Bau Duc and the 'money-generating' problem: Vietnamese football ahead of the VFF Congress 2026-2030

Ahead of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) Congress for the 2026-2030 term, a statement by Bau Duc — Doan Nguyen Duc, HAGL Chairman and former VFF Vice Chairman for Finance — is being repeated like an unpaid debt: "Vietnamese football needs to know how to generate money." He added that VFF needs businessmen "who know how to create cash flow, know how to manage, and especially dare to spend money." What stands out lies elsewhere: not a single table, not a single line of data on league revenue or club wage bills, is attached. A statement about money, entirely without evidence about money. For someone whose trade is reading records, that gap is itself a data point.

Bau Duc is not an outsider. He once held the VFF Vice Chairmanship for Finance, and for more than twenty-five years he has remained one of the most influential voices in Vietnamese football. The HAGL Arsenal JMG Academy, founded in 2026, combines football with culture and foreign languages — a holistic development philosophy with a foreign partner, close to international academy best practice. Out of that pipeline came Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh and Hong Duy — names that became familiar faces of the national game and pillars of several national-team generations.

Yet Bau Duc himself admits he has "had to pay the price for investment decisions." That is the line I keep longest, because it exposes a structural reality: the patron model ties a club's fate to one individual's wallet. When that individual rises and falls, the club rises and falls with them. And Vietnamese football, in his own words, "cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons."

What is worth thinking about is this: a statement calling for money landed exactly at a moment of power, not a moment of expertise. The VFF Congress for the 2026-2030 term is a narrow window to reshape the leadership apparatus and the allocation of resources. A statement before a congress, even without a direct candidacy, is still a tool for steering delegate sentiment. Vietnamese football has just come through a positive cycle of results, from U23 titles up to the national team. That success generates political capital for reform — and Bau Duc is using it.

Cross-checking against the records I keep, I see a familiar pattern. In 2026, at the Bayern Munich academy, I declined to recommend promotion for Lukas Werner, a sixteen-year-old midfielder with a 78% pass-completion rate in the U17 Bundesliga but a top speed of only 28 km/h, below the team average. I held my ground, and Werner moved to the RB Leipzig academy. A year later, at the 2026 World Cup, I counted nineteen players under twenty starting in the knockout rounds and found that fourteen of them had once been rejected by German academies on physique grounds. I was wrong — not because the data was wrong, but because I read a single layer of sediment and mistook it for the whole. I wrote a forty-page internal memo bluntly admitting the limits of the traditional evaluation method.

Every layer of sediment tells a story; the question is whether we bother to dig. Vietnamese football currently has two parallel points of concentrated risk. Financial resources concentrate in a few patrons. Talent resources concentrate in a few academies. The two concentrations reinforce each other: the same small group supplies both the money and the players. Such a foundation can survive one good season, but not a decade of turbulence.

Look at the HAGL academy's graduating generation and this becomes clear. They stood at their career peak for roughly a decade, and most have now passed thirty. When a talent generation moves past its peak, the gap behind it appears immediately. If supply comes from only a few pipelines, regeneration depends on whether those pipelines keep producing. This is pipeline-concentration risk — and it is not HAGL's problem alone.

The goal Vietnamese football pursues — reaching a World Cup or continental level — demands a commercial base far deeper than the current one. Since the World Cup expanded to forty-eight teams, the door has widened for Southeast Asian football nations. But a wider door does not mean an easier passage. It requires a long-cycle investment in facilities, sports medicine and coach education — things that cannot be bought with a short-term sponsorship deal. This is the mismatch between ambition and resources, and it cannot be solved by a slogan about money.

The "socialization" proposal Bau Duc raises — mobilizing social and corporate resources — is in essence a governance reform dressed as finance. He calls it money, but the mechanism he describes is an import of a management model: businessmen with "management methods and investment thinking." This is a sound argument, but it is also an argument anyone who has lived in a market-run football economy finds easy to make — and easy to forget that the rules of the game differ from place to place.

There is a detail here I consider important but easily overlooked. VFF, in Bau Duc's own phrasing, is a "social-professional organization." That legal label is not a formality: it limits how far a purely corporate governance model can be applied without structural and statutory reform. Calling businessmen onto the board is one thing; changing the legal framework so they can operate on cash-flow logic is another, far harder matter.

Beyond that, Bau Duc also stresses placing Vietnamese people in positions within FIFA, AFC and AFF. This is a legitimate governance lever, because seats on international committees often come with influence over scheduling, qualification-slot allocation and development funding. But it can also be read as the personal ambition of a well-connected figure rather than a purely institutional interest. A club patron proposing a financial model for the federation always carries the risk of being seen as a conflict of interest.

I used to ask myself why I missed Werner. The answer lies in the fact that I let a single metric play the role of judge. A conservative decision can bury talent, but it keeps the foundation from collapsing. Vietnamese football's problem is not a lack of money — it is a lack of a system thick enough that money does not depend on the goodwill of a few.

Here, my experience of living in Germany easily deceives me. I once tended to treat the Bundesliga standard as a universal yardstick, and I have to remind myself that each football nation is a geological layer with its own laws. Vietnamese football does not need to copy the German model; it needs to understand its own sediment. There are football nations with modest budgets that still overperform through talent density and coaching quality. Money is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

During the pandemic period, I sat and recounted forty-seven fragments in my personal database — forty-seven players I had once undervalued. After the storm, I counted 47 fragments again. They pieced together into a picture no one wanted to see. That lesson means I never read a football nation through a single index again. The same applies to Vietnamese football: it cannot be read through one revenue figure, nor through one trophy.

Old records never die; they merely wait for someone patient enough to read them again. The 2026-2030 Congress is a chance for Vietnamese football to shift from a patron model to a system model. But that chance only has value if it comes with transparency: published league revenue, wage bills, investment cash flows. Without data, no one — not even the most well-intentioned — knows how large the real gap is. I do not trust my eyes; I trust what the records leave behind. And the records of Vietnamese football are still waiting for a serious excavation.