Nguyen Duc Thuy's 600–1,000 Billion VND Plan: Nearly Half the Money Is Spoken For Before Kickoff

The First Division match last October drew a little over eight hundred spectators. I stayed behind after the final whistle to talk to a 22-year-old midfielder, and he opened his notebook for me: across the whole calendar year, he had played six competitive matches. Six. His team trained eleven months, ninety minutes a session, and his coach gave me a line I wrote down word for word: "He doesn't lack training minutes. He lacks minutes under pressure." Three years on, I still hold that line up whenever someone talks about expanding the league. It is also why, when I read the figure of 600 to 1,000 billion VND a year that Nguyen Duc Thuy has put forward for the Vietnamese Football Federation's 2026–2030 term, I did not look at the money first. I looked at the diagnosis behind it. That diagnosis is right, and uncomfortably so: Vietnamese players are developed for years and then reach professional maturity without competitive minutes. Thuy says this plainly in the campaign programme published ahead of the congress. The rest is a financial architecture: from 2027, mobilise 600 to 1,000 billion VND a year — roughly USD 23.5 to 39.2 million at an approximate rate of 25,500 VND per dollar — across five revenue lines: socialised sponsorship, commercial and broadcast rights, digital content, football services, and international cooperation. Attached to it is a pledge of 100% socialisation, handing back about 80 billion VND of state budget each year to Olympic and Asian Games sports. On the spending side sit subsidies of 3 billion VND per V.League club, 2 billion per First Division club, 2 billion per women's club, 2 to 3 billion for 20 of 63 provincial federations, a two- to three-fold rise in staff salaries, and auditing by a Big 4 firm alongside supervision by member organisations. On format, the proposal is to expand the V.League from 14 to 16–18 teams and the First Division to 18–20, with a note that this remains a research option. Add the lines together and the picture is far clearer than the headline. With 16 V.League clubs and 18–20 First Division sides, those two subsidy lines alone consume 84 to 94 billion VND. Add 14–16 billion for women's football, 40–60 billion for provincial federations, 15–50 billion for the payroll increase, 10–30 billion for futsal and school football, and total committed spending lands at roughly 165 to 250 billion VND a year. Add the 80 billion of state budget that must now be replaced, and the pre-committed total is 245 to 330 billion — 41 to 55% of the 600 billion target, or 25 to 33% of the 1,000 billion target. A quarter to a half of the money raised already has an owner before a single dong reaches a pitch, sports medicine, a youth academy, or a bid to host an international tournament. The 3 billion VND per V.League club deserves a closer look, because it shows the gap between financial meaning and political meaning. At about USD 118,000, it equals 3 to 7% of a V.League club's annual budget and sits closer to one month of a wage bill than to a restructuring instrument. It will not buy a good foreign centre-back. It buys loyalty, and at a federation congress, the loyalty of member blocs carries a price. The single most consequential technical decision in the whole programme is left blank: the foreign-player quota. Thuy names the trade-off clearly — good imports raise the league's level, too many imports block Vietnamese players — but attaches no mechanism: no age-based quota, no transition schedule, no mandatory minutes for young players. Expand without that constraint and total minutes rise while the pressure minutes available to a 22-year-old may not rise by a single second. The calendar arithmetic is skipped as well. A 14-team V.League playing a single round robin is 26 rounds; 16 teams is 30; 18 teams is 34. Layered on top are FIFA windows, the ASEAN Championship, the SEA Games and continental matchdays. Thailand keeps Thai League 1 at 16 teams, Indonesia runs Liga 1 with 18, K League 1 has only 12, and J1 goes to 20 with a reserve system and infrastructure of a different order. Going from 14 to 18 requires four more clubs meeting AFC-linked licensing criteria — a supply constraint, not an administrative decision. The pitch never betrays anyone; people just forget that it knows how to hold you too. The most valuable part of the programme sits where it is least quoted: Big 4 auditing and supervision by member organisations. Most federations in the region publish far less. Done for real, that is a bigger legacy than any fundraising target. But there is a blind spot in Vietnamese football's collective memory: we still assume money is the bottleneck and expansion is the answer. The 2000s already ran on the logic of more teams, more chances, and what it mainly produced was a denser calendar. Cheaper, better-aimed and less glamorous tools remain on the table: an official reserve or U21 league, a loan mechanism tied to minutes, a registration rule for young players. They make poor congress photographs, but they hit the right address. The 600-to-1,000 billion spread is worth mentioning too. A 67% gap is very wide for a plan described as being concretised through financial projections. Of the programme's 35 information points, about ten are monetary targets and none supplies a current baseline against which delivery could be measured. The federation's present revenue, its liabilities, its reserves, its revenue split with the professional football joint-stock company — all absent, and the absence is verifiable on the page. The risk sits in the structure. Four named sponsor groups — Vingroup, the SHB-linked group, the HAGL/THACO-linked group, ThaiGroup — represent heavy concentration. Handing back 80 billion VND of state budget is a ratchet: once that money has moved to Olympic sports, reclaiming it after a bad revenue season is politically close to impossible. And digital content, the weakest line, is blocked by three things at once: broadcast rights split between the federation and the joint-stock company, piracy, and a strong free-to-air culture. I write slowly, because football does not hurry — it only waits for someone patient enough to understand. At 69 I have learned that the world still runs faster than I do, but memory always stands still. What my generation remembers most is the image of a 22-year-old walking into November with legs tired from playing, not from waiting — more than any trophy. People can argue endlessly about whether 600 billion or 1,000 billion is achievable. But there is a far cheaper question any candidate can answer in one sentence: what is the federation's current revenue? Publishing that baseline before the vote would teach the next generation of writers something it took me fifty years to learn — that in football, transparency is the first pass of every successful move.