The VFF Presidency 2027-2031: A 600-1,000 Billion VND Annual Target and Vietnam's Test of Self-Funding

The list of nominations for the Vietnam Football Federation's 10th term (2027-2031) has just been published, with three names for the presidency: Tran Quoc Tuan, Nguyen Xuan Vu and Nguyen Duc Thuy. I read all three action programmes in one evening, then opened my old V-League notebook. The last page, written from the Thien Truong stand in the 2026 season, is still there: around 8,000 spectators, general admission tickets of a few tens of thousands of dong, matchday revenue that does not cover stadium rent, electricity and security.

Every debate about the most powerful seat in Vietnamese football eventually touches that small line of notes.

The third candidate makes people sit up. Nguyen Duc Thuy, Vice Chairman of Sacombank's board and the man behind Ninh Binh FC, targets mobilising 600-1,000 billion dong per year from 2027 through socialisation and revenue from sponsorship, corporate partnerships, commercial rights, digital content and football services. He pledges that from 2027, 100% of the funding for VFF's operational and development duties will come from socialised and self-generated revenue, with no state budget.

Reading that, I underlined two words: "self-generated". An entire term sits inside those two words.

Three profiles, one seat

Tran Quoc Tuan is the incumbent, the president who oversaw Vietnam's first appearance in the final round of World Cup qualifying and also the period when the youth teams plateaued after the Thường Châu peak. Nguyen Xuan Vu, the term-9 vice chairman in charge of communications, represents the operational and image wing of the organisation. Nguyen Duc Thuy brings a very different profile: a man of cash flow, bank governance and a club that has just come through a transition.

Those three profiles reflect three different understandings of what the VFF exists to do. A competition organiser, a media organisation, or a football business.

There is one easily missed detail in Thuy's programme: the roughly 80 billion dong of state budget allocated annually to football duties. The candidate wants to work with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Vietnam Sports Administration to adjust how that money is allocated, giving priority to sports that need extra funding, especially those capable of competing for medals at the ASIAD and the Olympics.

Translated into plain language: football volunteers to leave the state budget priority list. This is a bet on sequencing. Private money has to arrive before public money leaves. If that sequence reverses, the system has no safety net.

The arithmetic of sharing the pie

The programme sets out support packages: 2-3 billion dong per year for each eligible provincial federation; 3 billion dong for each V-League club, 2 billion for each First Division club and 2 billion for each women's club per season.

I took out a calculator, because that is the only way to know how heavy a promise is.

The V-League currently has around 14 clubs. At 3 billion per club, the top flight alone absorbs 42 billion dong a season. The First Division, with more than 10 teams at 2 billion, needs another 22-24 billion. Women's football, if it reaches the target of 8-10 stable teams, needs 16-20 billion. Together, those three packages already account for 80-86 billion dong a year, before a single dong is set aside for youth development, referees, medical care, physical recovery or international cooperation.

Then the provincial layer. If only 30 provincial federations meet the criteria for 2-3 billion dong, the bill rises by 60-90 billion. Total spending on support packages lands somewhere between 140 and 180 billion dong, and could approach 270 billion if most of the 63 provincial federations qualify.

Set against the 600 billion target, that means 25-45% of the intended revenue is committed to be spent before anything is collected. At the 1,000 billion threshold the ratio falls to 14-27%, but operational pressure does not fall, because every new club slot is still a new line of expenditure.

The 600-1,000 billion dong target is a redistribution plan written in the language of a growth plan.

The hard part is on the revenue side. V-League broadcast rights, digital content and football services combined do not currently generate enough cash to cover the new spending. I do not have the VFF's audited accounts in front of me, so I will not claim to know its present revenue. But there is one principle I have kept through 39 years in this trade: anyone who presents a revenue target without an audited baseline is presenting a wish, not a plan.

Data does not lie, but the people who clean data do. And here, the cleaners have not appeared. No income statement has been published for comparison. No independent auditor has been named. Thuy does mention auditing and oversight by VFF members, but an oversight pledge only counts when it comes with a mechanism: who audits, what is audited, where it is published, how often.

The contrarian view: a lesson from a league that dissolved

In July 2026 I sat in the Tianhe stand for the AFC Champions League quarter-final between Guangzhou Evergrande and Shanghai SIPG. The whole stadium was singing, and the money behind those two clubs was so thick that nobody thought about the day it would vanish. From my seat that evening I counted three ticket tiers, two club merchandise shops and a LED advertising system running non-stop for 90 minutes. A club there earned money from everything, including selling its own name to a city.

Four years later, Jiangsu Suning won the Chinese Super League and dissolved a few months afterwards when the parent group withdrew. Evergrande entered a crisis far bigger than football. An entire generation of Chinese clubs was fed by property money, and when that money stopped, no mechanism was there to catch them.

I look at the VFF's 600-1,000 billion target through that lens. A football economy that raises 1,000 billion dong can still collapse if 80% of the money comes from three companies. Socialisation, by definition, means many sources sharing the load. But in Vietnam, the number of companies able to write a cheque of several tens of billions a year for football is small. If that list is shorter than ten names, we are talking about a disguised concentration model, with risks no different from the old one.

There is another internal contradiction in the programme itself. Thuy wants to study expanding the V-League to 16-18 teams and the First Division to 18-20. Every new slot is another chance for a young player, true. But every new slot is also another 3 billion or 2 billion dong a season in support, plus refereeing, administration and broadcast costs. Expanding the league and increasing subsidies are two faces of the same decision. In a league where many clubs cannot survive on their own revenue, expansion means replicating dependence.

The part that interests me most sits in a line few people notice: digital content. In a stadium with no singing, I hear the future of media. But that future only becomes money when the VFF can sell match data, imagery and short-form content to platforms. V-League broadcast rights have for years been a hard product to sell at a high price, because the product has not been packaged well enough: fixture lists change, picture quality is uneven, match data is not standardised for resale.

Fans do not leave the stadium when they bring the stadium into their own living room. But keeping them in that living room requires a consistent product. That is a job for media and rights people, not for promises made at a congress.

There is one more point, about people. The programme targets training at least 20 additional staff in foreign languages, management and professional skills from 2027, aiming for at least 5-10 Vietnamese personnel to be recruited, appointed or regularly assigned at the AFF, AFC and FIFA by 2030, plus deep investment in 10-20 promising referees and assistant referees. I value this section more than the money, because it can be measured in real people, real job titles, real terms. Data only becomes rebellion when someone dares to believe it. Here, that data is a list of Vietnamese names sitting on continental committees.

What to watch after the vote

The VFF election will be decided by delegates, but the term will be decided by people who are not in the room: First Division chairmen waiting for their 2 billion dong, provincial federations waiting for a definition of "eligible", and sponsors waiting to see whether the rights are repackaged.

I want to know one very concrete thing: what the provincial "eligibility" criteria actually contain. That is where a financial plan turns into internal politics. If the criteria are vague, 2-3 billion dong a year becomes a bargaining chip for votes in the next term, and every debate about transparency stops at the meeting room door.

Based on my experience watching matches in the V-League and the Chinese Super League, I believe something simple: a football economy's financial model is only proven when its biggest sponsor walks away and the league keeps running. If, by 2028, at least one V-League club publishes independently audited accounts and stays standing after its main sponsor withdraws, then this year's presidential race will have genuinely changed something. If not, Vietnamese football will have another term of beautiful targets on paper, and my notebook will keep recording the same lines from the Thien Truong stand.