V.League and the Foreign Striker Dilemma: Vietnamese Football Is Mortgaging Its Future for Short-Term Success

In the days when the whole country was still savouring the AFF Cup triumph, I sat alone with the V.League statistics table and asked myself an uncomfortable question: if you removed every foreign striker from the league, what would the national team's attack look like?

It is a question few people want to answer honestly. Look at the V.League top-scorers' list across many seasons, and the pattern is obvious: foreign forwards regularly occupy most of the leading positions. They arrive, score, win individual awards, and then leave. What they leave behind is a gap that domestic football has still not managed to fill.

Context: a results-driven national game and an unstable domestic league

Vietnamese football has come a long way since 2026, when the U23 generation produced a miracle at the AFC U23 Championship. Since then, the national team has won the 2026 AFF Cup, reached the quarter-finals of the 2026 Asian Cup, qualified for the third round of the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, and most recently won the 2026 AFF Cup. Looking at that record, it is hard to deny the remarkable progress of Vietnamese football over the past decade and more.

But behind the national team's glory lies a deeply unstable V.League. The domestic competition has seen many clubs struggle with finances, many teams change owners or fold, and a fixture calendar repeatedly disrupted for one reason or another. In that environment, clubs choose the simplest way to survive: buy foreign strikers who have already been properly trained elsewhere, rather than patiently building from the ground up.

This is not a story unique to Vietnamese football. Several leagues in Southeast Asia face the same situation. But that is precisely why it is worth discussing, because Vietnamese football is expected to be the exception — the place where youth development is put first.

Core analysis: the structure of a typical V.League club

Look at how a typical V.League club allocates its personnel. The defence is usually manned by domestic players, because that position does not demand goalscoring ability and clubs can train it themselves. Midfield is a mix of local and foreign. But the most important position — the centre-forward — is almost by default reserved for a foreigner. A foreign striker who scores fifteen goals in a season will be courted and paid far more than a club would spend patiently giving a chance to a twenty-year-old domestic forward who is still raw.

This creates a frightening vicious circle. A domestic player who does not start cannot improve. If he does not improve, he cannot compete on equal terms. If he cannot compete, the club has even more reason to buy a foreigner. And so the circle closes, season after season, with no way out.

The consequences are clearest at national-team level. For years, Vietnam lacked a domestic centre-forward of sufficient calibre to carry the attack in major tournaments. When a goal was needed, the team had to rely on players produced elsewhere — such as the naturalised striker Nguyen Xuan Son, who shone and contributed greatly to the 2026 AFF Cup title. Son is a wonderful addition, and nobody denies that. But having to naturalise a Brazil-born striker to solve the scoring problem raises a difficult question: where is our development system, and what has it actually achieved all these years?

Of course, there are precious exceptions such as Nguyen Tien Linh, who has proved that a domestic striker can score consistently if given the chance. But the rarer the exception, the more it shows that the problem is systemic rather than isolated.

In developed football nations, foreign strikers are seasoning, not the main dish. In Vietnam, at times, they have been the whole meal. That is the difference between a mature league and one still groping for its own place.

What is worth noting is that this problem is not new at all. It was flagged years ago, but every time the national team achieves something, people forget. The day they said buying foreign strikers was enough, I quietly took note. This article is the answer. National-team success becomes a painkiller, masking the dull ache of the domestic league. And so we live under the illusion that everything is heading in the right direction.

A contrarian view: don't blame the foreigners

At this point, the familiar reaction of the majority is to blame foreign players and demand tighter quotas. I believe that is the wrong way to frame the problem entirely. Foreign players are not the root cause; they are merely a symptom of a deeper disease: financial instability and short-term thinking at the clubs.

If tomorrow the V.League banned foreign players completely, clubs would not suddenly produce world-class domestic strikers. They would simply score fewer goals, and the league would become less attractive to spectators. The issue is not how many foreigners there are, but whether clubs have enough resources and patience to invest in their academies.

I have had the chance to observe Vietnam's youth academies working very seriously, producing players with good tactical thinking and solid technical foundations. But when they reach the first team, they are often pushed into safe positions, or made to wait for an opportunity that never comes. A young talent needs thousands of minutes of playing time to develop; in the V.League, he usually gets only a few hundred scattered minutes per season.

So, instead of asking "how many foreigners are there", we should ask "are young domestic players getting enough playing time". A rule requiring a minimum number of minutes for players under twenty-three, for example, would be far more useful than a purely cosmetic foreign-player ban that is easy to circumvent.

The crowd's shouting is not evidence. I need to watch the tape, to look at the actual numbers on young players' minutes, not the promises repeated every season.

Conclusion: a debt that will one day come due

The 2026 AFF Cup trophy is an achievement to be proud of, and I do not want anyone to belittle it. But the national team's success should not obscure the problems of the domestic league. If the V.League keeps borrowing success with owners' money and foreign strikers who come and go, then one day that debt will have to be repaid — and the ones paying will be the next generation of players.

There are revolutions that do not fire a shot; they simply pass the ball quietly. A football nation that wants to endure must build from the roots, not live forever on short-term loans.

The question I leave for Vietnamese football's decision-makers is simple: ten years from now, when we look at the V.League top-scorers' list, whose names do we want to see?