate, advertising deals decline. An 18-club league with four non-compliant clubs will never have what big leagues have: unconditional trust. But I could be wrong. Let me argue against myself, because in football I have learned that nothing is absolute. Sometimes to win, you must be willing to look like a fool in front of the world. I may be the fool opposing expansion, and the strongest argument for expansion that I respect most is the youth development argument. Four new clubs create 100 to 120 new starting spots in Vietnam's top flight, and roughly 500 to 700 additional minutes of top-flight play for young players per round. For a football nation struggling to give young talents top-level playing opportunities, that is a very real developmental benefit. If young Vietnamese players get regular starting chances, they can improve faster, and the national team benefits in the long run. But even this strongest argument cannot save the governance record. A league that expands without reforming licensing, without addressing conflicts of interest, without creating a central revenue distribution mechanism, is like a hospital opening a new wing while the emergency room is overflowing. New patients will wait and die just like the old ones. I want to revisit the 2026 story because it shows this problem is not new. It is fourteen years old. If for fourteen years, through several VFF congress terms, the problem of multi-club ownership and conflict of interest remains unsolved, I do not believe an expansion roadmap to 18 clubs is the tool to solve it. On the contrary, expansion could worsen the problem, because more clubs mean more potential patrons, more overlapping relationships, and more opportunities for new conflicts. I remember during the 2026 World Cup, I shouted on live television that Mbappe would surpass Messi and Ronaldo to win the Ballon d'Or, then mispronounced Pavard's name three times. I was mocked across forums. I spent the whole week relearning the phonetic names of players from all 32 teams. The lesson I learned was not to stop shouting bold predictions, but that if I shout, I must have data to back it up. Today, before the V.League expansion roadmap, I shout another bold prediction: expansion will fail without financial reform. And I have the data to back up my shout. There is one final argument, coming from the fact that I live in China and observe two football nations. In China, the Super League once had 16 clubs, then 18, and now they are struggling to reduce. Expansion by forcing weak clubs into the top flight never creates lasting value. In Vietnam, I see the same pattern: we love football, we have good players, we have passionate fans, but we seem to believe the answer is always more clubs, more matches, more categories. Meanwhile, the correct answer may be much simpler: make the existing 14 clubs healthy first. The moment of emotional release is when football tells the only truth. That moment is not when a new club is promoted. That moment is when Quang Nam submitted its withdrawal, when Thanh Hoa went for rescue, when a patron spoke at the congress and the hall applauded out of fear rather than belief. I have nothing against Vietnamese football aiming for 16 or 18 clubs in the future. But I oppose setting a hard expansion deadline while the most basic problems are still bleeding. So my question to the VFF and VPF before the 2027 roadmap is: what evidence shows that adding four clubs will improve league quality, rather than dilute it? What viable plan is being prepared to ensure the new clubs meet licensing standards? And if two of the current 14 clubs only received conditional licenses, how can we trust that four First Division clubs will do better? I predict this: if the expansion roadmap is approved in 2027 without a comprehensive financial and licensing reform package, then within the first two seasons of an 18-club V.League, we will see at least two to three clubs withdrawing or being suspended mid-season. Instead of a bigger league, we will have a shorter league, with lower credibility, and a more expensive lesson. But if we choose the opposite path, keep 14 clubs, redesign the format to increase match rounds, strictly enforce licensing, and gradually build a sustainable financial model, then I believe Vietnamese football will have a league anyone wants to watch, whether 14 or 18 clubs. When everyone looks at club numbers, I look at the fate of each club one by one. And I will be there, waiting to see which path is chosen.