Academies Produce the Players, but the V.League Cannot Keep Them: The Value-Chain Problem of Vietnamese Football

ACADEMIES PRODUCE THE PLAYERS, BUT THE V.LEAGUE CANNOT KEEP THEM

1. The man in stand B

The man sitting beside me in stand B at Thien Truong Stadium was no ordinary supporter. He pointed down at the grass, where an eighteen-year-old had just taken the ball on his left foot, and said something I have carried for years: "That kid dribbles in two touches, but he'll be in Japan before you learn his name."

He was right. Two seasons later, the name appeared on the transfer page of a Japanese second-division club, then vanished from the V.League like a deleted status update. I never got to write about him. Nobody did.

That detail — a young player leaving before he is remembered — is not a personal story. It is a structure. And that structure is what Vietnamese football has operated for nearly two decades, since the day an academy in Pleiku signed with Arsenal and opened what the press called a "golden generation."

I write this from Marseille, where I live and work. That afternoon at Thien Truong was one of the few times I returned to Vietnam just to watch football, with no recorder, no assignment. And I realised something: the most writable moments in Vietnamese football are not in the goals, but where the ball does not roll. An empty stadium, a seat left untouched — the ball does not roll, yet time has scored on its own.

2. Context — twenty years of a belief

To understand why the V.League sits exactly here, we need the starting point. In 2026, the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Academy partnered with Arsenal and JMG Academy and opened in Pleiku. This was not a simple football project. It was a declaration: Vietnam could produce players, not import them.

Out of that furnace came names an entire generation of fans knows by heart: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Van Toan. Alongside them, the talent systems of Viettel, PVF and the traditional Song Lam Nghe An academy kept supplying more. In terms of output, this is a real achievement, not a slogan.

But output is not value. And that is where the story branches.

The 2026-2026 period is seen as the peak. Under coach Park Hang-seo, Vietnam won the 2026 AFF Cup, the U23 team reached the final of the 2026 AFC U23 Championship, and the senior team reached the quarter-finals of the 2026 Asian Cup. Those results created a very strong collective belief: Vietnamese football had "grown up."

The problem with collective belief is that it tends to feed itself. When one specific generation achieves high results, the public attributes the achievement to the whole system, while the system contributes only part of it. A beautiful memory hides a structural blind spot. And that blind spot sits exactly in the middle of the value chain: the midpoint, where the V.League should be the transit station turning young talent into durable assets.

3. The talent machine upstream

Let us split the Vietnamese value chain into three segments: upstream (academies), midstream (the V.League), downstream (exports, commerce, the national team). Seen this way, Vietnam's upstream performs well by regional standards.

Vietnamese academies do not mass-produce superstars, but they steadily produce players good enough to be professionals. That is the foundation of any sustainable league. A league cannot survive if only a few new names appear each season; it needs a continuous stream of dozens of players coming through.

The strength of the Vietnamese model is its systematic nature. The HAGL-Arsenal JMG academy, PVF, Viettel and Song Lam Nghe An operate by cohorts, by curriculum, over years. Players are trained in fundamentals, fitness and tactical discipline. Compared with many Southeast Asian nations, this is a real advantage.

But there is a paradox buried in the model: Vietnamese academies are designed to produce players for the national team, not players for the market. That is a big difference. An academy oriented to the national team measures success by how many players reach the national side. A market-oriented academy measures success by the transfer and commercial value its players create.

When the goal is the national team, a player leaving early or being sold cheaply is not treated as failure. When the goal is the market, it is a severe failure. Vietnamese football sits between these two goals, and has not decided firmly.

4. The knot at the midpoint

If upstream flows well, why does the stream jam in the middle? The answer lies in the economics of the V.League.

A graduate of an academy faces three choices: stay in the V.League, go abroad, or leave football. The first depends on whether the V.League pays enough and offers enough of a stage for the player to develop. And here is the structural weakness.

