Bau Duc and the 'Money-Generating' Question Ahead of the 2026-2030 VFF Congress: Vietnamese Football Needs a New Governance Model

In 2026, the HAGL Arsenal JMG Football Academy opened its doors in Pleiku with a training philosophy that was rare in Southeast Asia at the time: combining football with culture and foreign languages, rather than focusing purely on physical fitness and technical skill. Nearly two decades later, the list of players who graduated from that academy still carries weight: Nguyen Cong Phuong, Luong Xuan Truong, Nguyen Tuan Anh, Nguyen Van Toan, Vu Van Thanh, Nguyen Hong Duy. They are the faces behind most of the achievements Vietnamese football has secured from the U23 level up to the senior national team over roughly the past decade.

When the founder of that academy, Doan Nguyen Duc, widely known as Bau Duc, Chairman of Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group, spoke ahead of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) Congress for the 2026-2030 term, he did not talk about tactics. He did not mention formations, pressing, transitions, or any concept belonging to the pitch. He talked about money. For someone who has tracked the football market for nine years and recorded every figure of the 222 million euro Neymar deal, that is a signal more noteworthy than any blockbuster transfer.

When the 222 million deal was signed, I knew I had chosen the right profession. But the biggest lesson from that transfer was not the number itself. It was this: once money enters the negotiating room, everything else, from tactics to training to dreams, has to be revalued. Bau Duc understands this better than most people sitting inside Vietnamese football's institutional machinery. And he is trying to put that issue on the agenda at precisely the moment it carries the most weight.

The VFF Congress: A Decisive Moment

A national football federation congress is, by nature, a governance event. It does not produce goals, does not change a tactical formation, does not improve any team's PPDA. But it determines who controls resources, how those resources are allocated, and for how many years. The VFF Congress for the 2026-2030 term lands at a particularly sensitive time: Vietnamese football has just completed a cycle of results judged to exceed expectations, with titles from the U23 level up to the senior national team.

That success creates what analysts call a 'window of reform legitimacy.' When on-pitch results are good, people tend to listen to reform proposals more easily, because the prevailing mood is that being in a winning position allows one to take risks and change things. Conversely, when results fail, every reform proposal is scrutinised through a lens of fear. Bau Duc understands this psychological mechanism. He chose a moment of success to raise difficult points, rather than using success to postpone the discussion.

Based on my experience tracking matches and transfers, I have observed that Southeast Asian federations tend to handle two types of crisis very differently. On-pitch crises are handled quickly, sometimes ruthlessly: coaches are replaced within weeks. Boardroom crises are postponed indefinitely, because they involve seats and cash flows. The 2026-2030 VFF Congress is precisely the moment when the second type of crisis is forced into the open.

This governance context matters because it governs almost the entire talent supply chain of Vietnamese football. A federation decides how youth training budgets are allocated, which academies are licensed, how the national league operates, and, most importantly, where the money flows in from. When those decisions are made at a congress, they affect not just one season. They shape an entire decade.

Having observed how European clubs restructured after the pandemic, I see a striking parallel. During 2026-2026, when global football revenues evaporated by billions of euros, clubs were forced to shift from a 'spend by inspiration' model to a 'spend by cash flow' model. The pandemic did not destroy football, it only wiped out the poor managers. The clubs that survived were not the richest ones, but the ones with the most transparent financial structures and the most diversified revenue streams. Vietnamese football faces a similar lesson, except it does not need a pandemic to realise it.

The Financial Structure: Where Money Flows and Where It Stops

The most notable thing about Bau Duc's statement is its economic directness. He said the VFF 'needs businessmen who know how to create cash flow, know how to manage, and especially dare to spend money.' Read carefully, this sentence contains three layers stacked on top of each other. The first layer is about capability: creating cash flow. The second is about method: knowing how to manage. The third is about nerve: daring to spend. These three layers cannot be separated, and the absence of any one is enough to trap a football ecosystem.

