V.League to 18 clubs: four new slots and the club licensing test

In the 2026/26 licensing list I recorded from the organisers' published documents, two V.League clubs received only conditional licences. Three years earlier, two different clubs were penalised for failing the criteria. At the same moment, the roadmap to 16 and then 18 clubs by 2027 remains on the VFF and VPF agenda, described as a technical target already agreed in principle.

The two data points sit a few lines apart in the same file. One is evidence that the operating standard for clubs is being loosened; the other is a plan to replicate four more entities that must pass exactly that standard. Nobody in the room challenged the addition. Addition is easy to sign; division — of resources, broadcast rights, qualified staff — is what nobody wants to present to a congress.

That night in Tokyo I replayed a recording of a mid-table V.League match. 0-0, the stands thinning from the 70th minute, the two pressing lines almost 20 metres apart, neither side daring to push up because the back line had no cover. I wrote in my notebook: 14 clubs, 26 rounds; 16 clubs, 30; 18 clubs, 34. Add the National Cup and a play-off, and a 14-club season is roughly 30-33 competitive matches; an 18-club season is 38-41. Those numbers say nothing about quality. They say something about volume, and volume always has a payer.

The regional comparison any league analyst must open: J1 League 20 clubs, 38 rounds; K League 1 just 12 clubs yet still 38 matches through a post-round-33 split; Thai League 16 clubs, 30 rounds; Indonesia 18; Malaysia 12; Singapore 8. Club count barely predicts match volume and certainly does not predict standards. Position is only the starting point; the system decides the destination — a line I wrote about players, and it holds for a league. A 12-club league playing 38 matches can be better than an 18-club league playing 34, if the 12 all meet licensing standards and four of the 18 live on provincial budgets.

If the real goal is more football, V.League has a far cheaper route. Keep 14 clubs, play 26 rounds, split into two groups of seven for the title and for survival, six extra matches each — 32 rounds, with not one additional licence required. To reach 38, split into groups of six after 26 rounds plus play-offs. K League has run exactly that mechanism for over a decade with 12 clubs, and nobody calls K League a low-volume competition. Format is a technical tool; expansion is a political decision. The two are swapped for each other in most debates I have followed.

More matches without more medical, physical and nutrition capacity turns the last 20 minutes into a war of attrition. Five substitutions deepen squads and simultaneously turn teams without 16 senior-ready players into second-half casualties. In the current V.League, the gap between the starting XI and the back-up options in the middle of the table is among the widest in the region. Eight extra rounds means eight extra pressure tests applied precisely where the squad is thinnest.

Club finance is the decisive layer. HAGL is the cleanest case I have: one individual put in roughly 2,000 billion VND over 20 years, about 100 billion per season, which at roughly 25,000 VND to the dollar is USD 3.8-4.0 million a year. That is a mid-table V.League operating budget. The one-patron, one-club model is enough to survive, not enough to grow, and at HAGL it came with a decade of continuous decline. Thanh Hoa, SLNA and Hai Phong are described as hard to run without local budgets. Quang Nam survived relegation and withdrew anyway, over money. Those three facts combine into one conclusion: the binding constraint is not the number of clubs but the number of solvent clubs.

Licensing is the paper quality filter, and the filter leaks. Two of 14 clubs fall short of full compliance, a non-compliance rate of about 14%. Add four clubs drawn from a reserve pool with weaker budgets and infrastructure, apply the same rate, and the league gains two to three more failures. At that point licensing has two futures: become a formality, or force the organisers to relegate clubs by administrative decision — something V.League has never done and which would trigger a credibility crisis far larger than one sporting relegation. The Japanese are not strong because they are disciplined; they are strong because they understand why discipline is required. A conditional licence is soft discipline: it saves the club's face and transfers the entire risk to the league's competitive integrity, exactly as Quang Nam's mid-season disappearance showed.

The only source for four new slots is the First Division. Under the current promotion mechanism, newly professional clubs arrive with licensing profiles weaker than the V.League average, not stronger. An 18-club league must therefore either accept a bottom group with infrastructure below the existing standard, or build a phased entry mechanism — two slots per season, with infrastructure and wage-floor conditions attached. Without that mechanism, expansion moves the problem from the meeting room onto the pitch, where nobody can defer a decision by forming a subcommittee.

On the player-supply side, expansion is a measurable double edge. Four new clubs mean roughly 100-120 first-team squad places. Each round those four teams field 44 starting places, close to 3,960 competitive minutes; over a 30-round season that is nearly 120,000 minutes. For a football economy where young players are routinely blocked by imports and short-term contracts, this is the largest and least discussed benefit of the plan. But dilution is uneven: goalkeepers, centre-backs and creative midfielders are Vietnam's thinnest positions and the ones that degrade fastest when the league is split into 18 squads. HAGL has run an academy for 20 years, produced talent, and still could not convert that talent into balance-sheet strength. A V.League club is currently forced into too many roles at once: academy, provincial tourism ambassador, local media instrument and competitive team. That is a dangerous form of positionless football — the roles overlap, and none of them is properly paid for.

The original commentary uses regional club counts to argue that expansion does not create quality. The reasoning holds, but it quietly skips the strongest development argument it itself raises: more slots, more minutes, more room for young players. Forced to choose between 14 clubs of average quality and 18 clubs of stratified quality, the second is not automatically worse — it is only riskier in the 13-18 band. The issue is sequencing: tighten licensing first, expand second. Done the other way round, four new slots are four new liabilities, and quality is not something lost but something never built. Quantity versus quality is the secondary question. The real variable is how many clubs will still be able to pay in three years.

Quality, if it is to be measured, must be defined before expansion. Three minimum indicators: the share of clubs with full licences, the share of competitive minutes given to under-21 players, and the share of revenue not sourced from provincial budgets. All three can be published next season at zero cost. A league willing to publish them is putting itself under pressure to be disciplined; a league that publishes only a club count is advertising.

Above that sits an issue unresolved for 13-14 years: the 2026 dispute over multi-club sponsorship between bau Kien and the clubs linked to bau Hien. The conflict of interest implied by playing football while blowing the whistle is not about one referee in one match; it is about ownership structure. Agenda-setting power sits with club owners rather than an independent regulator, so technical criteria tend to lose to the loudest patron with a seat at the 10th-term congress. The 2027 plan therefore carries political risk: if it is tied to one faction, it can be halted after the congress, not because it is technically wrong but because the balance of power shifted.

I am not a prophet; I only read the evidence before the current changes direction. Whether V.League should have 16 or 18 clubs is the secondary question. The primary one: where will clubs 13 to 18 find the money for wages, travel, medical departments and academies. Answer that, and expansion is investment. Fail to answer it, and expansion only postpones the payment to another term.