Bau Duc says Vietnamese football must learn to “generate money”: the bottleneck is the mechanism, not the money

On June 11, 2026, in Basra, Vietnam lost 1-3 to Iraq and went out of the second round of AFC qualification for the 2026 World Cup, finishing third in Group F. Around the same time, Indonesia — the other Southeast Asian side in that group — advanced to the third round and then to the fourth. The gap between the two teams in the FIFA ranking was a few places. The gap in how much money they pour into football was measured in multiples.

That is the backdrop for a short line from Bau Duc — Doan Nguyen Duc, chairman of HAGL and a former VFF vice chairman in charge of finance — ahead of the VFF Congress for the 2026–2030 term: Vietnamese football needs to know how to “generate money.” He added that the VFF is a social and professional organisation, and that such an organisation needs businessmen who know how to create cash flow, how to manage, and who dare to spend.

He is right. And because he is right, the line is easy to nod at and then forget. People call me a troublemaker. I call it reading the run one step early.

Talking about money in Vietnamese football without talking about mechanism is like analysing a match from the scoreboard: right about the result, wrong about the cause.

The VFF Congress for the 2026–2030 term is a governance milestone, not a technical one. It will not decide who plays centre-forward next weekend. It will decide who sits in the room where resources are allocated for the next five years — broadcasting rights, sponsorship, youth scholarships, facilities, and seats on committees at FIFA, the AFC and the AFF.

Bau Duc is no outsider. He has spent more than twenty-five years in Vietnamese football, served as VFF vice chairman for finance, and stands behind the HAGL – Arsenal JMG Academy founded in 2026. That academy produced Nguyen Cong Phuong, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Nguyen Van Toan, Vu Van Thanh and Nguyen Phong Hong Duy — the faces of Vietnamese football for a decade, from the 2026 AFC U23 Championship to the AFF Cup title won on January 5, 2026 after a 3-2 second-leg win over Thailand and a 5-3 aggregate.

The results exist. But it is precisely because the results exist while the money does not that Bau Duc’s line deserves to be taken apart. He puts forward two propositions. First: Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. Second: without money, do not talk about reaching the top.

The second proposition gets all the attention, because it is easy on the ear and easy to agree with. The first is the hard one, because it argues against the very model that made the speaker’s name.

The first thing worth noticing is the age of the golden generation. The first intake of the HAGL – Arsenal JMG Academy arrived in 2026, mostly born between 2026 and 2026. By 2026, those players turn 29 to 31. In Southeast Asian football, that is the far end of a peak. Put another way: the biggest asset Vietnamese football has owned in twenty years has almost fully depreciated through one cycle.

Set beside that another count: nineteen years. That is the span from the academy’s founding to today. Nineteen years for six names good enough to hold regular national-team places. That ratio is not bad for a Southeast Asian nation. But it is not enough to feed a football country that wants the World Cup, because the whole country is drawing from a single pipeline running out of one plot of land in Pleiku.

My own match-watching record offers a small but telling detail. In June 2026, with world football frozen by the pandemic, I sat down and rewatched every V.League 2026 match I had missed. I built a simple table: average starting-lineup age, and minutes played by footballers born from 2026 onward. It produced two conclusions — one correct, and one more correct than I expected. Quang Nam’s average starting age was close to 29.8, and they were relegated at the end of the 2026 season. Hanoi FC had six players born between 2026 and 2026 who each played more than 1,500 minutes.

In Quang Nam I learned one thing: people hate you for being right a season before they are.

I bring that up not to boast. I bring it up because it is the only way to talk about Vietnamese football without sliding into sentiment. And when Bau Duc’s money argument is examined the same way, what surfaces is not a shortfall but a value chain broken in the middle.

The value chain of a professional football nation has four links: producing players, developing and educating them, competing to create the product, and selling that product on a market. Vietnamese football does links one and two very well. Link three is passable. Link four is nearly empty.

The evidence is in the outflow of players. Nguyen Cong Phuong joined Mito Hollyhock on loan in 2026. Luong Xuan Truong signed for Gangwon FC in 2026. Nguyen Quang Hai moved to Pau FC in 2026. Nguyen Van Toan joined Seoul E-Land in 2026. Count them again: the number of Vietnamese players who have gone abroad on a genuine transfer fee, with one club paying another club that held their registration, still fits on the fingers of one hand. Most of the moves are loans, short-term deals, subsidised study trips.

Vietnamese football is not blocked by a lack of money. It is blocked because money has to pass through one individual’s pocket to reach the pitch.