The V.League is modest in scale. Few teams, not many matches per season, and club revenue concentrated in a few narrow channels. Broadcast revenue is centrally managed, while commercial revenue depends on major sponsors. When revenue narrows, wage bills narrow with it, and clubs are forced to choose the cheapest route to immediate results.

The cheapest route, sadly, is often not a young local player. It is a low-cost foreign striker.

5. The economics of the foreign striker

A mid-table V.League club has two ways to score: patiently develop a local striker over three seasons, or sign a foreign striker in three weeks. Under results pressure from the board and the fans, most choose the second.

This creates a self-reinforcing spiral. When the striker slot is taken by a foreigner, local attackers get no chance. With no chance, they do not score. Without scoring, they are undervalued. Undervalued, the club has even more reason to buy foreign. The spiral closes.

The consequence is not only a shortage of local strikers for the national team. The deeper consequence is that the V.League turns itself into a transit league. Foreign players arrive, score for two seasons, then leave. Young local players sit on the bench, run out their contracts, then leave. In both directions, value drains out of the league.

I once tracked a foreign striker in the V.League who scored more than twenty goals in a season. The next season he moved to another regional league for a fee Vietnamese clubs could not match. At the same time, a local striker of the same age, trained for ten years in an academy, could not get fifteen starts in two seasons. He was not bad. He was simply in the wrong place, in a system that reserved no slot for him.

The worry is not that the V.League uses foreign players. The worry is that it uses them as a substitute for development, rather than as a catalyst that adds to it.

6. The transfer window and the noise

In the midst of a transfer window buzzing with millions, I remember only the diary where no ball rolled.

Every transfer window, the Vietnamese market floods with rumours. This player to that club, this striker sought, that young star watched by a foreign team. Most rumours have no verifiable source. Most are tools of agents, of clubs, or simply products of algorithms.

To read a transfer window correctly, you need a filter. That filter has three questions: who benefits from this news? Where does the money go? And how is the contract structured?

The third matters most and is asked least. A deal is not just a transfer fee. It is a structure: duration, release clause, signing-on fee, agent commission, and bonuses. When a V.League club announces a "blockbuster signing," the figure that deserves attention is often not the fee but the structure behind it.

In Vietnam, most clubs do not disclose contract structures. That is a transparency problem, and also a governance problem. Without public data, there is no efficient market. Without an efficient market, local players are mispriced — usually below their true value.

7. Governance — where the value chain locks

The midpoint does not jam only because of money. It jams because of governance structure.

Vietnamese football runs on a two-tier model: the Vietnam Football Federation governs overall, and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company runs the professional leagues. The model is not wrong in principle. It simply creates a friction point: commercial decision-making and sporting decision-making do not sit in the same hand.

When commerce and sport are separated, long-term decisions tend to be deferred. Academy development is long-term investment. Signing a foreigner is short-term cost. In a system squeezed by seasonal results, long-term investment always loses to short-term cost.

Alongside this is the Asian Football Confederation's club licensing standard. This is an important tool: it forces clubs to prove financial capacity, facilities and organisational structure. But a standard only has power when enforced strictly. If licensing becomes a formality, it does not produce structural change.

8. Exports — a door that opens then closes

The downstream of the value chain is export. This is where the story turns bitter.

Nguyen Cong Phuong wore the shirts of Mito HollyHock in Japan, Incheon United in Korea and Sint-Truiden in Belgium. Nguyen Quang Hai joined Pau FC in France in 2026. Doan Van Hau had the 2026-2026 season at Heerenveen in the Netherlands. Those moves are a real step forward for a football nation, and also a real test.

The test shows one thing: the gap between the V.League and the leagues of Europe, Japan and Korea is far larger than the gap suggested by national-team results. A player good in the V.League needs time to adapt to the intensity, the speed of decision-making and the competitive pressure abroad. That time is usually not granted.

When players come home, they bring experience. But they also bring an unanswered question: which system will keep them, and how?

