Nguyen Duc Thuy's 600–1,000 Billion VND Plan: Where the Money Goes Before It Reaches the Pitch

Inside the plan to raise 600 to 1,000 billion VND a year for Vietnamese football, there is one line. It sits in the budget section, and it says that roughly 80 billion VND of state funding for football duties will be handed back, redirected to sports chasing Olympic and Asian Games medals.

Nobody applauded that line. The room applauded the 1,000 billion figure, the image of a football industry standing on its own feet, the prospect of a federation that no longer has to ask for money. I sat in the press corner, wrote both numbers on the same sheet of paper, and saw that they tell two different stories. A trillion dong is a promise about the future. Eighty billion is a commitment about the past, and that kind of commitment has no reverse gear.

It took me thirty years to understand that in football, what is promised is never what is delivered; what is delivered always sits in the lines nobody reads out loud.

Nguyen Duc Thuy is a businessman and a candidate for the presidency of the Vietnam Football Federation for the 2026–2030 term. His programme was published during the pre-congress campaign period and reported by Dan Tri. This is a campaign document with numbers attached, and it should be read exactly that way: the targets are clear, the baseline is not.

The substance runs as follows. Raise 600 to 1,000 billion VND a year from 2027 through full socialisation. Five revenue lines are named: corporate sponsorship, broadcast rights, digital content, football services and other socialised sources. Hand back roughly 80 billion VND of state budget. Expand the V.League from 14 to 16–18 clubs and the First Division to 18–20. Pay a 3 billion VND subsidy per V.League club per season, 2 billion per First Division club and 2 billion per women's club. Support eligible local federations with 2–3 billion each. Raise federation staff salaries two to three times from 2027. Submit to an audit by one of the Big Four and disclose it so member organisations can supervise.

At a reference rate of about 25,500 VND to the dollar, the 600–1,000 billion target equals 23.5 to 39.2 million USD a year. The 80 billion equals roughly 3.1 million USD. Placed side by side, those two figures show the size of the promise and the size of what has been put on the table.

For scale: the V.League currently has 14 clubs, which means 26 rounds a season. Thai League 1 has 16, Indonesia's Liga 1 has 18, Japan's J1 has 20, and Korea's K League 1 has only 12. Vietnam sits at the low end of the region on club count, and that is a legitimate technical reason to discuss expansion. The gap between legitimate and feasible is the one the document never bridges.

I ran a cost table from the commitments in the text itself, assuming mid-range club counts. Sixteen V.League clubs at 3 billion is 48 billion. Eighteen to twenty First Division clubs at 2 billion is 36 to 40 billion. Seven to eight women's clubs at 2 billion is 14 to 16 billion. Around 20 eligible local federations out of 63, at 2 to 3 billion each, is 40 to 60 billion. A two-to-threefold payroll increase is 15 to 50 billion. Futsal, beach football, school football and other duties add 10 to 30 billion. That puts pre-committed spending at roughly 165 to 250 billion VND. Add the 80 billion that must now be replaced, and total obligations before a ball is kicked reach 245 to 330 billion VND.

A quarter to a half of the headline fundraising target is consumed before a single dong reaches a pitch, sports medicine, a youth academy or an international tournament bid. Against the 600 billion mark, pre-committed spending is 41 to 55 percent. Against 1,000 billion, it is 25 to 33 percent. This is the simplest calculation in the most complicated problem, and it is the only one the document does not perform.

The 80 billion deserves its own paragraph, because it behaves like a ratchet. Once that budget line is reassigned to sports with Olympic and Asian Games medal targets, clawing it back after a bad revenue year becomes politically almost impossible. No one dares strip money from a sport that has just been promised medals in order to hand it back to football. The plan converts a soft dependency into a hard commitment, and places that hard commitment ahead of every revenue line not yet signed.

What bothers me more is the width of the target band. Six hundred and one thousand billion are 67 percent apart. No financial plan built from the bottom up carries that margin of error. A plan built from cash flow produces 612, or 738, or 815 billion. The round band of 600 to 1,000 is a number chosen to be memorable in a congress season.

Of the 35 information points in the document, about ten are financial targets, and not one supplies a current-state baseline. No present revenue, no contracted revenue, no sponsor pipeline, no revenue-split figure with the professional football joint-stock company. A credible plan writes itself in order: what we have, what is signed, what is in negotiation, what is new. This document starts at the third item and skips the first two.

The expansion section also needs to be read with league arithmetic rather than slogans. A 14-club double round-robin gives 26 rounds. Sixteen clubs give 30. Eighteen clubs give 34. Layer on FIFA windows, the ASEAN Championship, the SEA Games and Asian club matchdays, and congestion rises sharply. Expanding the league to give young players more minutes, without expanding squad depth at the same time, produces overload rather than opportunity. That is the paradox no coach wants to raise in a congress season.

