VFF 10th-Term Congress: The Nomination Envelope and Vietnam's Unspoken World Cup Dream

On October 19, 2026, at the Vietnam Football Federation headquarters on Le Quang Dao Street in Hanoi, an envelope lay still on a table. Inside was the nomination list for the 10th-term Executive Committee — the names that will shape Vietnamese football's fate over the next four years. No cameras, no press lenses. Only one deadline: nomination documents had to reach the federation office before that date.

I stood for a long time outside the gate. Not to wait for anyone to emerge, but to listen to motorbikes passing along the empty road. The country's largest sports organization was about to change its leadership, yet the silence was striking. No flags, no banners, no cheering. Just an envelope.

People call me a writer on the grass verge. I only know how to record the breath of the ball before it rolls. This time that breath wasn't on the pitch, but in a closed meeting room — where ballots will decide whether V.League keeps climbing, or sinks back into the swamp it once was trapped in.

The VFF 10th-term Congress is expected to take place in December 2026 or early January 2026. This is not a routine meeting. It is a fork in the road. And the remarkable thing is that even before the election result is settled, the biggest question has already surfaced: does Vietnamese football need a rich man, or a professional apparatus?

I am not Vietnamese. I was born in China, work as a documentary screenwriter in Lyon, and follow Southeast Asian football as someone standing on the edge. The windowless Moscow room never showed me daylight, but every night I saw the World Cup shining through the slit of my pen. Precisely because I stand outside, I notice something insiders often overlook: in Vietnam, people talk about money, about patrons, about big names. Very few talk about structure. And structure is what determines whether a football nation reaches the World Cup.

Before diving into the personnel story, look at the numbers already on the table. The 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the USA, Canada, and Mexico, will be the first expanded to 48 teams. Asian slots rise from 4.5 to 8.5. This is a pivotal change for a football nation like Vietnam — the door has never been wider. But a wide door doesn't mean you can walk through it, if inside the house no one has bothered to lay the foundation.

Over the past four years, Vietnamese football has lived through a period observers call professionalization under the 9th term, with Tran Quoc Tuan in a leadership role. The women's team reached the 2026 World Cup for the first time. Futsal reached the World Cup for the first time. U17 reached the World Cup finals for the first time. U22 won SEA Games gold. And two Southeast Asian titles at senior national team level. That is the thickest collection of achievements Vietnamese football has ever assembled in a single cycle.

But before that, the 8th term — a period described as the era of businessmen, of patrons — left a different memory. AFF Cup 2026 failure. SEA Games 2026 early exit. Negative incidents exposed inside V.League. A coach resigning mid-SEA Games. The media of that time used one word to describe it all: rock bottom.

Place the two periods side by side, and the reader easily arrives at a tidy conclusion: businessmen lead to rock bottom, professionals lead to the summit. But if I told you that story that way, I would be deceiving you. Football does not operate by such simple addition and subtraction.

Slow down a beat. When bau Thuy withdrew from football, the story was retold as a warning. A businessman who once protested right outside VFF headquarters, then turned his back, then vanished. That image is used to prove that an unfair playing field drives investors away. True. But it also proves the opposite: without a state management mechanism strong enough to keep things fair, no matter how much money flows in, it will only flow in one direction and then run dry.

This is the point I want to dig into. In the closing stretch of the 10th-term personnel debate, an important argument was raised: VFF is a socio-professional organization, so the role of state management cannot be absent. This sounds like a procedural line. But it is actually the nucleus of the entire issue. The state should not directly run football — but the state must be the guarantor of the rules. For the line between a businessman spending money to buy a club and a businessman spending money to buy an official is very thin. And it was precisely that thin line that created the 8th term.

What most commentary on the VFF congress overlooks is this: the problem is not whether the leader is a businessman or a professional, but whether the system has a mechanism allowing both types to coexist without destroying each other.

