V.League and the Great Revaluation of the Transfer Market: When Money Stops Flowing Toward Reputation

There is a question a V.League club executive asked me in late 2026, over a coffee in District 1, Saigon, that I still cannot forget: "How much do you think we should pay for a domestic player, when his value is measured only by the number of shirts sold outside the store?" I did not answer right away. Because that question, simple as it sounds, cut straight into the most painful spot in Vietnam's football transfer market: we have never been able to price a player by his actual ability, and we still price him by emotion, by reputation, and by the number of spectators who come to the stadium.

Two months later, during the mid-season transfer window of the 2026-25 V.League, I sat down with three different agents, in three different cities. All three told me the same thing in three different ways: domestic players are being paid below their true value, while money flows toward foreign contracts that have already passed their peak. Between those two currents sits a generation of Vietnamese players entering the prime of their careers without anyone, including themselves, knowing what they are truly worth.

People see contracts; I see the people sitting behind the negotiating table. And the story of the V.League transfer market today is not a story of numbers, but a story of people trying to redefine their own value within a system that is not yet ready to pay them what they deserve.

Context: A market built with one person's money

To understand why the V.League transfer market operates the way it does, you have to start with the structure of ownership. Most clubs in Vietnam's top division do not live on football revenue. They live on the money of a company, a conglomerate, a bank, or a single patron. The television rights revenue of the whole league, after being split among the clubs, is not enough to pay the wages of a few key players. Commercial revenue depends on results, and results depend on investment. It is a closed circle: to have money you must have results, and to have results you must have money.

In such a market, transfer decisions are not made by a sporting director analysing data, but by a club chairman weighing honour, ambition, and the paying capacity of the parent company. This is the key point: when the payer is not the market but an individual or a conglomerate, the price of a player no longer reflects that player's value. It reflects how much someone wants that player to belong to them.

Since 2026, when I began tracking Vietnam's transfer market systematically, I have noticed something no statistical table shows: the biggest deals in the V.League are usually not the most rational ones, but the ones that someone had enough money and enough determination to make happen. Cong An Ha Noi won the V.League in 2026, only their second season after promotion, largely thanks to a string of signings few clubs in Vietnam could compete for. Thep Xanh Nam Dinh won the 2026-24 title by a similar logic: a large conglomerate behind them, a clear ambition, and a budget that did not have to worry too much about breaking even.

That is not wrong. It simply means the V.League transfer market operates on the logic of financial power, not the logic of value. And when the game is decided by one person's wallet, players at smaller clubs are always the weaker party in every negotiation.

Analysis: Domestic players priced by emotion

This is the point I want to spend the most time on, because it is the biggest blind spot in Vietnamese football.

Domestic players in the V.League are priced by how famous they are, not by how much they contribute on the pitch. A striker who scores fifteen goals a season at a mid-table club can earn less than a famous attacking midfielder who scores only five, simply because the midfielder sells more shirts. This is not an emotional judgment on my part. It is what the brokers themselves told me as I sat listening to them explain how they price a player before proposing him to a club.

They calculate three things. First, popularity: social media followers and media appearances. Second, commercial value: the ability to sell shirts and draw crowds to the stadium. Third, and only third, actual ability, which is usually the most casually assessed, because Vietnamese clubs rarely have an analytics department strong enough to evaluate it seriously.

Look at the story of player exports. In 2026, Doan Van Hau joined SC Heerenveen in the Netherlands on loan. He was one of the best young left-backs in Southeast Asia at the time, having featured in the AFC U23 Championship team of the tournament. But in the Netherlands he barely played, and returned to Vietnam after one season. Three years later, in July 2026, Nguyen Quang Hai left Hanoi FC to join Pau FC in France's Ligue 2, a deal once hailed as a turning point for Vietnamese football. He also lasted only one season before returning home to play for Cong An Ha Noi.

I do not tell these two stories to say that Vietnamese players are not good enough to play abroad. I tell them to point out something else: when Vietnamese players go abroad, they are judged by metrics that Vietnamese football itself never taught them to read. In Europe, a defender is measured by successful tackles, progressive passes, and positional discipline within a pressing system. In Vietnam, a defender is measured by the feeling of reassurance when you see him on the pitch. Two different measurement systems, and the gap between them is precisely the gap a Vietnamese player must cross when going abroad.

Based on my experience watching matches, I believe the problem is not physicality or technique, because Vietnamese players are good enough to play in many Asian leagues. The problem is that they step into a market where a player's value is decided by data, while throughout their careers at home they were never assessed by data. They are good in the way the V.League needs, but have not been trained in the way the international market demands.

Agents: The people holding the keys

You cannot talk about the V.League transfer market without talking about the agents. They are the layer between the player and the club, and in many cases they are the only people who truly understand a player's real value.

But the agent profession in Vietnam is still in its infancy. There is no strict licensing system, no association strong enough to protect the interests of both sides, and no public database of player values. This means every negotiation takes place in a grey zone, where personal trust matters more than the contract, and where a promise can be worth more than a written clause.

