Bau Thuy's bid for the VFF chair: money, seats and the people missing from the minutes

In 2026, on stand B of the 19/8 stadium in Nha Trang, on a late July evening, a man in a white shirt with a frayed collar sat next to me. He did not cheer for either team. For the whole first half his eyes stayed fixed on the touchline where the substitutes were warming up, and his hand kept writing on a piece of paper folded into four. I leaned over and asked. He unfolded the paper for me. No score, no team names. Just small, shaky lines: “14 — minute 31 of the first half — abandoned on the right flank — still running.” “Number 7 — on at 68 — nobody passed to him.” “Left-back — called for the ball four times — never received it once.” He said: “I write down the ones nobody mentions.” A football match in Vietnam can put twenty thousand people in the stands, but only about twenty are truly seen. The rest run in silence, and when the final whistle goes, they walk into the tunnel without anyone calling their name. I bring that up because for the past few days the most repeated name in Vietnamese football belongs to a man who sits at the very top. Information from within the game suggests that Nguyen Duc Thuy — known to everyone as Bau Thuy — is preparing the steps to run for the chairmanship of the Vietnam Football Federation at the next congress. No official document has been published. But in the corridors, that name has long been on the table, and each person says it in a different tone. I do not have a seat in that meeting room. I only have a place in the stands and a notebook. A name read aloud in the corridor Nguyen Duc Thuy is chairman of Xuan Thanh Group, a major building-materials company with factories and projects stretching from Nam Dinh southward. In football, his name is tied to the club called Xuan Thanh Sai Gon Cement, which played in the V.League in the early 2010s — a club owned by a business, funded by a business, and whose fate was decided by a business. In 2026, at the seventh VFF congress, his name was mentioned among the candidates before the ballot. That vote ended with a different chairman, and Vietnamese football entered a long decade of successive crises of confidence: refereeing scandals, match-fixing cases, election controversies, clubs dissolving mid-season. The structure of the VFF is not complicated for people inside the game. A congress every four years, an elected executive committee, a standing committee that runs daily affairs, and specialised committees for refereeing, discipline, and player eligibility. Most professional competitions are operated by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company, but the controlling shares remain with the federation. In other words, the person in the VFF chair does not merely manage the national team; that person sits at the intersection of sponsorship money, fixture scheduling, disciplinary rulings and the commercial rights of the entire game. Tran Quoc Tuan has held the VFF chair since 2026 and was re-elected at the ninth congress in 2026. That term closes in 2026. The tenth congress is where every name must be placed on the table, and where every private arrangement must either step into the light or disappear. The context a candidate walks into is not comfortable. The national team has passed through a short golden window — the 2026 AFF Cup title, the 2026 Asian Cup quarter-final, two SEA Games golds, a first-ever appearance in the third round of World Cup qualifying. Those results lifted the commercial value of Vietnamese football to a new level. But underneath, the V.League remains a competition where spectators come for a local club rather than for the league, and where clubs still live off a parent company rather than off a market. That is the ground any candidate must accept: a country whose national team is expensive and whose domestic league is poor. Fourteen names, fourteen patrons From my experience covering matches at Thien Truong, Lach Tray, Hang Day and 19/8, one thing is rarely said at press conferences: the V.League does not operate as a commercial league. It operates as fourteen businesses renting a shared organising body. Each club survives because one person or one group of people has money and affection for football. A season's budget for most clubs sits in the range of a few tens of billions of dong, most of it from the owner's pocket or the parent company's marketing budget. Self-generated revenue — tickets, redistributed broadcast rights, merchandise, shirt sponsorship — contributes a small slice. At many clubs, a full season of ticket sales does not cover one month of the squad's wages. The first consequence is fragility. When the parent company runs into trouble — a loan, a revoked project, a turn in the market — the club is the first thing cut. Players are not sold because they are not good enough; they are sold because of somebody else's balance sheet. I have watched a team train normally in the morning and, by the afternoon, three key players told their contracts were being terminated, with no press conference and no explanation. The second consequence is how decisions get made. In a league where the club chairman also pays the coach, tactical decisions and accounting decisions tend to share a table. A young player in form can be pushed into the first team earlier than he should be, to raise his transfer value. A veteran can be kept not because his legs still work, but because he is the face of the shirt sponsor's campaign. The pitch breathes through the whistle, through the studs, through the silence after a botched move. But it also breathes through invoices. And in Vietnam, that invoice usually carries a single signature. This is why the question of who chairs the VFF matters far more than it appears. The person in that seat may not pay players directly, but that person writes the rules for the people who do: on cross-ownership, on transfers, on whether a business may sponsor the league and own a club at the same time. A market with no prices There is a paradox I have always found hard to explain to foreigners: Vietnam produces players, yet has almost no domestic transfer market. Most movement inside the country happens as expiring contracts and free signings. A club develops a player from eleven to twenty, then loses him for nothing to a richer club. Training compensation exists on paper, but in practice it is so weak that nobody factors it into financial planning. Investment in youth development becomes an unrecoverable cost — a moral obligation rather than an economic decision. I once asked an academy man in central Vietnam why he kept his programme running knowing most of his boys would leave. He smiled and said: “Because if I don't, in ten years there will be nobody left to play.” It is a beautiful answer. It is also a confession that the system runs on goodwill. Into that vacuum step the agents. And here I have a clear bias after sixteen years standing inside and outside these corridors: agents are the largest hidden cost in Vietnamese football. Not because the profession is dirty. Because when a market has no public prices, people pay for information instead of paying for players. The noise the trade generates distorts the market in very concrete ways. A nineteen-year-old with three good games can be inflated into “a target for European clubs”, a rumour pumped out to raise a price, a real negotiation hidden behind five fake ones. The owning club has