In developed football markets, revenue is structured around four relatively clear pillars: broadcasting rights, commercial and sponsorship, matchday revenue, and player transfers. Each pillar has its own earning cycle and its own risk level. Broadcasting is the most stable pillar but also the hardest to grow, because it depends on the size of the viewing market. Commercial is the highest-margin pillar but depends on brand strength. Matchday is tied to infrastructure. Transfers are the most volatile pillar, capable of delivering an enormous profit in one season or leaving a club empty-handed.

What I observe about Vietnamese football, and what Bau Duc's statement indirectly acknowledges, is that this ecosystem has not yet completed any of those pillars at a scale commensurate with its ambition. The ambition is clear: qualifying for the World Cup, reaching continental level. But the commercial base of the national league, as Bau Duc describes it, is far too thin to support that ambition. This is a resource-ambition mismatch, and such mismatches in football history rarely self-correct. They are only resolved when someone actively restructures.

I once spent months analysing the Neymar transfer to understand how release clauses, signing fees, and financial fair play mechanisms interlock. The biggest lesson drawn was this: money in football never flows in one direction. It flows according to structure, and that structure is designed by people. A federation does not create money out of nothing. It creates mechanisms so that money has a reason to flow in, and so that those who send money in feel safe doing so. The VFF, as a social-professional organisation, is in a difficult position to design such mechanisms, because its legal status does not allow it to operate purely as a commercial entity.

The 'Patron' Model: Advantage With a Fatal Risk

Bau Duc's second notable statement concerns dependency: the problem of Vietnamese football today cannot rely only on a few academies or a few 'patrons.' This sentence carries particular weight when the person saying it is himself a typical patron, someone who has poured money into the HAGL academy for nearly two decades.

The patron model has one clear advantage: speed of decision-making. When an individual is both owner and decision-maker, there is no board that needs to meet, no shareholders to convince. Money is injected into the academy, players are signed, projects are launched far faster than a bureaucratic machine could manage. This is why the model was highly effective in the early phase of building professional football in Vietnam.

But that advantage comes with a fatal risk, and this is the point I want to emphasise because it is often overlooked in emotional debates. When a club's or an ecosystem's finances are bound tightly to the fortunes of a few individuals, the club's balance sheet and those individuals' balance sheets become one. When the individual struggles, the club struggles. When the individual loses interest, the training project loses its lifeblood. This is not a moral judgement about the model, but an observation about risk structure.

Bau Duc himself has admitted he 'had to pay the price for investment decisions.' The way he describes his own up-and-down journey, including a period when his group faced financial pressure, shows that the patron model is not merely a strategic choice. It is a choice that carries concentration risk, and that risk has materialised at least once. For an analyst, this is a vivid case study in resource-concentration risk. Once resources are concentrated at a single point, any fluctuation at that point spreads through the entire system.

I have spent years observing how different football markets handle this problem. In Europe, after many decades, mechanisms such as club licensing, salary caps, and financial fair play were built to reduce dependence on a single individual. These mechanisms are imperfect and are constantly circumvented, but they exist because the lessons were too costly. In Japan, where I live and work, J-League clubs operate on a corporate model with dispersed ownership structures, thereby minimising the 'one person carrying the whole team' risk. Notably, the Japanese model was not built because they were richer, but because they understood that sustainability matters more than speed.

The patron model of Vietnamese football has an interesting paradox. It produced achievements that a purely bureaucratic system could hardly have produced in the same timeframe, as the HAGL academy proves. But those very achievements expose the model's weakness: when success depends on a few individuals, that success cannot be systematically replicated. Bau Duc recognises this, and his speaking out against the very model he embodies is a rare 'conversion narrative' among football owners.

The Academy as a National Asset, Not Just a Club Asset

To understand why this financial problem matters, the HAGL academy must be placed in its proper position within Vietnamese football's value chain. This academy is not an ordinary training centre. It is a national-level talent supplier. The players who graduated from it have become pillars of the national team, contributing to the string of achievements Bau Duc referenced in his statement.

In other words, HAGL is a club whose influence far exceeds its league table position. The club's real product is not trophies, but the flow of players into the national football system. This is a classic 'selling and developing club' model within the football food chain, similar to how clubs like Ajax or Porto operate in Europe, albeit at a different scale and context.

