Bau Duc Before the VFF 2026–2030 Congress: Vietnamese Football Must Learn to Generate Its Own Money

Pleiku on a day without a match: rain drifts across the valley and settles into small pools on the Hàm Rồng turf. A ball boy sweeps the water into long streaks, careful as if redrawing the touchline of a stadium that has never had a crowd. No chronicle records his name. But my memory of Vietnamese football sometimes lives in those streaks of water, not in the scoreboard. A few hundred kilometres away, a man who has been bound to the Vietnamese ball for more than twenty-five years said something short and clean, like a one-touch pass: Vietnamese football needs to know how to give birth to money. The speaker is Đoàn Nguyên Đức, the name the whole country calls Bầu Đức, Chairman of HAGL, former Vice Chairman in charge of finance at the Vietnam Football Federation. The remark landed at the most sensitive moment of a cycle: on the eve of the VFF Congress for the 2026–2030 term. In football, timing matters as much as content. A shot in the 89th minute is worth something entirely different from the same shot in the third. At this age I have learned one thing: to understand a statement about money, you must understand how the speaker has spent money. Bầu Đức is no newcomer. He is a businessman, he once held the VFF finance chair, and above all he is the man who poured his own money into a football academy in the driest patch of Vietnamese football. In 2026, the HAGL Arsenal JMG Academy opened in Pleiku, in partnership with Arsenal and JMG, on a model combining football with schooling and foreign languages. It was a long-term gamble. Roughly seven years later, that gamble began paying interest: Công Phượng, Xuân Trường, Tuấn Anh, Văn Toàn, Văn Thanh, Hồng Duy — names that came out of the same furnace and became familiar faces of Vietnamese football. Set beside that is the wider picture. Vietnamese football has just passed through a cycle widely judged a success, with titles stretching from the U23 level up to the national team. That success produced something precious: belief. But success also produces a familiar trap — the feeling that everything is fine. The institutional backdrop is where the eye should go. The VFF is a social and professional organisation, operating under FIFA and AFC statutes while sitting inside Vietnam's policy framework for the socialisation of sport. The 2026–2030 Congress will shape the leadership, shape the operating platform, and shape how money flows into football. That is why a remark about money, made before a congress, carries more weight than a tactical analysis. The first thing to note clearly: Bầu Đức's statement is not a lament. It is a thesis. He argues that professionalisation and commercialisation demand very large financial resources; that the VFF needs businessmen who know how to create cash flow, know how to manage, and above all dare to spend. And he pushes the thesis to its limit with something close to a manifesto: without money, do not talk about reaching the top. This is resource determinism in its purest form. As a direction, it stands. A football nation that wants the World Cup — especially in the era of a 48-team tournament — must invest persistently in facilities, in coach education, in nutrition, in sports science and in youth scouting. No shortcut crosses those categories without money. But the interesting part lies elsewhere: Bầu Đức points out that the problem of Vietnamese football today cannot rest on a few academies or a few patrons alone. He says this while being one of those patrons himself. And the fix he proposes — broad corporate mobilisation of resources for youth training, facilities, nutrition and expertise — is in essence a thesis of funding diversification. I want to pause here a beat, because this is the point most readers skim past. The patron model carries an accounting risk buried deep inside it: a club's financial health is welded to one person's fate. When that person rises, the club rises. When that person falls, the club falls. Bầu Đức recounts that he went through ups and downs and had to pay the price for investment decisions. He does not say this to complain. He says it as living evidence. And that evidence has a consequence in time. The HAGL Academy opened in 2026. Its first products only truly shone from around 2026 onward. Seven years, even ten, is the payback cycle of a football academy. No investor can carry a negative cash flow that long without something close to religious faith in the ball. That is why the patron model is at once generous and fragile. Based on my experience following matches, I have noticed a pattern: teams that live on one individual's resources tend to play their best when that person still believes, and their worst when that person is tired. The psychology of a single backer seeps into every pass, even if no one sees it on the pitch. There is a striking data gap in this whole story. Bầu Đức's statement comes with no figures: no V.League broadcast revenue, no club budget, no average wage bill, no share of sponsor contribution in total income. That makes his thesis right in direction but unverifiable in magnitude. We know money is needed. We do not know how much is needed, or how much is missing. In the food chain of Vietnamese football, HAGL's position is also worth noting. The club is not a trophy machine. Its real product is the development pipeline. In other words, HAGL exports talent to the national game more than it attracts it. When a club sits in that position, it wields influence beyond its league placing while carrying the constant risk of losing players to wealthier sides. Finally, one proposal is easily overlooked in the money story: placing Vietnamese people in positions at FIFA, AFC and AFF. On the surface it sounds like an honour. In practice it is about interests: seats on international committees usually come with the ability to influence scheduling, slot allocation and development funding. That is an advantage in the rules of the game, not a medal. But to stop there would be to skip the hardest part of the story. Blind spot one: money is a necessary condition, and perhaps never a sufficient one. World football history holds federations on thin budgets that still overachieved through coaching quality, tight tactical organisation and dense talent. Conversely, football nations that spent enormous sums still stood outside the door. If money automatically produced class, the world ranking would be decided by the balance sheet. It is not. Football is the sport where a large invoice can be beaten by a small idea. Blind spot two is subtler: what is called socialisation is in essence a governance reform dressed as finance. Bầu Đức talks about money, but the mechanism he proposes is to bring people with management methods and investment thinking into the machine. That is an import of a management model. And here a legal constraint appears: the VFF holds the status of a social and professional organisation, not a purely commercial entity. To bring corporate culture in, one must amend the statute itself, not merely call in more sponsors. Blind spot three concerns perception. When a club owner, who once held the federation's finance chair, proposes a finance model for the federation, the proposal can be read as a statement of group interest. I do not believe that is the truth. But in a power contest before a congress, perception sometimes matters as much as truth. And here is the largest blind spot, the one I — a man who has sat in the stands for five stages of the road — feel most clearly. The collective memory of Vietnamese football keeps only the trophies. No one remembers an academy's losses. No one remembers the electricity bill of a training ground. No one remembers a sponsorship that collapsed. People remember Công Phượng's goals, and forget that behind those goals lie ten years of invoices that were never paid in inspiration. I still keep in a drawer a few pages of notes from an evening in Moscow, when a seventy-year-old man beside me said the player he was watching was running on twenty years of refuge. Rain blurred the words in that notebook. And I learned that the most beautiful things in football rarely appear on a balance sheet. But they cannot exist without one either. They call me a dreamer. But the ball has never hidden anything from me. It simply never pays for itself. Vietnamese football stands before a narrow window: results good enough to create belief, and a congress close enough to turn that belief into structure. If the window shuts with nothing changed, we will have a few more trophies, a few more beautiful matches, and a few more exhausted patrons. If it opens, then in twenty years there may be a boy sweeping rainwater in Pleiku, growing up inside a system that depends on no one's goodwill. At sixty-nine, I still believe a beautiful pass is a confession of love. But I have also learned that for someone to pass beautifully, someone must first pay for the grass. So who will pay for the next pitch — with belief, or with a system?