no tool to value its own asset, because that asset was never listed. And the player — the one who actually has to move, learn a language, sit on a bench far from home — is usually the person who understands least about the deal bearing his name. A VFF chairman could change this with very specific rules: publish transfer fees, licence agents, enforce training compensation, cap commissions. But to do so, that person must face the very people who voted for him. One template, endlessly copied There is a shift over the past decade that spectators feel but rarely name: Vietnamese football has stopped producing traditional wingers. Walk into an academy now and you will see one template cloned. A right-footed player is placed on the left wing; a left-footed player on the right. The familiar drill is to receive on the touchline, cut inside, shoot with the stronger foot. An entire generation has been taught that the purpose of running to the byline is to turn back inward. It works by the numbers: more goals from the second line, more shots from the edge of the box. But it erases a type of player — the one who goes outside, who stretches the back line, who crosses with his natural foot after running the full length of the touchline, who forces a full-back to choose between two fears. I think of Nguyen Van Toan, number 14, the player I once rewatched four times just to count how often he went outside. He belongs to one of the last generations that still kept that reflex. Most players born after 2026 have been coached never to touch the touchline again. The tactical consequence spills into the national team. With nobody holding width, the full-back pushes high all game, and when the full-back pushes high, the space behind him becomes a killing zone. Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Hoang Duc and Nguyen Tien Linh have all played in matches where the attack crowded into the middle and the opponent simply stood in the right place to defend. The game became crowded in the centre and empty on the flanks — a reversal of the very thing the academies set out to create. A VFF chairman cannot teach a player to cushion a ball with his instep. But that person signs off the national development programme, decides who sits on the coaching council, and chooses the philosophy for youth teams. If that philosophy keeps cloning a single template, then in ten years we will have more players who look alike and fewer options. The whistle and the trust One thing costs more than sponsorship money, and Vietnamese football has lost it several times: trust in the honesty of results. A wrong refereeing decision does not just ruin a match. It ruins the spectator's entire frame of reference. Once people watch a challenge and think about motive instead of technique, the stands may still be full but half the game is gone. I have sat in stands where the jeering was louder than the cheering, and the sad part is that the jeering was not irrational. VAR arrived as a technical answer. But VAR cannot fix an institutional problem: when the governing body is also the judging body, every ruling carries a shadow of doubt. A federation that organises the league, appoints the referees, issues disciplinary rulings and decides who gets promoted creates its own conflict by design. This is where a wealthy candidate can make a real difference, and also where a wealthy candidate is most likely to stumble. Money can buy technology, professional referees, camera systems. Money cannot buy the independence of the person who rules, unless the powers are actually separated. The ballot A VFF congress is not a general election. Delegates come from member organisations: provincial and municipal federations, professional clubs, associations and a number of collective members. Whoever holds that network holds the result. And here is what I want to state plainly, because it is often misunderstood: money cannot buy votes. But money can buy presence. A business that sponsors a province's youth tournament, sponsors a grassroots club, sponsors an academy in the mountains — that is not bribery. It is the only way an outsider becomes an insider. In a federation with a thin budget, the person able to write large cheques holds a structural advantage without doing anything wrong. That is Bau Thuy's advantage. It is also his risk. The risk has a name: conflict of interest. A man who owns a building-materials business, who has ties to clubs, and who is preparing to sit in the seat that writes the rules for clubs — that is a structure any football nation must handle with clear regulation. Not by excluding people with money, but by forcing them to choose: either chair the federation, or own the club. I have heard two currents of opinion in recent days. The first says Vietnamese football needs someone with money and business connections, because the federation currently cannot earn and cannot retain talent. The second says putting a club owner in the highest chair legitimises the very model we are trying to escape. Both have a point. And both are talking about the same thing: power, not football. The blind spot of a race for a seat What keeps me awake after every congress is not who wins. It is what nobody mentions across four hours of meetings. In that room, people talk about the national team, about broadcast rights, about competition planning, about expanding the V.League. They do not talk about the U11 coach in a mountain district teaching children with a ball whose leather has peeled off, on a schoolyard with two wooden posts. They do not talk about the women's league, where players train and then take second jobs. They do not talk about futsal, a sport where Vietnam twice reached a World Cup and which has almost no sponsor. My notes do not hold players. They hold the moments when those players forgot someone was watching. And in my notebook, the most durable names are not the ones in the front row. There is a deeper blind spot. The whole debate rests on the assumption that the VFF chair is the biggest lever in Vietnamese football. I do not believe it. The biggest lever sits where nobody wants to look: the First and Second Divisions, where hundreds of players play without decent contracts, without insurance, without a regular monthly wage. A game that is only healthy at the top is a game living on illusion. Our collective memory has blind spots too. We remember the names of men who chaired the federation, who were removed, who were investigated. We do not remember the man who raised a batch of U11s for eight years, who carried a player from a dirt pitch to the first team. A game that remembers wrongly will choose wrongly. The silence at the 19/8 stadium is not empty. It is dense, like a confession never spoken. The people sitting in it saw everything: who ran, who gave up, who was called by name and who was left behind. They simply have no vote. The match ends, the pitch keeps breathing. And I am still sitting there, listening. If Bau Thuy does enter this race, I hope to hear him speak about the things that never appear in a trophy cabinet: training compensation, the rights of young players, the independence of referees — and one simple question. Four years from now, how many more children in a poor district will have seen a pitch with real grass? The answer will not appear in the congress minutes. It will appear in some stand, much later, when a man in a white shirt folds his piece of paper and stands up to go home.