VFF Candidate List: Three Chairman Contenders and Six Names for the Finance Seat

Forty-Eight Hours

October 19 was the deadline for nominations to the executive committee of the Vietnam Football Federation for its tenth term. On October 21, the list was published. In between lay forty-eight hours to read more than a dozen files, verify legal standing, check financial histories, and then decide whose names would be printed on the board.

I have read candidate lists for more than twenty years in this trade. Every list has a skew. At the VFF, the skew sits on two adjacent lines: the Vice Chairman for Finance and Sponsorship Mobilization race has six candidates; the Vice Chairman for Communications and Foreign Affairs race has one. Six and one. The people inside have already answered which seat is worth holding.

Then comes the name that made me reopen the whole file: Nguyen Duc Thuy, known as bau Thuy, a construction businessman born in 2026, standing for Chairman. Thuy is tied to LPBank, and LPBank is the main sponsor of the V-League. One man could sit in the seat that signs off on sponsorship contracts while his own company is the counterparty on that contract.

This is where I stop. I once accused someone out of emotion. Now I need evidence, or I stay silent.

The Structure of a Ballot

The VFF's ninth term runs from 2026 to 2026. The tenth-term congress is expected in January 2027, electing the chairman, the vice chairmen and the executive committee members.

The list published on October 21 shows three names for the top seat: Tran Quoc Tuan, the incumbent chairman; Nguyen Duc Thuy, a first-time candidate; and Nguyen Xuan Vu, the incumbent vice chairman for communications and foreign affairs.

The Vice Chairman for Professional Affairs race includes Tran Huy Duc, Tran Quoc Tuan and Tran Anh Tu, who currently chairs the board of the Vietnam Professional Football joint-stock company (VPF), the body that operates the V-League.

The Vice Chairman for Finance and Sponsorship Mobilization race has six names, among them Nguyen Duc Thuy, Vu Quoc Khanh (LPBank's chief executive), Nguyen Trung Kien and Le Van Thanh, chairman of a construction company.

The Communications and Foreign Affairs seat belongs to Nguyen Xuan Vu alone. The final list must pass review by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

Which Seat Is Worth Holding

A football federation lives on three sources: sponsorship, broadcasting rights and matchday revenue. In Vietnam, sponsorship is the largest and the easiest to negotiate behind closed doors. Whoever holds the finance seat holds the key to the money that flows to the clubs.

Six candidates for one seat says two things, and both can be true at once: the seat carries high leverage, or the outgoing term is judged to have underdelivered.

By contrast, the Communications and Foreign Affairs seat has a single candidate. I spend more nights poring over player wage bills than watching beautiful goals, and a federation's balance sheet deserves the same treatment: wherever people fight to sit, that is where the money is. The finance seat sets the split; the chairman's seat decides whose name carries the liability.

My experience following V-League matches shows that league sponsorship deals are usually signed on multi-year cycles, and every renewal reshapes how money is divided among clubs. The finance vice chairman signs the paper, and that seat sets the ratio.

Three Candidates, Three Double Entries

All three chairman candidates appear on a second ballot. Tuan is running for professional affairs, Thuy for finance, and Vu is the only name in the communications and foreign affairs race.

The published document cites no clause of the VFF statutes on whether one person may contest multiple seats at the same congress. If Tuan wins the chairmanship, the professional-affairs ballot is a fallback he never needs. If he loses, it becomes a lifeline. An incumbent standing on two ballots is usually not a sure winner.

Vu sits in the safest position: with no rival for communications and foreign affairs, he keeps a leadership post whatever the chairman vote produces.

One detail in the list needs cross-checking: Nguyen Trung Kien's file lists him as finance vice chairman for the fourth term, while the current term is the ninth. It may be shorthand for an earlier era, or a copying error. In 2026 I misread a naturalized player's release clause, and a rival broadcaster repeated the wrong information live on air. Since then I read every appendix page. A candidate list has to be read like a contract appendix.

The Sponsor Sits at the Table

LPBank is the V-League's main sponsor. Nguyen Duc Thuy is contesting the chairmanship and the finance seat. Vu Quoc Khanh, LPBank's chief executive, is also contesting the finance seat. Three facts sit in one document, and the document contains not a line on conflict of interest.

I am not saying anyone has broken a rule. The structure is creating its own difficulty: if the man behind the league's biggest sponsor also approves the sponsorship contracts, the terms will be negotiated in a room where both sides are the same person.

For V-League clubs the consequence is concrete: whether the sponsorship package is renewed or narrowed decides next season's budget. In 2026 I received a leaked dataset from an accountant at a Korean club: 40 billion won borrowed from an opaque fund, and nine ghost sponsorship contracts with companies that had no real office. Those contracts could only exist because the signatory and the recipient sat at the same table and nobody kept minutes.

The Two-Ministry Gate

The list is not the result. The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism can vet personnel before the congress, and this is a real gate: a candidate with unresolved legal or financial issues can be removed before ballots are printed. The worst case is a file sent back, forcing a fresh nomination round and a postponed congress.

The Reasonable Case on the Other Side

There is a reading that does not suit my hypothesis, and I have to record it.

A businessman from outside the system entering the chairmanship race can be a good sign. Vietnamese football has been through an era when clubs lived on one man's money, and that model built stadiums as well as debts. It also produced people who understand the value of a sponsorship contract and know how to sell rights. A federation led by someone who can sell may earn more than one led by an administrator.

The continuity camp has its own case: a stable 2026–2030 term keeps the national-team pipeline unbroken, and changes at the professional-affairs seat usually take two or three years to show on the pitch.

The problem is that I do not have any candidate's platform. Nobody has published a concrete plan on sponsorship, academies, naturalization policy or hiring foreign coaches. On the night of the 2026 World Cup I looked at a needle and asked where the finish line of honesty was; the lesson was not to conclude on a single layer of data. Here I have one layer: a list of names. To know who can change what, I need a second layer, the platforms, and a third, the money flow of the outgoing term.

What to Watch

About fourteen months remain until January 2027, long enough for a published list to change: withdrawals, additions, seat swaps. Three things I will track are the two ministries' review announcements, the renewal terms of LPBank's sponsorship, and whether candidates publish platforms before the congress.

Forty-eight hours to vet a person is too short. Fourteen months to publish a platform is too long. If Vietnamese fans, the people who pay for tickets and subscriptions, cannot read the plan of the man about to run their league before ballots are printed, then every promise of transparency after the congress is a single line in the minutes. I write to restore fairness to supporters long accustomed to being misled, though this time I have no evidence of who misled whom. I have a list, and fourteen months to interrogate it.