9. A counter-intuitive angle — the success of a closed ecosystem

Here I want to go against the collective memory.

The popular story of Vietnamese football is a story of ascent: from a small football nation, Vietnam has reached the continental stage, beaten big opponents, produced a golden generation. That story is not false. But it hides a structural truth.

Vietnam's success over the past decade is the success of a closed ecosystem, optimised for the regional arena — not for open competition.

A closed ecosystem has its own features. It is stable, it produces consistent results within its scope, and it rewards those who follow the rules inside. But it does not produce players who can compete at the world's summit, because the world's summit demands open competition. A player raised in a stable but low-competition system will struggle to survive where every starting slot is a battle against people from everywhere.

This is why a national team can reach an Asian quarter-final while a player struggles to hold a place in a European second division. The two measure different abilities: collective ability in a familiar system, and individual ability in an unfamiliar environment.

I do not write this to deny the achievements. I write to say that achievement and structure are two different things. If we mistake achievement for structure, we will keep celebrating while the value chain keeps leaking.

10. Risk and transmission

Looking across the chain, risk sits at three points.

First, generational risk. Recent success is tied tightly to a specific group of players and a specific coaching cycle. As that group ages, the system must produce a new group of the same quality. If not, results will fall. This is single-point dependency risk.

Second, financial risk. Many V.League clubs live on sponsorship and the affection of their owners more than on self-generated revenue. When an owner withdraws or changes priorities, the club wobbles. A league where most clubs depend on one individual is not a sustainable league.

Third, transmission risk. Football does not stand alone. It transmits impact to the agent ecosystem, to commercial markets, to capital networks, and to the national-team ecosystem. When the midpoint leaks, the other segments absorb it. Young players see a precarious career path and choose another profession. Families stop treating football as an investment. The talent stream narrows from the source.

11. What I learned from a boy with no shoes

There is a memory I cannot remove from my head when I write about Vietnam.

Years ago, on a beach near the port of Marseille, I filmed a forty-seven-second clip of a thirteen-year-old boy. That boy had no shoes — but every touch was a page of his résumé. In twelve seconds, he dribbled past four players and scored with his left foot. The clip was shared thousands of times, and a professional academy called me to find the boy.

I tell that story not to talk about a child's luck. I tell it to point out one thing: talent exists everywhere. What decides a talent's fate is not talent. It is the system — a value chain that recognises, retains and elevates.

Vietnam has a system that recognises talent. The academies do that well. Vietnam does not yet have a system that retains and elevates talent at the midpoint. That is the whole story, wrapped in one sentence.

I thought I was writing about goals — it turned out what I was chasing were real people.

12. Not a summary, but a direction

If the midpoint is the knot, then any reform worth the name must start there.

The central question is not "how do we win more with the national team." The central question is "how do we make the V.League a destination, not a transit station." A league becomes a destination when players want to stay, when clubs have self-generated revenue, when contracts are transparent, and when local players are correctly priced.

That requires three shifts.

One is financial transparency. Disclosing contract structures, wage bills and revenue is not for curiosity. It is a condition for having a market. Without transparency, there is no pricing.

Two is a policy that creates slots for local players, but in a way that encourages development rather than formal protection. A slot for a young player only means something if it comes with expectation and responsibility, not as an administrative quota.

Three is turning exports into a cycle, not an endpoint. A player who leaves and returns, carrying knowledge, should become an asset of the league. That needs a mechanism to retain and reintegrate, rather than letting every return be a fading away.

At forty-four, I have come to understand: sport does not end at the whistle — it keeps rolling on in the human heart.

The man in stand B that day was right about the eighteen-year-old. But I want to believe he was right only because no one had yet made him wrong. A football nation is not measured by how many players it produces. It is measured by how many it keeps — and by whether, when they leave, they carry a piece of that place in their own résumé.

The boy in that stand is now somewhere far away. The remaining question is not where he went. The remaining question is: next time, who will keep him for longer than a season?