A Trillion Dong a Year and the Subtraction Nobody Has Done in the VFF Presidential Race

There is a fourteen-page document on my desk in Barcelona, printed from a feed that runs seven hours behind Vietnam. Page three carries a line that made me open my calculator: 600 to 1,000 billion dong a year, starting in 2027, without a single dong of state budget. Just below it, in smaller type: roughly 80 billion dong of state funding allocated annually for football duties. I sat still for a while. The two lines do not contradict each other. Placed side by side, they produce a clean division: seven to twelve times.

I am 68, but the data is younger than I have ever been – every season it grows another ring of teeth. My trade is reading a candidate's action plan the way I read a prospectus: separating the promise from the commitment, and the commitment from the mechanism that can verify it. At the VFF, for the first time in years, I found a campaign document willing to write spending figures down to the level of each recipient group: local federations, V-League clubs, First Division clubs, women's clubs, referees, staff.

The Vietnam Football Federation has just published its list of nominees for key positions and executive committee seats for term 10 (2027-2031). Three files sit on the presidential desk: Tran Quoc Tuan, the incumbent; Nguyen Xuan Vu, vice president in charge of communications in term 9; and Nguyen Duc Thuy, vice chairman of Sacombank's board, the man behind Ninh Binh Club. Three files, three different kinds of resources: incumbency, media reach, private capital.

Thuy comes from a profession far removed from football: banking. Most of the verbs in his file are financial verbs – mobilise, allocate, audit, supervise. A banker reads a sports federation the way he reads a balance sheet: cash in, cash out, and concentration risk.

His action plan targets 600-1,000 billion dong a year from 2027, raised through socialisation and new revenue from sponsorship, corporate partnerships, commercial rights, digital content and football services. Every dong must be spent on purpose, disclosed, transparent, audited and supervised by VFF members. The accompanying pledge is equally explicit: from 2027, 100% of the funding for VFF's operations and football development will come from socialised and self-generated revenue, with no state budget. On the roughly 80 billion dong granted annually, he wants to work with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Sports Authority of Vietnam to adjust how resources are allocated, prioritising sports with medal potential at the Asian Games and the Olympics.

Spending is broken into specific packages: 2-3 billion dong a year for each eligible local federation; 3 billion dong per V-League club, 2 billion per First Division club and 2 billion per women's club each season. On competition structure, he wants the VFF to work with VPF, the clubs and experts on an appropriate league size, including a 16-18 team V-League and an 18-20 team First Division. Women's football would move toward 8-10 clubs operating stably, backed by men's clubs. On people, the target is at least 20 additional staff trained in languages, governance and professional skills from 2027, and 5-10 Vietnamese working regularly at AFF, AFC or FIFA by 2030. On referees, deeper investment in 10-20 promising referees and assistant referees.

I took out the calculator and added up the recurring spending using his own figures. The V-League has 14 clubs, times 3 billion, equals 42 billion. The First Division, at 12 clubs, times 2 billion, equals 24 billion. Women's football, at 8 clubs, times 2 billion, equals 16 billion. Add 63 local federations at the floor of 2 billion: 126 billion; at the ceiling of 3 billion: 189 billion. Total annual obligations land between roughly 208 and 271 billion dong. In other words, 34% to 45% of the lowest funding target is already pledged to flat distributions – before VFF's own operating costs, before training, before VAR infrastructure, and before a single dong for the national teams.

The second sum sits in league size. A 14-club V-League runs 26 rounds; 16 clubs make 30; 18 clubs make 34. Every round is a package of matches, a unit of goods to sell to broadcasters and sponsors. Expanding to 18 clubs adds eight rounds, roughly 31% more broadcast inventory each season – that is the real economic rationale for expansion, not the slogan about giving young players more minutes.

Where the money comes from is the technical question. Socialisation in Vietnamese football over the past two decades has mostly meant one man's money: a businessman arrives, pays wages, funds the club, then walks away and leaves a club without a body. Recurring revenue is different in kind: it arrives through contracts, with terms, with renewal clauses, and it survives the person who signed it leaving the chair. Three lines have to be built: broadcast rights, competition and shirt sponsorship, and digital content. The plan does not yet name a single contract, a counterparty, or a month.

The 80 billion dong line is the least discussed and the boldest. A candidate who proposes redirecting state money toward sports with Asian Games and Olympic medal potential is cutting his own safety rope. In governance terms it is a clean move: an organisation that lives on budget money is run by budget money; an organisation that lives on contracts is forced to learn how to sell a product. In political terms it is expensive: 80 billion is certain, 600 billion is a target.

Women's football sits in between. The goal is 8-10 stable clubs, 2 billion dong per women's club per season, and men's V-League clubs encouraged to create, affiliate with or sponsor women's teams. I have watched how women's leagues are built in many places and the pattern repeats: a women's team is born as a line in a corporate social responsibility report, survives on the men's budget, and disappears when the men's club changes owner. Two billion dong a season is enough to keep a women's team running; it is not enough to give it an audience, a rights contract and its own academy. The difference between a team that is fed and a league that is sold is who pays to watch.

Two of the personnel targets are the hardest. Investing in 10-20 promising referees so they get appointed to Asian matches is achievable, but only with VAR infrastructure and an appointment mechanism independent of clubs. Getting 5-10 Vietnamese into regular roles at AFF, AFC or FIFA by 2030 is the longest game, because it cannot be bought with sponsorship money; it is bought with relationships, languages and time. Based on my experience following matches across Asian competitions, a country with someone in AFC's technical rooms holds an advantage over a country that only has cash.

The most valuable part of the plan is a single phrase: audited. In the summer of 2026 I saw the Opta ghost – and since then my eyes no longer trust what they see. When the stadiums fell silent in 2026, I understood: football never died, it simply took off its clothes and showed its skeleton. A federation's skeleton is its balance sheet. If the VFF genuinely lives on self-generated revenue, its incentives invert: from administering a league to selling one, from waiting for fans to bringing them back, from receiving rights money to negotiating it like a media company.

Money in does not automatically become results, and this is where I part company with most commentary. In the data of leagues I have followed, budget booms tend to bring wage inflation faster than productivity, not table improvement. A 3 billion dong package per V-League club, without conditions tied to facilities, medical staff and academies, flows straight into the wage bill and evaporates after one season. The second risk is dependency: clubs budget on the subsidy, year two misses the funding target, the subsidy is cut, and the club collapses before it finds a replacement.

The correlation between money and performance only becomes causation when allocation is conditional.

One thing should be said plainly: an action plan is a prospectus, not a contract. After the vote, the only part that survives is the part with a mechanism – audits, member supervision, and indicators reported on schedule. Everything else depends on who signs the first contract and for how much.

I will follow this cycle through three checkpoints, not through the vote count. First, the first audited financial statement after 2027, and where self-generated revenue sits as a share of the total. Second, the broadcast contract re-signed after that date, with a stated value and term. Third, the number of women's teams still operating twelve months later, not the number announced. Vietnam does not lack people promising to raise money; it lacks a balance sheet published on the day it was promised.