V-League Regular Season: The Transfer Arms Race and the Forgotten Academies

Across many recent V-League seasons, I have watched and recorded every deal, every fee, every promise made at a new-signing unveiling. And each time, the same pattern reappears: the clubs that spend the most in the transfer market are rarely the ones sitting at the top of the table when the season ends. The champion, in most cases, is the club that was the most patient with its own academy. That is the first thing I want to say to anyone who still believes money can buy a title.

I do not write this to provoke anyone. I write it because the league table has spoken on our behalf. Vietnamese football does not lack money. It lacks a frame of reference for spending it correctly.

The V-League currently has 14 clubs, playing a double round-robin format across roughly eight months. On the surface, it is a stable competition. But beneath that surface lies a widening gap between rich and poor. A small group of clubs has a budget large enough to sign quality foreign players, pay high wages, and invest in facilities. The rest must scramble with limited resources, often relying on provincial enterprise sponsorship or large corporations standing behind them.

There are three types of clubs in the V-League. The first is the buying club. It believes a few expensive deals will solve every problem. The second is the developing club. It invests in its academy and accepts years of waiting before harvest. The third is the survival club. It has neither money to buy nor a strong academy, so it simply tries to stay afloat. Notably, across many seasons, the title has usually gone to the second type.

Any analysis of the V-League transfer market must begin with a simple reality: the supply of high-quality domestic players is extremely limited. The entire league has only a few dozen players good enough to start at a high level of competition. When the supply is that thin, their price is driven sky-high. A mediocre but experienced domestic player can be valued far above his true worth on the pitch.

Clubs usually solve this problem by importing foreign players. Each team is allowed to register a certain number of foreigners, and most of them are strikers. That says a great deal about how Vietnamese clubs think. They are not looking for a system. They are looking for a goalscorer. And when that goalscorer gets injured or loses form, the whole team collapses because there is no structure to hold it up.

I have asked several V-League coaches: what makes you choose a foreign player instead of trusting your own youngster? The answers repeat almost identically. Young players need time. And time is the one thing they do not have, because the pressure for results is always present. A coach who loses three games in a row can lose his job. A youngster who makes a mistake on his debut can be pushed out of the squad for a year.

That is the root of the problem. No one wants to take responsibility for the future. Everyone just wants to survive the present.

If you want to understand a team, do not look at the table. Look at how they defend when they lose the ball. In the V-League, the moment of transition after losing possession is where the gap between teams is exposed most clearly. The strongest teams press immediately, giving opponents no time to hold the ball and organise. Their PPDA is markedly lower. The weaker teams drop deep, endure, and hope for a lucky counterattack.

That difference is not about individual quality. It is about organisational capacity. A well-coached team can press synchronously with five players, while a hastily assembled team presses with two and exposes the space behind. Modern football, anywhere in the world, is a sport of the gaps between the lines.

What is interesting is that Vietnam's best academies understand this better than anyone. Players who come through properly structured training centres are taught collective defending from childhood. They know how to move as a block, cover for teammates, and judge when to push up and when to drop back. That knowledge cannot be bought with a transfer fee.

A good foreign player can score 15 goals a season. But he rarely changes the way the whole team operates. A generation of young players trained together, by contrast, can shape a style of play that lasts a decade.

That is why I always say that the biggest asset of a V-League club is not in the transfer ledger, but in the academy's list of trainees.

Looking at recent history, this becomes clear. A few training centres have produced the backbone of the national team for years on end. These players are not just individually good. They understand each other so well they can combine almost without looking. That understanding is the result of thousands of hours of training together, something no transfer fee can buy.

And this is where I want to go against the majority.

Many people argue that the V-League's problem is that clubs refuse to invest in youth development. I disagree. The problem is that they invest, then sell too early. A youngster who shines for a few games is sold to another club or abroad before he has time to mature tactically. The academy becomes a money-printing machine rather than the foundation of a football club.

Clubs say they need to sell to survive. That is true. But there is a line between selling to survive and selling away your own future. When you sell your core every season, you are not building a team. You are running a transit station.

I did not rebel because of Nguyen Van Quyet; I rebelled because of the way we look at contracts. A contract, to me, has never been just a number. It is a cultural specimen. It tells me what a club thinks of itself.

A contract is only a promise in a frame, while the truth always lies outside the frame. And the truth in the V-League is this: teams that sell their identity to buy short-term success usually end the season with neither.

Look at the relegation battlers. They are the clearest victims of this system. No money for quality foreigners, no academy strong enough to rely on, they must make do with players other clubs have discarded. Every season, they fight not to rise, but to avoid falling. And that pressure means they never dare try anything new.

At 59, I am not wiser than anyone; I am just less afraid of headlines. But I am clear-headed enough to recognise that a football ecosystem can only develop when it allows its weakest teams to make mistakes. The V-League today does not allow that.

I have spent most of my career recording moments like this. And the more I observe, the more I believe the V-League transfer market is not a story about money. It is a story about how a football culture sees itself. When you only buy, you are saying you do not believe in your ability to create. When you sell too early, you are saying you do not believe in the future.

One year, when the stands were empty because of the pandemic, I sat alone in a stadium and looked at the rows of empty seats. Something clicked. The empty stands of 2026 were not a laboratory; they were where football confessed. When the familiar shell was stripped away, when the cheering could no longer cover it up, people saw what football really is. And what they saw in the V-League was a competition still fumbling for its own identity.

Covid taught us a lesson we perhaps did not want to hear. Clubs with solid foundations — good academies, stable structures, healthy finances — weathered the crisis far better than those that lived on buying. But instead of learning from that lesson, many teams returned to old habits the moment the pandemic passed.

Based on my experience watching matches, I believe a club built from its academy needs roughly three to five years to shape a style, and another two to three to harvest results. That is a timeframe no V-League coach is allowed to have.

But here is the most important thing I want to say. Vietnamese football does not need more record deals. It needs more people willing to take responsibility for a long-term project, willing to keep a youngster instead of selling him at peak value, willing to accept a trophy-less season in exchange for a stable decade.

The philosophy did not die in Kazan; it died long ago — we simply did not see it. And the same thing is happening in the V-League. This league's football philosophy did not collapse in a single defeat. It died slowly through every deal sold off too early, every youngster stunted by impatience, every season in which clubs forgot that football is a collective sport.

Empty stands, contracts and Kazan — all three taught me not to worship what is dying. I write long articles to say a short thing: football is never what you think it is. It is not a race for money. It is a process of cultivation, demanding time, patience, and a little courage to wait.

So what do I predict for this regular season? I predict the champion will again be the club with the best academy, not the biggest spender. And I predict the relegation battlers will again scramble without solving the root of their problem, because that root is not on the pitch. It is in how we view a contract, a youngster, a season.

Football does not die in a single night. It dies in silence, through small decisions nobody notices. And if we do not start looking at those decisions, the V-League will remain a competition where talent is produced only to be sold off, and where the loyalty of the fans becomes the last commodity no one wants to buy.