Vietnamese Football: When Glory Can't Pay the Bills

On the night of January 5, 2026, at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, I sat in front of a screen in Shenzhen and screamed like a child. Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 in the second leg, won 5-3 on aggregate, and lifted the ASEAN Cup. Nguyễn Xuân Son scored twice and then broke his leg on the pitch. An entire S-shaped strip of land poured into the streets, from Hanoi to Ca Mau. I stood up too, clapping alone in a small apartment. But only minutes later, I muted the television and opened a different spreadsheet — the wage bill of the V.League clubs.

That is the bad habit of a man who has spent nearly forty years in commentary: I cannot sleep well after a victory until I know how much it cost.

Vietnamese football is walking on two mismatched legs. One leg is the national team — the side that has won Southeast Asia twice in seven years, reached the 2026 AFC U23 final under Park Hang-seo, and now holds the 2026 ASEAN Cup under Kim Sang-sik. The other leg is the V.League — a competition whose stands are often empty, whose television rights go for a pittance, and whose clubs mostly run on budgets of a few million dollars a season.

That mismatch is nothing new. It is the product of a football culture fed more by national emotion than by cash flow. People will take to the streets for a medal, but few will buy a ticket to watch a V.League match between Nam Dinh and Ha Tinh on a Saturday afternoon. Storied clubs like Hoang Anh Gia Lai, Song Lam Nghe An, or Becamex Binh Duong were once the pride of their provinces, but they now struggle to keep players from the pull of bigger clubs and overseas markets.

I remember the 1990s, when I sat in small studios in Vietnam commentating on matches with only a few thousand spectators. Thirty years later, the national team has been transformed, but the domestic league has barely moved. That is the great paradox of Vietnamese football. On the continental stage, Vietnam's representatives in the AFC Champions League usually exit early, while Thai and Japanese clubs go deeper — once again revealing the gap in squad depth and resources.

When everyone looks at talent, I look at the price the market is willing to pay. And the Vietnamese market is paying very little.

Look at the numbers. According to player-valuation sites, most of the Vietnam national team's stars — the names the whole country knows by heart — are valued at only a few hundred thousand to around one million euros. A good V.League player might earn a salary of a few tens of millions of dong a month, while a Thai player of the same level can earn three or four times that. That is a market gap, not a talent gap.

Vietnamese fans like to boast that their national team is stronger than Thailand's. That may be true on the pitch. But on the balance sheet, Thai football is still richer, and that is why Vietnamese players leave once they mature — for Japan, Korea, or even the Thai League itself.

I was once called a madman by all of social media when I urged Liverpool to sell Philippe Coutinho for 150 million pounds in 2026. At the time, I argued the club should use that money to rebuild around Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino. Everyone knows how it ended: Coutinho left for 142 million pounds in January 2026, Liverpool signed Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker, and reached the Champions League final. The moment emotion bursts is when football speaks its only truth.

I tell that story not to boast. I tell it to prove a principle: a player's market value is the most honest information about him. And if the V.League wants to grow, it must learn to sell — at the right time, at the right price, and to use the money to become bigger. A sale only succeeds when the club uses the money to become bigger.

The case of Nguyễn Xuân Son is worth pondering. A naturalized striker of Brazilian origin, scoring like a machine in the V.League, then shining at the ASEAN Cup before a serious injury. Naturalizing players is a reasonable stopgap for the national team — it brings in a center-forward the domestic game cannot produce in time. But if naturalization becomes a permanent crutch, it hides the root problem: our youth academies are not producing enough top-class strikers.

Look at the industry's transmission chain — from academies, to clubs, to broadcasting rights and the commercial market — and Vietnam's bottleneck sits in the middle. Academies like HAGL JMG, PVF, or Viettel were once praised for good training. But when their young players mature, they have neither a league strong enough to keep developing in nor a transfer market active enough to sell them at a good price. The result is talent stuck mid-stream — not good enough to go abroad immediately, not affordable enough to keep long term.

One telling figure: while top Asian leagues like the J.League and K.League pull in hundreds of millions of dollars in broadcasting rights each season, the V.League still muddles along with small, piecemeal contracts. Broadcasting rights are not just money — they are a measure of public interest. And when a league cannot sell its own image, it struggles to sell its own players.

And here is where I might be wrong.

There is another view, more pessimistic but also reasonable: Vietnam's football problem is not the market, but governance. How many times has the V.League watched clubs fail to pay wages, dissolve, or change owners like shirts? How many times has a champion club simply vanished? If money is not managed transparently, then selling players for cash solves nothing — the money flows somewhere else, not into academies or infrastructure.

I once thought I understood Asian football until I mispronounced "Pavard" as "Pa-va" three times during a 2026 World Cup broadcast, and all of social media laughed in my face. I spent a week rewatching the tape and relearning the pronunciation of players from thirty-two national teams. Sometimes, to win, you must accept looking like a fool in front of the whole world. That lesson taught me that confidence without detail is just arrogance.

The same goes for Vietnamese football. The ASEAN Cup title is a beautiful detail, but it cannot replace a system. If we only celebrate and never look at the wage bills, the broadcasting rights, or the attendance figures, then ten years from now we will be standing in exactly the same place — happy for one night, and anxious the next morning.

Based on my experience following matches, I see a sad rule: football nations that live only on their national team tend to collapse when their golden generation ages. Vietnam had a golden generation under Park Hang-seo. The question is: what will feed the next one?

I do not believe in gloomy prophecies. I believe in data, and the data says Vietnamese football is at a genuine crossroads.

If the V.League can raise the value of its broadcasting rights, if clubs make their finances transparent, and if a few stars are sold abroad at a fair price — not a fire sale — then in five to seven years we will see a national team that no longer depends on naturalization. If not, the 2026 ASEAN Cup title will look like a grand party in a house with cracked walls.

So then, what do Vietnamese fans want more: one more night of glory, or a league that can live for decades?