Two Committees for One Deal: What the V.League Transfer Market Still Lacks

In late 2026, the Mexico City government announced a programme called Mercados que Florecen. It committed 234 million pesos, roughly 12 to 14 million US dollars, to renovating 189 public markets during 2026. The most striking detail was not the figure. It was how they split authority. Each market has two committees elected by the traders themselves. One committee decides where the money goes. A second committee sits and monitors that very money, both the spending and the construction progress.

Reading the analysis of this programme, my mind went straight to the Vietnamese football transfer market. It is also about spending money to buy. It is also about upgrading assets. It is also about investments announced loudly before a season. But in the V.League, almost no club has a second committee.

Over fourteen years of following the transfer market, I have learned something fairly brutal. Most failed deals do not fail because the player is bad. They fail because he is placed into a system that was never built for him. A midfielder who is good at dribbling in tight spaces is bought to play long balls. A centre-back who is good in the air is brought into a back line that pushes high. The name is expensive, but the tactical fit is something nobody measures.

In football, we are used to judging a deal by two things: the name and the number. A signing is considered a success if the player has a good résumé, or if the fee is large enough to please a sponsor. Very few people ask the reverse question: what problem did that money actually fix?

The structure of the V.League transfer market is layered. At the top sit a few clubs with large budgets, where a president or a technical director holds near-absolute decision-making power. In the middle is a dense layer of agents, often the only channel linking club to player. Below that are hundreds of players, from young domestic talents to ageing foreign imports, competing for a place on the registration list.

The budget of a leading V.League club rarely exceeds a few tens of billions of dong a season, and most of it goes to the wage bill rather than transfer fees. That means every signing is a serious resource-allocation decision. You do not have much money to be wrong with. Yet you are being wrong in the dark.

The programme in Mexico City chose a principle I wish V.League clubs would adopt. They prioritised risk first: electricity, gas, water, drainage, structure. Money went to the places that could cause harm, not to the places that photograph well. In football, risk has a different name. It is a midfield left open. It is a back line short of pace. It is an attack dependent on a striker who is already thirty-three.

The critical point both sides overlook is the gap between inputs and outputs. The public-market programme announced committed money and named markets; it did not announce how many works were finished or how many risks were retired. Football is the same. Clubs announce new signings, not systems that were fixed. We count money spent, not problems solved.

One word in the market programme statement made me pause: intervened. That word spans everything from a full structural overhaul to a minor repair. It carries the entire weight of the claim that eighty per cent of markets have been intervened. Football has an equivalent: reinforced, added cover, has a plan. A player who sits on the bench for eighty per cent of matches still counts as added cover. A one-season loan still counts as having a plan. The wording is broad, but the expectation is narrow.

Do a simple calculation clubs rarely make public. If a team has a net transfer budget of roughly twenty billion dong a season and signs five players, each costs four billion on average. But if half the money goes to one star, the other four share ten billion. Four signings for ten billion, while the squad has seven problem positions. The arithmetic does not match the need. The public-market programme faces exactly the same problem. Two hundred and thirty-four million pesos divided across one hundred and eighty-nine markets is about one point two four million pesos per market. Enough to fix one thing, not everything. And the nine largest markets, where needs far exceed the standard, were left open with no dedicated funding line.

In football, those nine large markets are the positions a team needs most but tends to defer longest. They might be a top-class goalkeeper, a commanding centre-back, or a holding midfielder who can read a game. These roles are not glamorous, they do not sell shirts, and they rarely appear in loud transfer headlines. They get pushed to the next window, then the one after, until the problem becomes too large to ignore.

This is the most dangerous part of both stories. In the market programme, the very people who benefit are the ones who decide, manage and monitor the money. No firewall is described between the recipient, the administrator and the auditor. In football, the structure is even looser. An agent can recommend a player to a club, negotiate with that same player, and serve as the club's trusted adviser on who to buy. One person, three roles. Those three roles are not separated, and almost nobody checks.

When the seller, the adviser and the verifier are the same person, the club becomes the only party in the room without a seat. It has no second committee. It has only trust, and trust does not appear on a balance sheet.

The second committee in the market programme does something very simple. It separates decision from verification. One group says fix this first. Another group asks whether it was fixed, whether it was on budget, whether it was on time. Applied to football, that model would look like this. A transfer committee of coach, technical director and data department decides who to buy. A second, independent group, not involved in the decision, reviews after six and twelve months whether that signing created value. The second group has no buying power. It only has the power to tell the truth.

