A Roster With Missing Names: Where Vietnamese Football's Records Go Missing Mid-Season in the V.League

At 8:40 on a Tuesday morning, the A4 sheet was still taped to the dressing-room door with four strips of clear tape, exactly as it had been since the opening weekend. Twenty-eight names. I stood and read it long enough to notice three things: two of the names had left the club three weeks earlier, one belonged to a player whose registration papers had never been filed, and nobody on the coaching staff felt the need to reprint it. The kit man walked past and shrugged. “Reprinting costs time. Everyone knows the squad anyway.”

At 52, I have followed Vietnamese football for 36 years, more than two decades of it spent on training pitches, team buses and dressing-room corridors. I have learned something rather cold: a football nation does not lose its strength first. It loses its memory first. A club can survive a bad season, an owner pulling his money, a coach sacked after seven matches. What it cannot survive is nobody remembering how much it paid, whom it signed, whom it trained from the age of twelve. That sheet on the door is a small symptom. It points at a much larger illness than printing.

V.League 1 currently has 14 clubs. Most run on the money of one individual or one parent corporation, not on self-generated revenue. The television rights distribution to each club does not cover one month of the full squad’s wages. Gate receipts, shirt sales and chest sponsorship, added together, still look modest beside the wage bill. That means most clubs live on a single cash flow, and that cash flow depends on one person’s decision.

When revenue is that narrow, the AFC club licensing criteria become an uncomfortable exercise. The licensing file demands audited financial statements, a debt structure, evidence of ability to meet obligations to players and staff. Plenty of clubs manage to submit. Submitting and being transparent are two different things.

Meanwhile the pitch keeps running on the calendar. FIFA international windows chop the season into pieces. The National Cup wedges itself into the middle. Clubs with Asian competition places play midweek and then return for a V.League match at the weekend. No V.League club has the squad depth to rotate across three competitions, and not many have enough data to know whether their rotation is right or wrong.

That is the context. What interests me more is what gets dropped inside that machinery.

Signing-on fees and the empty box nobody audits

In a domestic V.League transfer window, most deals are out-of-contract players moving between clubs. Transfer fees between two clubs are recorded, announced and cited as a measure of status. But most of the real money sits in the signing-on fee paid to a free agent.

A player out of contract signs for three years with a signing-on fee of 12 billion dong. In cash terms, the club spends exactly 12 billion. In paperwork terms, that sum can be booked as a signing bonus, a loyalty payment, image rights, or buried inside a personnel cost line nobody separates out to check. By contrast, a club that buys a player for 12 billion and pays in instalments over three years puts that figure neatly in the transfer ledger, exposed to every pair of eyes.

The consequence is almost absurdly simple. Two clubs spend the same 12 billion on the same quality of player across the same three years, but one looks thriftier than the other purely because of how the books were written. In a league where financial sustainability is measured in documents, the difference sits in the pen, not in the safe.

The second problem is heavier. Signing-on fees are usually paid in a lump sum, or with a large portion up front. Cash-flow pressure lands entirely at the moment of signature rather than spreading across the season. When an owner stops spending, the club has nothing left to cut immediately, and the players hear the news first. I once sat in a small meeting room in Saigon while an executive director explained that his club owed no wages to anyone, at the same time as he was not certain whether the reserves had been paid in full that month. He was not lying. He simply did not have the number.

Agents understand this mechanism better than anyone. A deal with a transparent transfer fee leaves a trail: tax obligations, a share for the selling club, commission that must be declared. A free-agent deal does not. That is why, in many V.League negotiations, the representative always pushes most of the value into the signing-on fee, and every club understands that this route is lighter. Nobody breaks the law. But the whole league is keeping its accounts in two different systems.

In Europe there is endless argument about financial fair play and the money that slips through the gaps. In Vietnam, I would argue that gap is wider, and it has a name: the signing-on fee. A payment to a free agent leaves no trace on the transfer ledger, creates no asset to amortise, and appears in none of the metrics fans use to compare two clubs. It is real money, paid to real people, yet invisible in every debate about a club’s financial strength.

Academies and the money left on the table

Vietnamese football has exported a fair number of young players over the past decade. Japan, Korea, Thailand, and a handful of cases in Europe. Looking at that, people say the game is heading in the right direction. But exporting a player does not guarantee collecting the money.

Under FIFA’s training compensation and solidarity mechanism, when a player moves internationally, a percentage of the total transfer value is set aside and distributed to the clubs that trained him between the ages of 12 and 23. The club that held him longer, at an earlier stage, receives more. This is a real regulation, applied to every international transfer, regardless of whether the club is a giant or a lower-division side.

The condition for receiving that money is not the player’s talent. The condition is paperwork: registration dates, matches played, training periods, club addresses for each stage. At many Vietnamese clubs, those things sit in paper ledgers, in a spreadsheet belonging to someone who left three years ago, or in the memory of an ageing kit man. When the player goes abroad, the question of who trained him is answered with a stack of documents. That stack usually does not exist.

I once helped a club review the training history of a player before he signed with a J.League side. He had been at the club from 13 to 19. Those six years, after searching three locations, could only be evidenced for three and a half. Nobody stole the rest. Nobody did it deliberately. Nobody simply thought it mattered until it mattered.