This leads to an important strategic consequence. If Vietnamese football's talent is concentrated in too few academies, then the system has a single point of failure. If one of those academies weakens for financial reasons, the entire talent supply to the national team is affected. This is exactly what Bau Duc warned about when he said Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few academies or a few patrons. He was not talking about HAGL's own interest. He was talking about systemic risk.

I once built youth player rankings based on a system of indicators, and the recurring lesson was this: the more concentrated the talent supply, the more volatile its value. A country with ten academies feeding talent into the national team will be far more stable than a country with only two or three doing so. This is a basic principle of diversification, and it applies to both cash flow and human flow.

People see a fast player, I see a tactical era. But in Vietnamese football's case, people see a few glittering stars, and what I see is a fragile supply chain behind them. The brilliance of Cong Phuong, Xuan Truong, Tuan Anh, Van Toan, Van Thanh, Hong Duy is real. But that reality raises a difficult question: if the next generation is not trained to the same quality, what happens to the national team over the next ten years?

The generation of players who graduated from the 2026 academy is now entering the twilight of their peak years or has already passed it. This is a natural law of football. The problem is not that they are ageing, but whether there is a sufficiently high-quality next generation to replace them. If the answer depends on whether a few patrons continue to spend, then that is a fragile answer. This very fragility is what a new governance model needs to address.

The Blind Spot: When Money Obscures the Technical Pathway

At this point, I want to offer a counter-intuitive angle, because if we simply agree with Bau Duc that Vietnamese football needs more money, we have missed half the story. The argument that 'without money, don't talk about reaching the top' is a resource-determinist argument. It is right in direction, but it has a blind spot.

That blind spot is the underestimation of non-monetary factors. Football history has no shortage of examples of federations with modest budgets that still achieved superior results thanks to high talent density, good coaching quality, and intelligent tactical organisation. Conversely, there is no shortage of football ecosystems that poured in enormous amounts of money without achieving commensurate results, because money was not converted into capability. Money is a necessary condition, but it has never been a sufficient one.

When a public debate revolves around money and governance, there is a risk that the technical development pathway is pushed down the priority list. Coach education, a playing philosophy running through all levels, the youth competition system, refereeing quality, and tactical culture are all factors that determine long-term achievement but are harder to measure than cash flow. They rarely appear in headlines. And because they rarely appear, they are easily forgotten at congresses, where decisions usually revolve around budget allocation and personnel.

I do not have enough quantitative data to assess the depth of this problem in the Vietnamese football context, because Bau Duc's statement does not provide specific figures on VFF revenues, V.League club budgets, or wage bills. I can say one thing with certainty: when a debate about the future of football takes place without any figures being published, both the proposer and the critic are speaking from feeling. And in an industry where I have spent my whole career pursuing numerical accuracy, that is a worrying thing.

The market never lies, only contracts that have not been read carefully. This holds true for transfer deals, and it also holds true for a football ecosystem. If Vietnamese football truly wants to know how much money it needs to reach the World Cup, the first thing to do is publish the figures it currently has. You cannot manage what you do not measure. This is a basic principle of modern governance, and it has not been fully implemented.

Another blind spot concerns the structure of the very model Bau Duc proposes. He wants to bring businessmen, those with management methods and investment thinking, into the VFF leadership apparatus. But the VFF is a social-professional organisation. This legal status imposes certain limits on applying a purely commercial governance model. You cannot simply bring businessmen in and expect everything to change, if the legal framework does not allow them to operate the way they are used to. This is a structural constraint, and it is often overlooked in debates about personnel.

Conflict of Interest and the Conversion Narrative

There is one detail about Bau Duc himself that cannot be ignored when analysing his statement. He is not only a club owner. He once served as VFF Vice Chairman in charge of finance. This means he has both insider knowledge of how the federation operates and an interest tied to a specific club.

This duality creates a complex situation. When a person is both a club owner and a proposer of a financial model for the federation, that person's proposals may be read as self-interested. This is unavoidable, and it applies to almost every influential figure in world football. In Europe, club owners routinely participate in football governance bodies, and each time, the question of conflict of interest is raised. The important thing is not to eliminate conflict of interest entirely, but to build transparent mechanisms to control it.

