Image Rights, Kits and Exclusive Content: How V.League 2034 Learned from a Polish Studio

At seven in the evening on January 12, 2034, in a gaming café on Nguyen Trai Street in District 5, a sixteen-year-old boy paid forty thousand dong for forty minutes on a machine. He opened the football game he knew by heart, scrolled to the kit selection screen, and stopped at a grey line of text: Cong An Ha Noi's home kit unlocks on one console only. That console costs two months of his mother's wages.

The boy did not turn the machine off. He picked another team, dressed it in another team's shirt, and played. The only goal he scored that evening came off his left foot, from outside the box, and he shouted one short shout. Nobody in the café turned around, because everybody was shouting.

Eleven thousand kilometres to the north-west, in Warsaw, a man named Miles Tost — level design lead at CD Projekt Red — had just told the press that his studio would never do what that boy was enduring. Their in-game content is not locked by platform. A hoodie can be exclusive to Xbox. The card set bundled with The Witcher 3 pre-orders can be exclusive to Xbox. But an outfit, a sword, a face — the things that carry the story — cannot.

Reading that on a muggy Saigon morning, my first thought was the boy in District 5.

When a club's identity becomes a data package

Vietnamese football in 2034 does not look like Vietnamese football ten years earlier. This V.League season has fourteen clubs, a calendar running from February to August, and the third-largest revenue line for most clubs — after parent-company sponsorship and domestic broadcast rights — is digital image-rights licensing.

That sounds abstract. Concretely, it means this: the club name, the crest, the kit, the shirt numbers, the players' faces, the supporters' chant, even archive footage of some long-ago derby. All of it is bundled into a package and licensed to football game publishers, to streaming platforms, to virtual-reality advertising projects and — since 2031 — to esports competitions inside the regional multi-sport games programme.

The grey line of text in District 5 was born there. When a club signs a licensing package, the contract usually carries a rider: if the platform pays more, the club's content appears on that platform alone. Not the hoodie. The in-game kit itself.

CD Projekt Red has now said it refuses that logic. The studio still does crossover content — a Geralt-inspired Barbarian skin is in Diablo 4, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners outfits will reach Overwatch in 2035. But none of it sits behind a commercial door. Whoever buys the game gets the content.

Miles Tost added one line that I consider more important than the decision itself: they will listen to the feedback from the BlizzCon announcements, and the studio is "not of a mindset where we'll do one thing and then never do another."

Read in Vietnam, that sentence sounds like an invitation.

Two kinds of exclusivity, two kinds of memory

Two things need pulling apart that people keep merging.

Physical exclusivity is a distribution deal. A hoodie sold on one console only. A card set available only in one retailer's pre-order. If you are outside that ecosystem, you can still buy the hoodie second-hand, still wear it in the street, still exist inside the fandom. It is a market, with sellers, buyers, a grey trade and rules.

In-game content exclusivity is a memory deal. Without that console, you do not see your club. Not the crest printed on your chest — the crest in the only place where a child in Ca Mau can move that club around with his thumb.

Vietnamese clubs are selling the first thing at the price of the second. The premium attached to a platform-exclusivity clause, at the level of a mid-table V.League club, is roughly a few months of academy operating cost. Meanwhile the annual marketing budget of a global console platform is several thousand times that figure, and the slice reserved for Southeast Asia is a single line in the allocation table.

People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. Selling that story to the highest bidder, then using the money to buy a little stability, is a trade anyone can understand. Understandable does not mean sound.

The second layer sits with the players themselves. Nguyen Dinh Bac's face, Nguyen Thai Son's shirt number, Khuat Van Khang's running stride, Bui Vi Hao's shot — all of it is licensable data, and re-licensable data. The player takes a share. The club takes a share. The agent takes a share. The supporter takes the bill.

Every contract is a farewell wrapped in tracking and expectation. For the player, it is a farewell to control over his own image. For the supporter, it is a farewell to the right to see his club anywhere he likes.

Market scale makes a negotiation that was already lopsided. Industry reports published in 2033 put Vietnam's games and digital content revenue above one billion US dollars, but only a sliver of that reaches football clubs. In Brazil, where I live and work, the big clubs negotiate game licensing collectively and retain a veto over content-locking clauses. The difference is not organisational skill. It is that their domestic market is large enough for a refusal to carry weight.

And here is where the Vietnamese story diverges from the Polish one. CD Projekt Red owns its own story. It can refuse because it controls distribution. Most V.League clubs own no channel: no app with real reach, no streaming platform with real users, no digital product they operate themselves. If you do not own a door, you rent one. And whoever rents you the door always decides who walks through it.

Based on my own experience of watching matches, I have sat through many V.League games from an apartment in Sao Paulo, usually at three in the morning local time, over a stream that stuttered. On December 14, 2033, the title-deciding match cut out four times. The fourth time, I took off my headphones and heard Brazilian supporters in the flat next door screaming about a different game. Two matches, two countries, one wall. I realised I was watching the same thing: people gathering to carry something together.

The wound sits on the paying side

Exclusive content is not the disease. It is a symptom of something else, and the something else is far less comfortable: many Vietnamese clubs are selling an identity before they own it.

An identity that exists only inside someone else's product has never belonged to you. The crest a child cannot select in a game is not really the club's asset — it is a licensing line inside somebody else's contract.

CD Projekt Red's decision is not a moral act. It is a company that owns its own story refusing to rent out the exact part that carries the story, while happily renting out the shell — shirts, cards, gifts. It can tell merchandise from memory. That is a capability, not a virtue.

The second counter-intuitive point is harder to hear. The loudest opponents of platform exclusivity are usually not the paying customers. In Vietnam, the legal road to a licensed football game or a full streaming package is still priced like a luxury good. Remove the exclusivity clause and leave the price untouched, and the boy in District 5 is still outside the door. There are two gates, not one: the contract gate and the price gate.

The third point is where anger most often gets it wrong. Miles Tost himself says the studio does not rule out doing things differently later. Policy is a living thing, with feedback loops and revisions. An absolute ban on every form of exclusivity would be exactly as rigid as an absolute willingness to sell. What is missing is not purity. It is negotiating power.

What is left after the café lights go out

There is one thing V.League clubs could do together, and could do inside the 2034 season without waiting for anyone's permission: set a common floor for digital licensing deals. Physical merchandise may be exclusive. In-game identity may not. And every deal must carry a free or near-free tier for schools, for community football centres, for places without an expensive console.

Some clubs will object, because the premium is real money. But the premium only exists as long as some club somewhere is willing to sell cheaper. A common floor turns a race to the bottom into an agreement about value. In Europe, leagues learned this lesson through expensive failures across the first two decades of the century. There is no reason Vietnamese football should learn it all over again.

What remains is the hardest part, the part nobody can sign into a contract. The child in District 5 that night chose a different team. He still scored, still shouted, still enjoyed himself. But the memory he kept from that evening did not contain the colours of the club he loves. Ten years from now, when that club needs him to buy a ticket, buy a shirt, tell the story to his own child — will he still remember he once belonged somewhere?

A loop does not exist for us to endure it, but for us to finally see ourselves in it. Vietnamese football is inside exactly such a loop: the loop in which a young football nation is asked, for the first time, what its identity is worth — and who pays.

Outside the café, Nguyen Trai Street was still busy. The boy handed back the machine and walked towards the bus stop. In his pocket was an unused phone top-up card, a reward for a win he never knew he had just lost.