The sequencing is also inverted. The document puts the increase in club numbers ahead of any filter on club licensing, stadiums, academies or financial sustainability. In practice, going from 14 to 16–18 requires two to four additional clubs meeting licensing standards tied to Asian confederation requirements. That is a supply constraint, not a demand decision. You cannot pass a resolution and thereby conjure licensed clubs.

And there is one large blank cell: the foreign-player quota. Thuy names the trade-off directly, between foreign quality raising the league's competitiveness and foreign players blocking Vietnamese development. But the programme offers no quota mechanism, no age-based rule, no transition schedule. That is the single most consequential technical decision in the whole programme, and it is left empty. Expanding a league without a registration rule for young players simply imports more mid-tier foreigners and more veteran locals.

The diagnosis is sharper than the prescription. Thuy is right about the core Vietnamese failure: players are trained for years and then, exactly at the point of maturity, lack elite minutes. But adding clubs increases total minutes, not necessarily high-pressure minutes for under-23 players. Indonesia chose a different tool: youth registration slots and minimum minutes. That route is cheaper, better targeted, and generates no image of a bigger league.

The 3 billion VND per V.League club per season, about 118,000 USD, is roughly 3 to 7 percent of a typical V.League club budget, commonly cited in the 40 to 200 billion range. In other words, it is about one month of payroll. One month of wages is not a reform instrument; it is a political instrument. Its real value lies in recognition, in creating a grateful bloc of clubs, and in creating dependency. Vietnamese football has long experience of small sums generating large obligations.

The 2–3 billion VND support for local federations is the document's true engine. Provincial federations are a large and disciplined voting bloc at the federation congress. A standing subsidy promise to 20 of 63 eligible units is easy to understand, easy to remember, and easier to convert into a vote than any academy. I am not saying that is wrong. I am saying it should be called by its name, so people know which part of the programme is investment and which part is campaigning.

The revenue architecture is also a concern. The four named sponsor groups are all tied to specific businessmen inside Vietnamese football. Concentration on three or four counterparties makes the 600 billion target dependent on a handful of boardrooms. And large Vietnamese corporates tend to prefer project-branded sponsorship — stadium naming, national team kit, tournament title — over untied cash to a federation. Money with a name on it cannot pay a subsidy. That is the trap every socialisation plan meets, and this document has no mechanism for converting one kind of money into the other.

A fully socialised design, with no state budget left at all, is pro-cyclical. It removes the buffer precisely when Vietnamese football's commercial value is most sensitive to national team results. One failed qualifying campaign can push sponsorship renewals back a full cycle. With 80 billion of state budget, a federation has a cushion against that shock. Without it, the shock lands directly on the payroll.

The strongest part of the document, and I want to be clear about it, is the transparency architecture. A Big Four audit plus disclosure for member-organisation supervision is a commitment beyond the regional norm. If executed, it is a bigger legacy than any fundraising figure. The problem is the word if.

There are no great prophecies, only an old man weathered enough to see the crack the crowd chooses to ignore. The crack here is not that Thuy promises a lot. It is that the document promises with money not yet earned while committing to pay with money already held.

Now to where I may be wrong.

There is a reasonable inverted reading: a federation that promises little usually delivers little, while one that promises loudly at least creates public pressure on itself. The 1,000 billion figure may simply be a negotiating anchor, with 600 billion the real target — still a large step-up, but not absurd given the growth of Southeast Asian leagues over the past decade. On that reading, naming the high number is not fantasy; it is bargaining technique.

I may also be wrong to treat expansion as dilution. For a league of only 14 clubs, Vietnamese football's problem may be precisely its closed shop: a small group of clubs sharing a market, sharing Asian slots, and nobody forced to grow. Expansion may be the way to break that closed shop, accepting a lower peak quality for two or three seasons in exchange for a wider market. That is a reasonable bet. The document simply does not say so.

And I may be wrong to demand a baseline from a campaign document. Campaign documents exist to inspire, not to be audited. Asking one for a balance sheet is asking for something it never intended to provide.

But even granting all of that, one question hangs. If the goal is minutes for young players, why is the chosen instrument the number of clubs, rather than a reserve league, a mandatory under-21 competition, or a loan-and-minutes mechanism? The latter three are cheaper, better targeted and measurable. They lack only one thing: they cannot be seen from the stage.

We go to the stadium to witness victory, but I want to stay behind to read the face of a hero questioning himself. Vietnamese football has such a hero right now, standing before a room that applauded, loading onto his own shoulders a number larger than any ever promised.

Three years from now, all of this can be checked without argument. Three numbers, read at the 2027 congress. First, actual federation revenue against the 600 billion mark. Second, whether the 80 billion state line was restored, and if so, how. Third, whether a minimum-minutes rule for young players exists — and if it does not, then every promise about player development is a line on a slide.

I will write all three numbers on the same sheet of paper where I wrote 1,000 billion and 80 billion. Then the paper will answer for itself.