But I believe focusing only on conflict of interest would miss the more important point. What is notable about Bau Duc is that he is speaking out against the very model he embodies. He says Vietnamese football cannot rely only on a few patrons, while he is one of the most prominent patrons. This is a form of 'conversion narrative' that is rarely seen among football owners. It may stem from various motives, but whatever the motive, its content remains analytically correct.

There is another possibility I want to raise with medium confidence. Bau Duc's emphasis on management methods and investment thinking, rather than simply calling for more spending, suggests he sees Vietnamese football's gap as a governance gap, not merely a financial one. This is a far more sophisticated position than the 'need more money' argument. If so, his real message is not 'spend more,' but 'manage better, and the money will follow.'

Every transfer is a card game, and I am among the few who know the real hand. In this case, the real hand is not the amount of money needed, but the mechanism for allocating that money. Anyone who can design such a mechanism transparently and sustainably will change Vietnamese football more than any single investment.

Concentration Risk and Lessons From Two Markets

I have a particular advantage in analysing this story: I grew up in Spain and now live in Japan. These two football markets represent two almost opposing governance philosophies, and observing both helps me see things I might have missed if I stood in only one place.

Spanish football operates on a model of member-owned social clubs combined with large private clubs. This model creates institutional stability, because power is not concentrated in one individual. But it also creates slow decision-making and sometimes protracted internal political battles. Japanese football operates on a corporate model, where large corporations own clubs with professional governance structures. This model creates financial stability and long-term planning capability, but sometimes makes tactical decisions overly cautious.

What both models share is the dispersion of power and resources. No club in Spain or Japan depends so completely on a single individual that that person's departure could cause the club to collapse. This is something Vietnamese football, with its patron model, has not yet achieved. And this is precisely the gap I believe Bau Duc is trying to close with his statement.

The lesson from these two markets is not that Vietnamese football should copy the Spanish or Japanese model. Copying a model without understanding the context is a common mistake, and it usually fails because assumptions about rules, negotiating culture, and ownership structures do not align. The correct lesson is that Vietnamese football needs to design a model suited to its own circumstances, but that model must share one characteristic with successful models: dispersed resources and professionalised governance.

I want to raise three conditions that could make my conclusion wrong, because I always try to maintain weighted confidence rather than absolute confidence. First condition: if Vietnamese football has hidden revenue streams I do not know about, my assessment of the fragility of its commercial foundation may be overly pessimistic. Second condition: if the patron model can genuinely be converted into a corporate model without changing the legal framework, then the constraint of social-professional organisational status I raised may be less severe. Third condition: if other academies are developing strongly and I lack the data, then the risk of talent-supply concentration may be decreasing rather than increasing.

The Next Domino

The VFF Congress for the 2026-2030 term is not a single event. It is the starting point of a domino chain whose outcome will become clear over many years. If this congress can deliver a transparent, diversified, power-dispersed financial model, then Vietnamese football will have a chance to move from a phase of individual dependency to a phase of systemic dependency. If not, this ecosystem will continue to operate by inertia, and inertia in football always leads to the same outcome: today's success becomes tomorrow's burden.

What I believe most strongly, after nine years of tracking the football market, is that football ecosystems do not fail for lack of talent. They fail for lack of mechanisms to convert talent into sustainable achievement. Vietnamese football has talent, as the generation produced by the HAGL academy proves. It has ambition, as the World Cup and continental goals prove. What it still lacks is mechanism. And mechanism, unlike talent and ambition, cannot wait. It must be designed, and it must be designed at the right moment when change is still possible.

Modern football is not won on the pitch; it is bought in advance at the negotiating table. This is true of every transfer, and it is even truer of a federation congress. Vietnamese football's real match does not take place on the grass. It takes place in the meeting room, where numbers are laid on the table and mechanisms are shaped. Bau Duc understands this. The remaining question is whether those sitting in that room understand it, and whether they have the courage to turn understanding into action.

Vietnamese football does not lack people who know how to count money. It lacks people who dare to redesign how money is counted.