It sounds simple, but it reverses football's habit. Today, the buyer and the assessor are often the same person. The technical director buys a player, then assesses the player he bought. The coach demands a name, then defends that name when challenged. Nobody has an incentive to say a deal failed, because saying so means denying themselves.

Risk-first prioritisation is the least glamorous choice and the most valuable one. Fixing a market's electrical system produces no beautiful photograph. Buying a good centre-back to plug a defensive hole produces no viral video. Both are correct investments, but they are usually deferred because the political and media rewards lie in flashier things. A headline signing sells shirts, attracts sponsors, draws coverage. A quiet centre-back who prevents three goals a season sells nothing to anyone. But the team still needs him.

There is another gap both public markets and football are carrying. The market programme is designed for a single fiscal year. Two hundred and thirty-four million pesos for 2026, with no multi-year budget framework and no maintenance schedule. That means today's renovations will decay, and everything returns to the starting point, or worse. Football operates identically. A club buys a good player, uses him for a season, then lets him leave on a free, only to go looking for a similar one next season. Invest once without maintaining, and the investment dissolves itself.

What neither the market programme nor the transfer market has is a measure of value for money. Public markets publish no cost per square metre, no cost per beneficiary. Football publishes no cost per point, per goal, per save. Without a measure, there is no way to judge independently whether an investment is good or bad. You are left with feeling. And feeling is the thing most easily steered by agents and the media.

Based on my experience watching matches in the V.League and regional competitions, I see a repeating pattern. A team has an open midfield all first half of the season. They buy a striker. The midfield is still open. They blame the coach. The coach is replaced. The midfield is still open. Next season they buy another striker. The problem was never the people. The problem is a process that never asks what we lack, only who we can buy.

The mistake of misreading names in 2026 taught me one thing: look at the contract, not at the mouth. When I was a young contributor, I judged a player by his name and by what people said about him. I was wrong. A name does not tell you where a player plays, what role he fills, or whether he fits the system. Contract, clauses, position, minutes — those are the things that tell the truth. And in modern football, the most truthful thing is the least published.

Tactical fit is not on paper; it is in how a player runs. A player can have a perfect résumé, but if he is not used to high pressing, not used to running into the spaces the system demands, he will look lost. Conversely, a modest player with an unimpressive résumé can become the perfect piece because he does exactly what the system needs. The problem is that both cases need time and data to recognise. Neither can be judged by a name alone. Nguyen Quang Hai's move to Pau FC in 2026 is one example. He is a good player, but Pau played a different kind of football from what he knew in the V.League. The question was not whether he was good. The question was whether he fitted the system.

I do not count how many times a player juggles the ball; I count how many times a player is strangled by the system. A beautiful highlight reel can fool the naked eye. It shows you a player dribbling past three men in a weak league, but it does not show you whether he can handle the pressure of a derby. It does not show you how he reacts when tightly marked, when his team is behind, when the coach asks him to play a role other than his natural one. Those things are not in the highlights. They are in tracking data, and in watching a player over weeks, not minutes.

An expensive name looks good only on a shirt, not on a wage bill. A record signing can sell tickets and please fans for a few weeks. But if that player takes up a large share of the wage bill without matching output, his true price is not the transfer fee; it is the other positions the club could not recruit because the money was gone. This is the opportunity cost almost nobody calculates. Football remembers the item it bought, rarely the item it could not buy because of it.

What I believe only begins when money changes hands. Every promise, every claim, every grand unveiling is just a prelude. The real value of a deal shows only when the player steps onto the pitch, when he has to run inside the system, when he has to prove himself in real matches. Before that moment, everything is expectation, and expectation cannot be audited.

In 2026, I spent all my savings to fly to Moscow for a World Cup, without an official press visa. In a bar near the stadium, I met a bartender named Dmitri, who insisted he had an inside source saying a big star would leave his club right after the tournament. I did not fully believe him, but I used him as a reference channel, cross-checking with three other journalists in the mixed zone. In the end, the rumour was wrong. But the way I cross-checked taught me a lesson bigger than the rumour: on the ground, one source is worth less than three cross-checked sources. The Russian bartender was not an expert, but he knew who was drinking. And in transfers, the bartender, the driver, the hotel receptionist are often the first to know who is negotiating with whom, simply because they are present where reporters are not.