I spent many evenings in Lyon, sitting in a cafe near Groupama stadium, rereading the history of football nations that moved from chaos to stability. South Korea had a professionalized federation from the 1990s, but still needed large conglomerates like Hyundai to build the foundation. Japan built the J.League on a corporate model tied to local communities. No one chose one of the two poles. They chose both, then designed rules so the two poles could rub against each other without annihilating each other.

That is why I find the story of bau Duc nominating a businessman to VFF worthy of serious analysis, not just a headline grab. What is surprising is not the content of the nomination — but that a man long silent suddenly spoke up right at the finishing stretch. In sport, the timing of speaking often matters more than the content. A voice raised during the personnel transfer window, before the October 19 deadline, carries a different weight than a voice raised the following March.

But I want to be honest about one thing: I do not have the name of the nominated businessman, nor the specific position. And I do not build this article on a detail I cannot verify. I build it on what I can see: a governance event, which should be dry, is being elevated into a story about the survival of an entire football nation.

Look at V.League. The quality of the league is visible, measurable. Stadium attendance, television rights value, the number of young players promoted to first teams each season — these are indicators that do not lie. A professional federation creates an environment where those indicators rise. A federation dominated by personal relationships creates an environment where they fall, no matter how much money pours in. Money cannot buy sustainability. Only institutions can.

That is why I am not surprised when commentators stress that the 9th term's success is fragile. Achievements can come from a talented generation of players — like the squad that took the women's team to the 2026 World Cup, like the generation of Quang Hai, Hung Dung, Tien Linh who made those Southeast Asian nights. But a generation of players lasts only a decade. An institution lasts forever. If the 10th term returns to the old model, the 9th term's achievements will become only a beautiful memory, not a foundation.

Here I must say something few want to hear. For many years, the way Vietnamese football is told in the media always revolves around big individuals. This patron, that patron. This man, that man. That creates a habit of thinking: every problem can be solved by changing the person. But modern football does not work that way. A football nation that wants to go far must build three things no individual can replace: a youth development system, a professional competition system, and a transparent governance system. Those three things belong to no one. They belong to everyone.

There is a moment I will never forget. In 2026, in Sochi, after the Croatia-Nga quarter-final, I skipped the official press conference and followed Luka Modric into the tunnel. He stood crying alone, though his team had won. I understood that football's greatest moments are not in the scoreline. They are in what happens before and after the number. And the VFF 10th-term congress story is the same. The vote percentage will be announced. But what truly matters is what happens before the ballot — the closed meetings, the nominations, the compromises — and what happens after it, when a football nation must live with its choice for the next four years.

A single touch is an unfinished poem. The ball rolls away, but the writer stays. For Vietnamese football, the leaders will roll away after four years. Those who stay are the fans, the young players, the children practicing shots on village pitches, believing that one day they will play in a World Cup.

So I want to reframe the question. Instead of asking whom the 10th-term congress will elect, ask: what mechanism will the 10th-term congress leave behind? If the answer is a mechanism that lets businessmen participate but not dominate, lets professionals govern but not isolate, lets the state supervise but not intervene, then Vietnam has already won — regardless of who sits in the chairman's chair. If the answer is a return to the model of one man deciding everything, then no matter how capable that man is, Vietnamese football will again have to wait for another crisis to relearn an old lesson.

I learned to listen to the pitch with my heart, because reason had spoken too many dull words. But this time, I am forced to let reason speak. Because the World Cup dream is not decided on the pitch. It is decided in a meeting room, by ballots, on a day in December 2026 or January 2026. And if you ask me what I believe, I believe Vietnamese football stands before its greatest opportunity in decades. But opportunity belongs only to those who prepare for it with structure, not with hope.

The cheers echo in my head. The stadium is empty, but memory has never been without people. And in that memory, I want to see an envelope no longer lying still on a table — but opened, read aloud, and turned into a future that an entire generation of Vietnamese players deserves.