This is where Bau Duc’s “generate money” thesis lands correctly but stops too early. To generate money, a football nation needs a market, and that market has three doors: tickets and stadium experience, broadcasting and digital content, and player trading. The first door depends on stadiums and a culture of attending matches, and it is a ten-year story. The second is a global story, not a Vietnamese one: streaming platforms are burning cash on sports rights, repeating exactly the mistake pay television made twenty years ago — overpaying for content with no way to recoup enough. Vietnamese football should not stake its national budget on that door.

The third door is the one Vietnam has the greatest advantage in and has neglected the longest. A country that can produce six senior internationals from a single academy intake has every right to sell players. But to sell, the owning club needs professional contracts, a negotiation structure, representation, a database of player valuations, and a league credible enough that buyers trust the product. HAGL managed the hardest part — development — and then let the easiest part, commercialisation, fall into other hands.

Then comes the first proposition, the hard one. Bau Duc says Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. True. But nobody knows better than he does that this very model brought Vietnamese football here. Before 2026 there was no private academy of that standard, and Vietnamese football had no generation that travelled that far. Put another way, the patron model is the worst of all models, except for every other model Vietnam has tried.

That is why the argument has to be repositioned. The problem is not whether patrons exist. The problem is that the system contains nothing but patrons. A league with fourteen clubs in V.League 1, where the number of academies capable of supplying national-team players can be counted on one hand, is a league with an alarmingly concentrated risk profile. If one academy stops, part of the national team stops with it.

This is where Hanoi FC deserves mention as a counter-example. Hanoi FC does not need a golden generation. They need a generation willing to play the kind of football that others fear — and they have built in that direction through a multi-tier system with multiple resource streams, rather than through one man’s shoulders. That model is less romantic than the academy in Pleiku. It is also less dependent on one person’s lifespan.

Then comes the part few want to hear: the source of money. Bau Duc proposes that the VFF needs businessmen who can create cash flow and dare to spend. That leads straight to the question of who controls VFF money, and under what rules. The VFF is legally defined as a social and professional organisation, a status that places it outside the corporate framework. That status means businesses can be invited in as deeply as anyone likes — but going deeper requires changing the mechanism, not merely inviting people to meetings.

At the same time, Bau Duc raises something far less noticed: putting Vietnamese officials into positions at FIFA, the AFC and the AFF. That brings concrete returns. Seats on those committees shape match calendars, the allocation of competition slots, and access to development funding. A federation with a voice in the room where rules are written always has an edge over one that merely receives them. If Vietnamese football wants to reach a higher tier, this is the cheapest investment and the slowest-yielding one it is currently leaving empty.

Now the part where I have to argue against myself.

There is a simpler reading of this story, and it runs opposite to everything I have just written. Indonesia bought its passage with money. They naturalised at scale, spent sums Vietnamese football would not dare to spend, and they went further. If money is the whole story, then every argument about mechanism is just a polite way of describing a lack of money. And I would be doing exactly what I criticise: constructing a sophisticated case so I never have to say the simple thing.

I also have to concede that the patron model paid for things nobody else would. The 2026 academy was a personal gamble. Hand it to a committee and it would have had its budget cut in year three, because no committee survives ten years without results. So when I say “stop depending on patrons”, I am demanding something the Vietnamese system has never proved it can do.

There is one more risk, a political one. Any argument shaped like “the problem is the mechanism” can be used as cover by people who want to preserve the subsidised status quo, so that money keeps flowing through the old channels. I know that. I choose to say it anyway, knowing it can be misused.

The night I wrote “England will lose”, the whole country was singing. Three weeks later they understood why I was not. I was right that time. But being right early is also a way of being alone, and I do not want to use that feeling as evidence for a new argument.

Where I stand is clear: money is a condition, mechanism is the variable. Vietnamese football can receive a great deal more money and still go no further, if that money keeps passing through the same familiar hands and leaves no infrastructure behind.

My checkpoint: once the VFF Congress for the 2026–2030 term concludes, I will come back and examine three data points — the number of executive committee members drawn from businesses with real cash flow in sport, the number of V.League clubs with AFC-standard academies, and the number of Vietnamese players moving abroad on fee-paying transfers. If all three stay flat, “generate money” will remain a fine quote to cite, and Vietnamese football will remain exactly where it is.

Football does not generate money in meeting rooms. It generates money where people pay to watch, to buy and to believe. A federation’s job is to make that place more crowded.