In 2026, when football stopped because of the pandemic, I nearly lost my job. With no matches to watch, I dived into contract data for fifty players linked with transfers over the previous five years, cross-referencing minutes played and positions. In an empty-stadium summer, I invented an index to hear football in my head. From that I learned something: you can analyse the transfer market without a single match, using only data. And the data showed a painful pattern. Many failed deals failed not because the player was poor, but because he was sold into a system that did not suit him.

In Mexico City, the programme is not entirely new. It copies a model already applied to public schools earlier. That sounds safe, because the procedure has been tested. But markets and schools differ fundamentally: a market is a place of business, where traders live on daily margins. A repair that disrupts trading is not merely an inconvenience. It is lost income. Football also has a habit of copying models without accounting for context. A club looks at how a big European side runs its scouting department and imitates it. But it copies the visible part, not the hidden one: the data team, the scouting network, the financial capacity to nurture a player for two years before he proves his value. Copying the form without the foundation only produces a cheap version of an already expensive system.

The strength of the market model is participation. Its weakness is also participation, if participating merely reproduces the existing power structure. Those who stand for committee elections are often those who have long held a voice in the market. In football, a transfer committee of coach, technical director and board representative can likewise become a place that merely legitimises the decision of the most powerful person. Electing a committee does not automatically create independence. It only creates the appearance of independence.

Timing says a lot too. The market programme was announced before any construction began. Everything reported is a plan, not a result. Football also lives on this kind of announcement. When a club unveils plans for a stadium, youth development, a title target, those are announcements of intent, not achievements. Fans struggle to tell the two apart, which is why announcements of intent carry such power.

The nine large markets are the programme's fiscal fault line. Their needs far exceed the standard, yet no funding line, no tender route and no timeline were published. This is where collapse is most likely. Football has its nine markets too. They are the positions a club knows need a large investment but keeps deferring, because the money has been spent on things that sell more easily. In the end, when the problem can no longer be postponed, the price is many times higher than solving it from the start.

The counterintuitive angle is this. When a signing fails, the default reaction is to blame the player or the coach. Fans demand a sale. The board demands a change. But look closely and most failures are not the fault of one individual. They are the fault of a system in which nobody is responsible for checking the outcome. In the public-market programme, the glamorous part of the claim is the one hundred and eighty-nine markets and the two hundred and thirty-four million pesos. The real risk lies in nine large markets with no budget. In football, the glamour is the new signing's name. The real risk lies in the position nobody bought.

There is one more counterintuitive point I want to make clear. A model that lets beneficiaries decide sounds very democratic, but it also shifts risk downward. If traders get the priority order wrong, the responsibility is theirs. If a club lets agents and public opinion drive recruitment, then when it fails, the ones who take the hit are the player and the coach, not the process. Democratic buying in football does not create accountability. It only blurs it. And blurred accountability cannot be fixed, because nobody knows what to fix.

Another common belief holds that more money solves everything. The public-market programme shows the opposite. Two hundred and thirty-four million pesos is real money, but it is only about two point three per cent of the market system's annual economic value. It is a maintenance budget, not a full recapitalisation. Football is the same. Pouring more money into a broken process only makes that broken process more expensive. Money cannot fix a transfer committee with no audit committee. Money only makes mistakes costlier.

If football wants to learn from the public-market programme, the first step is not to buy more players but to redefine success. A successful deal is not one that makes noise. It is one that solves a problem identified in advance. To do that, a club must have the courage to say before the season what it lacks, rather than after the season who it bought. This is something almost no club will do, because stating it in advance puts yourself in a position to be checked.

I do not believe football needs another set of metrics to look modern. It needs something much simpler: an independent verification mechanism for every major investment. One person, one group, one process, not involved in the buying decision, but responsible for answering after six months: what value did this money create. Until someone asks that question, every record signing is just a promise that has never been audited.

If I had one wish for the next transfer window, it would not be a record signing. It would be a club brave enough to publish, after each window, three numbers. How much it spent. What problem it set out to fix. And six months later, whether that problem still exists. It sounds simple, yet almost nobody in the V.League does it. Football always teaches that money cannot buy goals. It teaches one more thing: money cannot buy a decent process either. A process must be built, and it must have a second committee. That committee does not need the right to buy anyone. It only needs the right to ask, six months later, what that money actually fixed.