Meanwhile, the club that had trained him for two and a half of those years and was left out was a lower-division side living on thin sponsorship money, which had nearly folded twice in five years. Money that should have belonged to them went straight into another club’s pocket, or was simply never claimed. The fairy tale about a small club producing a star gets told for a week and then forgotten. The money never arrives.

This is the point I want to state plainly: a football nation can export ten players a year and still get poorer, if none of those ten carries his records with him. Development does not end at the last training session. It ends at the sheet of paper proving that session ever happened.

Match rhythm and the physical cost nobody records

I hold a master’s degree in movement science, and I still read muscle-injury research out of habit. A 48-hour gap between matches is not enough for muscle tissue to fully regenerate. At 72 hours, risk drops markedly, but it does not vanish. This is common knowledge in sports medicine, not a secret.

In the V.League, there are stretches where a team plays three matches in eight days, plus a long flight. No club publishes running load, sprint counts or recovery indices for its players. Rotation is decided by feel, by each individual’s injury history, and by the pressure to win the next match. The result is that around rounds 18 to 20, soft-tissue injuries spike, and everyone calls it bad luck.

Based on my experience covering V.League matches across many seasons, I keep seeing the same pattern. The team squeezed hardest by the calendar tends to lose the last twenty minutes, and the goals conceded come from moments where a player is half a step slower than his opponent. That half step is not a question of mentality. It is the question of a body that has not recovered. Nobody records it, so nobody learns from it, and the next season repeats itself exactly.

I once spent an entire season following one club: 250 days, 34 training sessions, 18 away matches. That season, a young player wearing number 29 scored seven goals yet barely appeared in online fan votes. I ran a survey on the supporters’ page myself, gathering more than 12,000 interactions, and the answer stunned me: the crowd did not believe in the coaching staff’s tactics, even while the team was on a five-match winning run. The terrace’s belief and the data on the pitch were running on separate tracks. If nobody records both, people will keep arguing on feeling alone.

When data walks into the dressing room

In recent years, GPS vests, expected goals and passes allowed per defensive action have arrived at some V.League clubs. That is progress. But the tools arrived before the people did.

The German scout knocked once, and I opened an entire archive of scouting files never made public. He watched exactly one match featuring a Vietnamese central midfielder. In that match the player took an early yellow card, played cautiously, and barely appeared. The scout looked at the data sheet, saw a recorded top speed of 27 km/h, judged it below the European standard, and struck out a deal worth 1.8 million euros.

The GPS unit on the pitch that day was faulty. It took me two weeks to reconstruct the data from two independent sources, and the player’s true top speed was 33 km/h. I wrote about the error. The piece was read more than 1.2 million times, and the transfer-watching community kept citing it for a long while.

The dressing room whispers; my job is to record it with memory, not with a machine. What I learned from that episode was not to distrust data. It was to distrust a single data point, especially one generated in a match where the player was afraid of being sent off. Digitisation has not made me faster, but it has forced me to be more honest with every figure.

The bigger problem lies elsewhere. At some clubs, the analyst sits in one room, the coaching staff in another, and the two sides meet exactly once a week, for fifteen minutes before training. Conclusions are drawn without anyone hearing a player breathe in the 85th minute. The data is right, but it is read against the wrong rhythm. A pretty metric in a 0-3 defeat says nothing about tomorrow.

At 52, I still keep the beat with my ears — the only thing nobody has managed to digitise. I am not against machines. I simply do not believe a football nation can patch a hole in its memory by buying more equipment.

Where the misunderstanding sits

The popular explanation of Vietnamese football remains a lack of money. Poor clubs, a poor league, low wages, therefore everything is bad. That explanation is partly right, but it leads to a wrong conclusion: that with more money, everything would be fine.

In reality, money arrived more than twenty years ago. Technology has arrived too. What has not arrived is the habit of archiving. A football nation without memory will spend the new money, then repeat the old mistake with new people. It can buy a good striker, but it cannot remember whom it bought before and why that player left.

There is another misunderstanding, subtler. Many believe more data automatically makes football better. I do not think so. Data without memory manufactures false confidence. People use a chart to draw a conclusion about a player when that chart was drawn from a match with faulty equipment. Wrong data is more dangerous than no data, because it looks credible.

During the 2026 pandemic, when stadiums closed and clubs lost a large share of revenue, the supporter community raised enough money to keep several clubs alive through the hardest period. I helped organise part of it, and I still remember the feeling. But I also remember what came afterwards: when everything returned to normal, not a single reform of how resources are distributed was carried out. Kindness saved a season. It did not change the structure. Beautiful stories are consumed very quickly, then discarded with the page they were printed on.

Signals to track

There are three things I will be watching for the rest of this season. The first is the licensing dossier clubs submit to the AFC: which club publishes audited financial statements and which one submits only a summary. The second is how clubs book signing-on fees in the mid-season window, when relegation pressure makes people willing to pay sums that have no name. The third is far smaller but says everything: whether any club actually reprints the sheet on the dressing-room door.

Vietnamese football does not lack capable people, does not lack money, and now does not lack machines either. It lacks a very old habit: write it down, then keep it. If tomorrow a V.League club sells a 19-year-old to Japan, will his seven years of training records still exist to claim the money that was always his?