9,582 Pesos to Keep a Young Person: Is Vietnamese Football Losing the Race for Its 18-Year-Olds?

I was sitting in Osaka, opening a bulletin about Mexico's labor policy, when I came across a number that made me set my coffee down. The Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro program pays a young person aged 18 to 29 a support stipend of 9,582 pesos per month, roughly 550 US dollars, plus health insurance through IMSS. No university degree required. No experience required. You only need to register before September 30 to enter the new cycle that begins on October 1.

A country paying money for a young person to be allowed to learn a trade.

I finished reading and immediately thought of an 18-year-old at a Vietnamese football academy. He also wakes at five in the morning, also trains six days a week, also lives far from home, also bets his entire youth on one profession. He differs in one thing: if he never signs a professional contract, he walks out with empty hands and a half-finished high-school diploma.

That is the issue I want to discuss today. Not a match. Rather, the price our football is forcing its youth to pay.

Context: when transfer noise drowns out the footsteps of children

We are in the middle of the transfer window. Every day, dozens of headlines explode: this club is asking, that club is refusing, this agent posts a photo at the airport, that owner hints at a blockbuster. I have followed transfer windows in Southeast Asia for over a decade, and every season, what I see is not the deals — it is a frightening silence behind them.

The silence of the academies.

While the whole football world argues over which foreign striker to buy, at the lower level, thousands of 15, 16, 17-year-old players still live on stipends that many of them must call "food money," not yet daring to call it "income." I don't need anyone to hand me a confidential payroll to understand this. I only need to look at the faces of the parents sitting outside the training ground, holding their phones to film their children, then quietly asking each other after the session: "Will he really make it?"

That question is the real question of Vietnamese football. Not which team wins the title.

And in Mexico, a country with nothing especially remarkable about its youth football compared to ours, they answer that question with money. With a specific number. With a policy that has a registration deadline, a cycle, health insurance. With an administrative apparatus serious enough that young people believe that if they spend a year learning a trade, they will not starve.

We answer with faith. And faith, at 18, does not pay the rent.

Analysis: three balance sheets no one wants to look at

I declared war on defensive football back in 2026, and to this day no one has been brave enough to accept the challenge. But today I want to open another front: the war at the development level, where every club wants to win but no one wants to pay the bill.

Look at three balance sheets.

The first is the balance sheet of the 18-year-old. He gives up seven years of training to have a chance at his first professional contract. Counted by the hour, the money he receives over those seven years — including food, lodging, and equipment — may not even equal what a factory worker earns over the same period. And if he tears a knee ligament at 19, he loses both: his career and seven years of schooling.

The second is the family's balance sheet. In Vietnam, sending a child into an academy at 12 is a financial decision, not merely an emotional one. Parents must pay for food, lodging, travel, supplementary schooling, while the child generates no income. In an economy where an average provincial family earns a few million dong a month, that is a gamble. And every gamble has a losing side.

The third is the club's balance sheet. This is where I want to pause longer, because this is where blame is usually misplaced. In the V.League, many clubs live on state budgets or corporate sponsorship, and within those two sources, youth development funding is always the easiest line to cut. A club chairman can spend a large sum on a 30-year-old South American import, then claim there is no money to raise the stipends of ten U19 players.

I have said it and I say it again: the transfer market is the saddest drama on the sporting stage, where owners trade money for cowardice. And that cowardice, in this case, has a specific name: no one wants to take responsibility for an investment whose results only appear seven years later.

In Mexico, the Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro program solves that problem with a different mechanism. The state shoulders the support payment for young people during their training period, while companies only need to take them in for training. Risk is shared. Burden is spread. And young people have a stable sum so they don't have to drop out over food and rent.

Football cannot copy that model exactly. But football can learn to share risk. We are doing the opposite: piling all the risk onto a 17-year-old boy and a provincial family, then calling it a "dream."

Look again at the third balance sheet. In this transfer window, every blockbuster foreign signing in the V.League costs a sum that, if distributed evenly, could raise the stipends of an entire U19 cohort for two years. I am not saying foreign players are wrong. I am saying the order of priorities has been reversed, and no one is accountable for that reversal.

There is one small detail in the Mexico bulletin that I consider more important than the 9,582 figure itself. It is the eligibility condition: ages 18 to 29. Meaning the program does not target teenagers, does not target children. It targets precisely the age at which a young person must decide who they will become. And that is also precisely the age at which a Vietnamese player must decide: sign a professional contract, or go work in a factory.

