V.League's Money Flow: Contracts on Paper, Silent Accounts

The 2026-24 season ended with Rafaelson Bezerra Fernandes scoring 31 goals for Thep Xanh Nam Dinh, leading the club to the V.League 1 title. Thirty-one goals is a record for a foreign player in a single V.League season. Those thirty-one goals were recorded, printed and quoted thousands of times across every newspaper, from television bulletins to social media posts.

But when I looked for the transfer fee Nam Dinh paid to sign him, his contractual salary, the length of his deal, his release clause — I found nothing. No press release, no financial statement, not a single line in VPF's published records. Fans know how many goals he scored. Nobody knows how much the club paid for those goals.

That is the familiar paradox of Vietnamese football: data exists where it is easiest to see and vanishes where it matters most. Goals are counted. Money is not.

V.League does not operate like a capital market

V.League 1 is organised by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF), under the supervision of the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF). On paper, it is a professional league with a legal entity, a title sponsor and broadcasting contracts. But in financial substance, most clubs are not independent businesses living off their own revenue.

Thep Xanh Nam Dinh is tied to a steel producer. Becamex Binh Duong belongs to an infrastructure investment corporation. Viettel is a defence telecommunications company. Cong An Ha Noi belongs to the Ministry of Public Security. Hoang Anh Gia Lai was once part of a group listed on the stock exchange. In most cases, the club is a subordinate unit — not a business with its own audited and published balance sheet.

The consequence is that no disclosure mechanism exists. The Premier League has Profit and Sustainability Rules, La Liga has squad cost control, UEFA has Financial Fair Play. V.League has no equivalent. No loss threshold, no salary cap, no obligation to file financial statements with the league's governing body. In other words: nobody asks where the money is, and nobody is obliged to answer.

The AFC Club Licensing Regulations do set financial criteria for clubs entering Asian competitions. But those criteria touch only a handful of teams each season, and most of the assessment is not published. The rest of the league sits outside every control loop.

Three specific gaps

The first gap is in the transfer market. In Europe, a transfer leaves an administrative trail: contract, fee, add-ons, sell-on percentage. In V.League, most deals are domestic moves or free transfers. When real money is involved, the figure is usually undisclosed, and if it is mentioned at all, the only source is an agent's account — a source that cannot be cross-checked.

Based on my experience covering matches in V.League and in European leagues, I have tried many times to match those figures against banking data or federation records. The result is almost always the same: there is nothing to match.

The second gap directly affects the fate of academies. Under FIFA's Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), Articles 20 and 21, clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23 are entitled to training compensation and a 5% solidarity contribution on international transfer fees. The mechanism only works when the fee is declared. If no fee is stated, the payment chain breaks at its starting point. Academies that spent ten years developing a player may receive nothing — not because they were robbed, but because there is no figure to attach a claim to.

This is the point I care about most after years of following Vietnamese football. An academy can produce talent, but it cannot produce honesty — and it cannot generate a transparent fee declaration from the buying club.

The third gap is wage arrears. When a club withdraws or dissolves, players and staff are the last to be paid. Saigon FC withdrew from V.League before the 2026 season. Similar cases have happened before, and will likely happen again. The problem is not that clubs die — it is that no central register records who owes whom, how much, and since when.

Football does not end at the 90th minute; it runs to the last line of the bank statement. In V.League, that last line is usually torn out of the file before anyone can read it.

The counter-argument, and the reasonable part of it

There is a legitimate argument I am obliged to state, even though it does not soften the problem.

Most V.League clubs are not pure football companies. They are the communications and social responsibility arms of larger corporations. Viettel does not run a team to make a profit; Cong An Ha Noi does not set a return-on-capital target. Asking them to publish their entire cost structure is like asking a marketing department to publish its internal advertising budget — something no business wants to do, and in some cases is not permitted to do.

Moreover, the league's total revenue is small. Broadcasting, sponsorship, tickets — combined, they cannot fund an independent audit system for fourteen clubs. Imposing a European-style transparency standard on a football economy without matching accounting infrastructure could raise operating costs without solving the root cause.

In the lower tiers, people do not need glory; they need a roof when the rain comes. But a roof is only worth something if people know what it is built from.

What needs to be asked

I once mispronounced Perišić's name, but I am never wrong about what I have witnessed. What I have witnessed in Vietnamese football is a system that records goals very carefully and money very loosely.

Fans are the ones who pay, but they are usually the last to see the books. A league only truly matures when someone dares to ask — and when a mechanism forces an answer: where is the money?

Contracts exist only on paper; the money evaporated long ago. If V.League wants to leave the grey zone, the first step is not signing more stars but building a central register of transfers, wages and debts. Without it, every transfer story is just a story, and every number is just faith.