Bau Duc and the Money-Making Equation: Vietnamese Football at the Threshold of the VFF Congress

One morning in Pleiku, I stood outside the fence of the Ham Rong training ground while the mountain mist had not yet lifted. There was not a soul on the concrete stands. On the pitch, a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old players were running their first warm-up laps. By the touchline, a man in a button-down shirt stood still for a very long time, saying nothing, just watching. That was the first time I understood that Vietnamese football is built from mornings no one records — no television, no spectators, only sweat and one man paying for everything invisible. That man is Doan Nguyen Duc, a name the whole country knows by two familiar words: Bau Duc. Recently, he said something that stirred public opinion: Vietnamese football needs to know how to generate money. Heard plainly, it sounds like the complaint of a businessman. But placed beside the moment it was uttered — on the eve of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) Congress for the 2026–2030 term — it is no longer a complaint. It is a statement about how an entire football nation should be run. In my trade, I learned one thing: never listen to a sentence with your ears alone. Listen with context. And the context here is very clear. The VFF Congress is a periodic event that any football nation must undergo, but it is not merely ceremonial. It is the moment when the leadership, the executive committee and the members are re-elected, the moment when interest groups within the football world publicly place on the table what they want. For the 2026–2030 term, the central question is not who sits in the chairman's chair, but according to which model the VFF will be governed. Vietnamese football arrives at this threshold as a football nation that has just reaped success. From the U23 youth teams up to the national team, titles and achievements in continental competitions have come in recent years. This is the fruit of an investment cycle lasting more than a decade, not of fleeting luck. But that very success creates a paradox: people tend to believe everything is fine, and because it is fine, nothing needs to change. Bau Duc reads that paradox in the opposite direction — success must be converted into structural change, or it will evaporate along with the current generation of players. To understand why his words carry weight, one must place them within the speaker's own journey. Bau Duc is not an outside commentator. He is the chairman of Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), and he once held the post of VFF Vice Chairman in charge of finance. In other words, he has been both the man who pays and the man who once sat inside the governing machinery. Those two roles combined give him a kind of experience that very few people in Vietnamese football possess. In 2026, HAGL founded the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Arsenal JMG Football Academy, in partnership with Arsenal and the French JMG academy. The training model there does not teach football alone. It also teaches culture and foreign languages, nurturing players along a holistic path. This is what Asian football people often cite as the standard of a modern academy: education alongside football. But for such an academy to operate for nearly twenty years requires resources whose scale not everyone can imagine. From that academy, a generation of players emerged and became familiar faces of Vietnamese football: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Nguyen Van Toan, Vu Van Thanh, Nguyen Phong Hong Duy. These are names that have accompanied the national team through many tournaments. And they are also the clearest evidence of a type of investment people rarely call by its right name: investment in human capital over a long cycle. Look at the timeline. The academy opened in 2026. It was not until around 2026 that the first generation truly rose and entered top professional football. That means about seven years passed from the laying of the first brick to the harvest. During those seven years, not a single dong of revenue from these players came back. There were only costs: land, facilities, teachers' salaries, nutrition, academic tuition, training camps. This is what anyone discussing money-making must remember: in football, money is not generated by the quarter, it is generated by the generation. And that very characteristic creates the cash-flow problem. An academy cannot sustain itself on tuition alone. It needs a person or an organization willing to spend first and collect later, and willing to accept the risk that the return may never come. When Bau Duc says that professionalization and commercialization demand very large financial resources, he is not speaking in theory. He is describing his own balance sheet over two decades. What he says next is the important part. According to him, the VFF needs businessmen who know how to create cash flow, know how to manage, and especially dare to spend money. He also points out the core problem of Vietnamese football today: it cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. The solution he proposes is to mobilize corporate resources systematically, spread across youth training, facilities, nutrition and expertise. At a deeper layer, this is a thesis about diversifying resources. A system with only a few payers is a fragile system. If one of those people suffers a financial shock, an entire link can collapse. Bau Duc himself once said he had to pay the price for his investment decisions. That is not a modest remark. It is a warning drawn from real experience: the patron model carries embedded risk, because the survival of the club is tied tightly to the financial fate of one individual. I have seen that risk with my own eyes. In seasons when HAGL had to scramble, the matches at Pleiku stadium were still packed, but inside the press room, no one dared ask directly about the team's financial future. People asked about the squad, about form, about injuries. The real question — where does the money come from next season — was left to the corridors. I write for those who remain in the dressing room after the stadium lights have gone out, and there I learned that football is not decided on the pitch alone. But wait. Before agreeing with Bau Duc, one thing he left open must be made clear. He says Vietnamese football needs money, but he gives no figure. There is no V.League broadcasting revenue, no club budget, no wage bill, no total VFF income. There is not a single number to measure how wide the gap between ambition and resources really is. This is the greatest weakness in his argument, and also the weakness of the entire football nation: people talk about money while no one publishes the money. In my trade, this is familiar. The microphone stumble of 2026 did not silence me; it taught me to listen before writing. That day, I mispronounced a player's name before thousands of listeners, and the lesson left behind was not the shame, but the principle: if a number cannot be verified, do not use it to build a conclusion. Vietnamese football is missing exactly what I learned it must have — verifiable data. There is another argument that I consider directionally right but pushed too far: without money, do not talk about reaching the top. This is a thesis of resource determinism. True, to reach the World Cup requires sustained investment in facilities, coach education and youth football. But the history of world football shows that football nations on modest budgets can still rise through talent density, coaching quality and tactical organization. Money is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. When a football nation talks only about money, it easily forgets the things money cannot buy. And this is where I want to linger longer, because it concerns the very model Bau Duc represents. The HAGL academy is one of the best training models Vietnamese football has ever had. But looked at closely, there is a paradox. The academy's golden generation — Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh, Hong Duy — has largely passed the peak of its career. They are in their late twenties and early thirties. That means: the talent source of Vietnamese football over the past decade was concentrated in a single academy, and that generation is gradually reaching the end of its cycle. Bau Duc warns against depending on a few academies. But his own academy is the clearest example of that concentration. When a football nation has one academy producing most of the national team's pillars, that is both an achievement and a systemic weakness. If that academy stalls, or if the next generation is not trained to match, the entire football nation will feel the gap. There is another thing public debate in Vietnam rarely touches. When discussing football finance, people talk about revenue, about sponsors, about broadcasting rights. But almost no one talks about financial fair play rules, about wage caps, about how strictly club licensing is enforced. A football nation that wants to generate money sustainably cannot merely increase income. It must also control spending, and controlling spending demands hard rules, with sanctions, with transparency. This is the great gap in the story Bau Duc opens up. From my cross-border vantage point — a Vietnamese writing from China, watching how football nations operate — I see a stark contrast. In many developed football nations, the central question is how to make the system run itself without depending on one individual. In Vietnam, the question still revolves around finding more people to pay. That is the distance between a football nation in transition and one that has already completed its transition. I do not say this to deny the merits of people like Bau Duc. On the contrary. Precisely because they have done too much while the system has not done enough, the problem has become hard. When one individual carries the system for twenty years, the handover to a collective model cannot happen overnight. It is a process, and that process needs to be designed, not merely called for. One more point must be faced squarely. Bau Duc is both the chairman of a club and a former VFF Vice Chairman in charge of finance. When he proposes a financial model for the VFF, that proposal bears both marks: expertise and interest. That does not make the proposal wrong, but it requires the listener to read with clear eyes. A healthy debate on football finance must include voices that hold no stake in the answer. And there is one more layer, rarely mentioned but no less important. In his statements, Bau Duc also stresses the need to place Vietnamese people in positions within FIFA, AFC and AFF. This is not merely a matter of honor. Those positions, in practice, are tied to the power to influence schedules, tournament slot allocation and development funding. To sit at that table means having a voice in shaping the rules of the game. Football is not only won on the pitch; it is also won in the meeting room, years before the referee blows the whistle. So what will be decided at the 2026–2030 VFF Congress? Not merely who sits in which chair. What will be decided is whether Vietnamese football moves from a system based on the goodwill of a few individuals to a system based on structure. Bau Duc asks the right question, but he leaves the answer open — and perhaps that is the most honest thing an insider can do. Field 9 in 2026 planted a question in me: where does football beat when no one scores? I still carry that question with me. And every time I hear a debate about money in football, I ask myself again: where does the true heartbeat of this football nation lie — in the balance sheet, or in the mornings no one records in Pleiku? Perhaps the answer lies in neither. It lies in whether people have enough courage to look squarely at the gap between the two — a gap every football nation must cross before it grows up. A goal is only a rest note ending a long song of eleven people. And money, in the end, is only another rest note in the longer piece that Vietnamese football is still writing.