Bau Duc before the 2026-2030 VFF Congress: Vietnamese football must learn to generate money, and the patron model has hit its ceiling

There is a photograph I have kept on my computer for nearly twenty years. Taken in Ham Rong, Pleiku, dry season 2026: a row of wooden bunk beds, an English textbook on every pillow, and a blackboard listing the evening timetable. No grass, no stands, no sponsor board on the wall. Only eleven-year-old children and a man in a white shirt standing at the door, a roll-call list in his hand.

That man was Doan Nguyen Duc. Nearly twenty years later, on the eve of the Vietnam Football Federation Congress for the 2026-2030 term, he said something the media quoted verbatim: Vietnamese football needs to know how to generate money.

I pulled out the old photograph and realised I had been reading it wrong all those years. I thought it was about football. It was about cash flow.

The remark landed at a highly sensitive moment. The VFF Congress for the 2026-2030 term is about to take place, meaning a new leadership, a new executive committee, and a reallocation of the entire game's resources will be decided within months. A man who once held the VFF Vice Chairmanship for Finance while running HAGL as chairman for more than two decades does not talk about money at this precise moment by accident.

The results are on his side. Vietnamese football has just come through a rare cycle: runners-up at the 2026 AFC U23 Championship in Changzhou, the 2026 AFF Cup title, then a run of SEA Games medals. A whole generation matured almost at once, and most of them came out of one academy: the HAGL Arsenal JMG Academy, opened in 2026 in Pleiku. Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh, Hong Duy. Six names, one academy.

The cradle that feeds that system remains thin. V.League clubs live on low broadcast revenue, modest shirt sponsorship, and operating costs largely paid out of a handful of individuals' pockets. They are called the ong bau, the patrons.

In his remarks, Bau Duc said several blunt things. Professional football demands very large financial resources. The VFF, as a social-professional organisation, needs businessmen who know how to create cash flow, know how to manage, and dare to spend. He said Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. He also spoke of having paid the price for his own investment decisions, and raised the need for Vietnamese voices inside FIFA, AFC and AFF bodies to protect interests and keep up with trends.

"Without money, don't talk about reaching the top" sounds harsh, but look at the price of a place at a 48-team World Cup and it is not harsh at all. A national team that wants to go far needs a certified training centre, a sports-science staff, data analysts, and a youth system running steadily for twenty years. None of that is free.

The regional race matters too. Thailand and Indonesia have spent on foreign coaches, naturalised players, and high-quality friendly tournaments to bank ranking points. Asian football is now a budget race, and Vietnam enters it with a thinner wallet than most direct rivals. The recent run of results papers over that gap. It does not close it.

Agreeing with the direction is not the same as agreeing with the whole argument. The statement came with no numbers attached. No VFF revenue, no club budgets, no average V.League wage bill. Without numbers you cannot know how big the gap is, and you cannot know how much must be injected to close it. A diagnosis pointing the right way but carrying no measurement is still advice, not a plan.

Generating money, concretely, means selling tickets, selling shirts, selling data rights, and taking a percentage when your graduates move abroad. Leagues in the region are ahead on several of those links: centralised broadcast deals, league-level sponsors, sell-on clauses. Vietnam has stadiums, crowds and players, but is missing the link that connects the three.

The more interesting half of his sentence was the second: Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. That is a diagnosis of concentration risk, and it holds on two levels. Financially, the game's money depends on a small group of individuals whose personal fortunes are tied to their clubs. On the talent side, the game's output depends on a few academies, and one academy running short of cash makes the whole conveyor belt shudder.

Here is a detail few want to look at directly. The HAGL Arsenal JMG Academy opened in 2026. Its most famous names only truly broke into the first team and the national side from around 2026 onwards. That means nearly a decade of pouring money into an asset producing no revenue at all: no ticket sales, no shirt sales, no broadcast rights. In European football that kind of investment is usually carried by funds or multinationals, because they can wait ten years. In Vietnam, the carrier was one man.

This is why I always look at the patron model with a mix of admiration and worry. In 2026, Manchester City paid around 50 million pounds for Kyle Walker, at the time a record fee for a defender. I wrote that Pep Guardiola had lost his mind. People laughed at me over Walker. Three years later, they were laughing through tears at the price of defenders. The market paid that fee not because Walker was better than every other full-back, but because it could measure what he produced: ground covered, space exploited, pressing pressure. The market prices what it can measure. Vietnamese football measures almost nothing, because almost nobody publishes financial figures.

Vietnamese football lacks a mechanism to turn inspiration into measurable cash flow. Any model resting on one person's willingness to pay is a model resting on luck, and luck does not sign long-term contracts.

There is a barrier rarely mentioned. The VFF is a social-professional organisation. That legal label is not just paperwork. It limits how a federation can operate like a business: raising capital, distributing profit, hiring a professional executive, answering to shareholders. Putting businessmen on the executive committee is easy. Letting them run it on business logic requires changing the whole framework, and changing a framework takes longer than one term.

The subtle part of Bau Duc's argument is that he does not stop at asking for money. He asks for people who know how to manage, and his reasoning deserves thought: those who spend their own money have the motivation to find a suitable management model. That is a skin-in-the-game argument, and it is fundamentally different from requesting a bigger budget. The problem is that when resources concentrate in a few hands, their motivation becomes the system's motivation, including on the days they are tired.

The closing part of his remarks, about having Vietnamese people inside FIFA, AFC and AFF bodies, is usually read as a question of prestige. Read closely, it is a question of interest. Whoever sits on those committees has a voice on the calendar, on slot allocation, and on development funds. That is an advantage in the rules of the game, not a medal.

In Vietnamese football's food chain, HAGL occupies an odd position. Its on-pitch results are mid-table at best, but its influence runs far beyond its ranking. The club's real product is not trophies but the players who come out of the academy. A club that sells players to the whole league lives on transfer income, and transfer income only flows when there are buyers. When other academies produce nothing, domestic transfer values collapse, and HAGL is the first to feel it.

My experience watching matches in both the V.League and the Premier League taught me one habit: trust what is measured, doubt what is merely told. And this is where I have to argue against myself, because I got this kind of argument wrong once, and the price was a 1,500-word correction.

I may be wrong on a few points.

Money is not the only variable. Talent density, coaching quality and tactical organisation are factors you cannot buy with cash in the short term. Low-budget federations have overperformed through systematic coaching and a clear playing philosophy. If Bau Duc were entirely right, football would simply be a ranking of billionaires.

The patron model has a strength that the corporate model struggles to replace. It absorbs risk no bank would touch: ten years without revenue, no collateral, no cash flow. Only someone emotionally tied to the land and to the child in that photograph would dare. Corporate money, being rational, will demand returns sooner and back fewer long bets. Commercialisation may shorten horizons, not lengthen them.

And I may be misreading the moment. Success sometimes does not open the door to reform; it closes it, because nobody wants to fix what is working.

I disagree not because I want to be different. I disagree because the majority was once wrong with me.

At 43, I still speak hot, but the fire has learned to wait. Fans are angry at me because I break their dreams. Dreams built on facts last longer.

My prediction, for you to check: within the 2026-2030 term, at least one V.League club will publish independently audited financial statements, and the new VFF executive committee will include at least one person from a listed company. If neither happens, Bau Duc's remark will remain an echo in a conference hall, and that photograph in Pleiku will still be the most beautiful thing Vietnamese football has ever said about money.