Nguyen Duc Thuy's 600–1,000 Billion VND Program: A Quarter to Half of the Budget Spent Before a Ball Is Kicked

In the campaign document circulated ahead of the Vietnamese Football Federation congress for the 2026–2030 term, one line made me stop longer than the headline 1,000 billion VND target: the pledge to pay 3 billion VND per season to each V.League club, 2 billion VND to each First Division club, and 2 billion VND to each women's club. Presidential candidate Nguyen Duc Thuy has set a goal of raising 600 to 1,000 billion VND per year from 2027, moving all operations onto a socialised funding model, returning roughly 80 billion VND per year of state budget, and raising VFF staff salaries by a factor of two to three.

Why did it take me three weeks, rather than three minutes, to read a campaign programme? Because in football every fundraising figure must answer one question: where does the money go once it arrives. A programme can print 600 billion, 1,000 billion, even 2,000 billion, without proving a source. Expenditure, by contrast, is always concrete, always has a recipient, always has a due date. I started from the spending side, because it is the only part of this document that can be counted arithmetically.

Spending is settled, income is blank

The programme's spending commitments, converted at a reference rate of 25,500 VND/USD, stack up as follows. A 16-team V.League, or 18-team, multiplied by 3 billion VND, gives 48 to 54 billion VND per season. An 18 to 20-team First Division at 2 billion VND gives 36 to 40 billion VND. Women's football, 7 to 8 clubs at 2 billion VND, gives 14 to 16 billion VND — the number of women's clubs needs verification against VFF documents. Local federations: 20 qualifying units out of 63, at 2 to 3 billion VND each, gives 40 to 60 billion VND. A two to threefold VFF staff salary increase, estimated at 15 to 50 billion VND. Futsal, beach football and school football, roughly 10 to 30 billion VND, described in a single word: appropriate.

Added together, pre-committed spending lands between 165 and 250 billion VND per year. Add the 80 billion VND of state budget that must be self-replaced after being surrendered, and total obligations before a ball is kicked reach 245 to 330 billion VND. Against the 600 billion VND target, that is 41 to 55 percent. Against the 1,000 billion VND target, it is 25 to 33 percent.

Core insight: a quarter to a half of the headline fundraising target is consumed before a single dong reaches training pitches, sports medicine, youth academies or international tournament hosting. This is the point any serious financial plan must state, and this programme does not state it.

The income side is far blurrier. The programme names five revenue lines: sponsorship, broadcast rights, ticketing and services, digital content, and other football services. There is no current revenue, no contracted revenue, no pipeline, no year-by-year schedule. A plan described as being concretised through financial plans declines to disclose its starting point. Data is never missing in football. What is missing is the habit of asking: where did this data come from?

The gap between 600 and 1,000 billion VND is 67 percent. For a programme that needs to be concretised through financial plans, that spread is unusually wide. It suggests a headline number negotiated for memorability in a congress season, rather than a bottom-up sum.

Of the five revenue lines, digital content and football services are the weakest legs. In Vietnam these categories are constrained by broadcast rights fragmented between the VFF for the national team and the VPF for the V.League, plus piracy and a strong free-to-air culture. The programme names both lines without attaching any mechanism: no operating unit, no timeline, no partner. A revenue line without a mechanism is a revenue line that does not yet exist.

Four conglomerates and one concentration risk

The programme names four sponsorship groups: Vingroup linked to Mr Vuong, the SHB group linked to Mr Hien, the HAGL – THACO group linked to Mr Duc, and ThaiGroup. Four counterparties. Against a target of 600 to 1,000 billion VND per year, or 23.5 to 39.2 million USD at the reference rate, four counterparties is a high concentration.

Large Vietnamese corporates habitually sponsor on a project-branded, visible basis: stadium naming, national-team kit, tournament title. They rarely hand untied cash to a federation. The consequence is that realised revenue may skew toward restricted funds — money usable only for the project written into the contract, unusable for the club subsidy programme. A programme built on an assumption of free cash, in a market that only supplies labelled money, has a hole in its very first line.

Naming four sponsorship groups creates a second consequence: it invites scrutiny of conflicts of interest. When a presidential candidate ties a fundraising target to specific names in the business community, every subsequent sponsorship contract faces questions about attached conditions. The audit and member-organisation supervision mechanism, if it works properly, is where those questions get answered.

On the other side, the programme has one genuinely strong institutional element: a commitment to audit by one of the Big Four accounting firms, plus supervision by member organisations. Most Southeast Asian federations publish far less. If executed properly, this is the most valuable component in the entire document.

The 80 billion VND line: a one-way commitment

The second notable line, after the subsidy schedule, is the 80 billion VND of state budget. The programme voluntarily returns it, so that the money can shift to high-performance sports chasing Olympic and ASIAD medals.