Vietnamese football does not compete with Thai or Japanese football at age 18. We compete with a factory in Binh Duong, a vocational school in Dong Nai, a university place that parents have saved for a decade. That is the real opponent.

And we are losing.

The counter-view: if I'm wrong, where am I wrong?

I have said we must pay young players more. But I know that is not easy, and I know I could be wrong in at least three directions.

First, paying more does not automatically produce better players. Japanese football went through a period when academies paid high stipends but the proportion of players who "drifted through the days" was still large. Money solves the food-and-rent worry, but not motivation. If a young player receives enough money not to have to struggle, that very stipend can become the thing that lulls him to sleep.

Second, I may be conflating two different kinds of programs. Mexico uses wages to teach trades to young people in general, not to train specialists for an entertainment industry as brutally competitive as football. A social program accepts a high failure rate, because its goal is poverty reduction. A football academy cannot accept such a high failure rate, because its goal is producing players. Comparing the two directly is an unfair comparison, and I admit that.

Third, and this is what I think about most: pouring money into youth development in Vietnam, under the current system, might only enrich a middle layer. I have said many times that player agents are the biggest hidden cost in this football world, and the noise they create distorts the market. If stipend money flows down without any control mechanism, most of it will turn into commissions, into "brokerage fees," into trips no one records. At that point, young players remain poor, and only a few people in the middle get rich.

So I am not shouting "pour money in." I am saying pour money in, but first build a clean pipe. Mexico achieved that because the state controls payments directly, with ID numbers, cycles, and insurance. Vietnamese football has no such pipe at all. We have clubs that do it very well and clubs that do it for show. And in the darkness of opacity, money always chooses the shortest path to the pocket nearest it.

I may be wrong in that I trust mechanisms too much and people too little. At 68, I still have not resolved that question.

What matters more than the number

There is another detail in the Mexico bulletin that caught my attention: beyond Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro, they also run a parallel scholarship system — Beca Benito Juárez at 1,900 pesos every two months for upper-secondary students, plus other programs such as Jóvenes Escribiendo el Futuro and Beca Gertrudis Bocanegra. This means they do not bet on a single program. They build a multi-layered net, from high school to university, from vocational training to research support.

A Vietnamese player who leaves the academy at 18 without a contract falls into a void. No more academy stipend, no university degree, no vocational certificate. He falls from one floor to the one below with no net to catch him.

I don't need to be a policy expert to see that. I only need to recall those evenings in a bar after the Japan–Belgium match in 2026, when Japanese fans were furious with me for saying coach Nishino had killed himself with his own words. They were angry, but they admitted I had struck the truth. Japanese people have a system that catches players who fail, and precisely because of that, they dare to fail.

Vietnam does not yet have one. And when there is no net, people only dare to take very small steps.

Self-mockery to keep myself sane

I know someone will say: this old man is spouting nonsense again. He lives in Japan, draws a salary from a different football world, then comes back to lecture Vietnamese people on how to spend money. To be fair, they are partly right. I record a podcast from Osaka, I receive sponsorship from an already-mature sports economy, and I am not the one signing the cheques that pay young Vietnamese players. It is easy to talk from the outside.

I admit I am an old man who talks nonsense. But I have one principle: before lighting the fuse, I verify. The 9,582-peso figure is real, I read it from a bulletin about a Mexican labor program, and I know it has a clear registration deadline. I did not invent a number to make the article more dramatic.

As for my prediction, it may be wrong. And if it is wrong, I will accept it. I have been wrong many times, and I have never turned a wrong prediction into a personal tragedy.

Conclusion

In the coming weeks, as the transfer window enters its final stretch and a few new foreign names are hyped every day, I want you to notice a different detail: how many young players signed their first professional contract during the same period. If that number is lower than the number of foreign signings, then the answer to Vietnamese football's problem sits right in front of your eyes, in a place no one wants to look.

Modern football is suffocating under those who fear losing so much that they forget how to win. And in Vietnam, we fear losing at an even deeper level: we fear investing in the age of 18, because the age of 18 brings no results in this season.

I am still here, waiting to see who will be the first to dare to bet on the age of 18.

Until then, I hold to my view: at 68, I do not need to chase trends; I create them and leave them behind.