In budget mechanics, this is a ratchet. Once the flow has been reallocated to other sports, reclaiming it after a revenue shortfall becomes politically close to impossible. The programme converts a soft dependency into a hard commitment. The commercial value of Vietnamese football depends directly on national-team results — Asian Cup, World Cup qualifying, ASEAN Championship. Removing the counter-cyclical buffer precisely when cyclical risk is highest is a pro-cyclical design: a single failed qualifying campaign can push sponsorship renewals back a full cycle.

Lesson of 2026: never explain a law without the document in front of you. Here the document exists, but it is missing the most important part — a reinstatement clause if revenue underperforms.

League expansion: right diagnosis, uncertain prescription

The programme proposes expanding the V.League from 14 to 16–18 teams and the First Division to 18–20 teams. The diagnosis behind it is accurate: Vietnamese players train for years and then lack competitive minutes at the moment of maturation. That is a real problem, and I have seen it from the stands.

Based on my experience watching V.League matches, the pattern repeats almost on schedule: a 20-year-old enters at minute 85 with his side already two goals up, or sits the full 90 on the bench while a 29-year-old foreign player starts 14 matches in a row. Young players' cumulative minutes are not short because the league has too few teams. They are short because no mechanism obliges anyone to hand them minutes.

Expanding from 14 to 16 teams pushes the round count from 26 to 30. Eighteen teams means 34 rounds. Layered on FIFA windows, the ASEAN Championship, the SEA Games and AFC competition matchdays, congestion rises materially. Without expanding squad depth in parallel, the result is overload, and under overload every club rotates through foreign players and veterans — exactly the group the programme says it wants to limit.

On scale, a 14-team V.League sits at the low end regionally: Thai League 1 has 16 teams, Indonesia's Liga 1 has 18, while K League 1 has only 12 and J1 League has 20. Expansion is not an exotic idea; it is the standard Southeast Asian move.

The decisive point lies elsewhere. The programme clearly acknowledges the trade-off between high-quality foreign players raising league attractiveness and foreign players blocking domestic pathways, but offers no quota, no age-based rule, no transition schedule. This is the single most consequential technical decision in the whole programme, and it is left blank.

Furthermore, the sequencing is inverted. Team expansion is placed ahead of every filter on club licensing, stadiums, academies and financial sustainability. Going from 14 to 16–18 teams requires two to four additional clubs meeting AFC-linked criteria. That is a supply constraint, not a demand decision. The document itself notes that adjusting team numbers needs evaluation and remains at the research, not decided, stage. A campaign commitment written in the conditional mood is the kind most likely to slip once in office.

The counter-intuitive angle

The most easily overlooked element in this programme is the real function of the club subsidy. Three billion VND per season for a V.League club is roughly 118,000 USD. Against club budgets commonly cited in the 40 to 200 billion VND range — figures to be verified — that is 3 to 7 percent, approximately one month of a wage bill. It is not enough to change how a club operates.

So what is it for? It creates recognition, creates a bloc, and creates dependency. In the First Division, where the target is 18 to 20 teams, 2 billion VND per season is a very concrete electoral offer: a bigger league plus subsidy money. Local federations, 20 slots out of 63, follow the same logic — they are a large and disciplined voting bloc at the VFF congress. This is where political motive and financial motive separate most clearly.

Another counter-intuitive point: expansion may dilute top-end quality — precisely the part that determines Vietnam's club coefficient on the AFC rankings and its AFC Champions League Two slot allocation. The programme does not mention this cost. And there is a further possibility: expansion may be substituting for a politically harder but cheaper and better-targeted reform — a formal reserve or U21 league, or a controlled loan-and-minutes system. That reform delivers no recognition to distribute.

There is also a divergence between promise and measurability. Of roughly 35 information points in the programme, about 10 are financial targets, and none supplies a current-state baseline for comparison. A programme without a starting line cannot be judged as delivered or undelivered; it can only be judged as announced or not announced.

Finally, the lesson I carry from 2026. Before 2026, I trusted memory. After 2026, I trust three checks. A campaign programme is the document most easily blurred by memory: people remember the 1,000 billion figure, few remember that not a single current revenue line was published for comparison.

What to watch

The next three months will answer most of the story, and there is no need to wait until 2027. First, whether the VFF publishes current revenue, contracted revenue and pipeline — if it does, the programme can be assessed in numbers; if not, it remains a statement. Second, whether a foreign-player quota or youth-player slot mechanism appears, because that is the only variable determining whether expansion produces quality minutes or simply more bench seats. Third, how the 80 billion VND of state budget is handled — whether a reinstatement clause exists.

The quietest transfer usually shouts loudest in the release clause. Here, Vietnamese football's release clause sits in the 80 billion VND budget line and in the foreign-player quota gap. Both are silent, and precisely because they are silent they matter more than the 1,000 billion figure everyone repeats.