There are transfers that are not in the document but in a promise made at midnight. I have heard enough of those stories to understand that in the V.League, whether a deal succeeds or fails is usually decided before any paper is signed. A good agent is not the one who negotiates the highest price, but the one who understands what the club really wants and finds a way to place his player in exactly that position.

The problem is that when the market lacks transparency, the weakest party is always the young player. A nineteen-year-old just promoted to the first team does not know his own value, has no agent of real standing, and usually signs his first contract at a wage far below his future worth. Three years later, once he is a name, the club still holds him on the old contract, and he has no way to reclaim the value he created.

Vietnamese football and the foreign-player storm

Alongside the domestic-player story is the foreign-player story, where the money flows hardest and is also wasted most.

The V.League limits how many foreign players each club may register, and most teams use that slot for a striker. The reason is very practical: a foreign striker who scores fifteen goals a season wins points faster than any other investment. But behind that practicality is a dangerous habit: Vietnamese clubs tend to buy foreign players past their peak, aged thirty or above, on wages many times higher than the best domestic players.

Such contracts rarely create long-term value. A thirty-two-year-old striker cannot be resold. He cannot develop further. And when he gets injured, as often happens to players at the end of their careers, the club loses the entire investment. Yet clubs keep doing it, because buying an established foreign striker is the fastest way to reassure fans and the chairman that the club is serious.

I am not against foreign players. I am against how they are bought. A smart Southeast Asian club would buy young players from Africa or South America, develop them for two or three years, then sell them on to a bigger league. That is the model many clubs in Portugal, Belgium, or even Thailand have managed. But the V.League has almost never done it, because that model demands patience, which Vietnam's transfer market, under match-by-match pressure, does not have.

Naturalisation and the price of a shortcut

A new current is reshaping the valuation map of Vietnamese football: naturalisation. When the national team needs results immediately, the fastest route is to find players of foreign origin who have already proven themselves in the V.League and grant them citizenship.

The case of Nguyen Xuan Son, the Brazil-born striker who shone in the domestic league, is the clearest example. He became a key figure for the national team in the 2026 ASEAN Cup campaign, the tournament Vietnam won. It was a sensible decision on sporting grounds, but it also raises a larger market question: if a club can solve its striker problem by naturalising an established foreigner, where does the incentive to develop domestic strikers go?

I am not against naturalisation. But I worry about its long-term effect on the transfer market. When the shortcut becomes familiar, clubs will invest less in academies, because why spend eight years developing a striker when you can buy a ready-made one in three months? The answer, of course, is that the shortcut cannot scale. A national team can only naturalise a few positions. The rest of the squad must still come from this football culture itself.

The contrarian view: The blind spot is not the stars

This is where I want to say something few people say.

When people discuss the V.League transfer market, they discuss stars. Where Nguyen Quang Hai goes, whether Nguyen Hoang Duc stays or leaves, whether Nguyen Tien Linh is paid enough. But the real blind spot of this market is not the stars. It is the middle layer: the starters who are not famous, the defenders, the holding midfielders, the goalkeepers. These are the people who create the most value for a club and receive the least.

Think about it. A title-winning team needs a goalkeeper with fifteen clean sheets, a centre-back who reads the game well, a holding midfielder who shields the middle. These people do not sell shirts. They do not appear on the front page. And in a market that prices by reputation, they are paid below their true value. Meanwhile a flashy attacking midfielder can earn three times as much, even if his actual contribution is not necessarily greater.

The paradox is this: Vietnamese clubs say they lack money, but they spend it in a way that makes them lack money even more. They overpay for what is glamorous and underpay for what is essential. The result is an unbalanced squad: a brilliant attack, a fragile defence, and when the season turns harsh, the club collapses exactly where it saved money.

There is another aspect rarely mentioned. The V.League has no real secondary market. When a player's contract expires, he usually leaves for free. The club has invested years of training and wages but recovers nothing. In Europe, a club can sell a player with two years left on his contract to collect a transfer fee, then reinvest. In Vietnam that mechanism barely exists, because clubs are not in the habit of signing long-term contracts, and when they do, they are not in the habit of selling. They keep a player until he has no value left, then lose him for nothing.

That is why I believe the biggest problem in the V.League transfer market is not a lack of money, but a lack of a business model for players. A club cannot grow rich if it never manages to sell anything.

Conclusion: The next domino

In my many years tracking this market, I have learned that real change does not come from a record transfer, but from a different way of thinking.

At sixty-two, I no longer chase breaking news; I wait to see how people keep their word. And what I am waiting for in the V.League is the moment a Vietnamese club, for the first time, treats a player as an asset to develop and sell, rather than a gift to keep. The moment a club signs a five-year contract with a twenty-year-old, gives him minutes, raises his value, then sells him to a bigger league, and uses that money to build an academy and buy the next young player. That will be the first domino. And when it falls, the whole market will have to change with it.

Will any Vietnamese club be the first to dare take that path, when the reward only arrives years later while the pressure for results arrives in every single round? Until then, the V.League transfer market will remain a place where money flows toward reputation, domestic players are priced by emotion, and people in my trade must still sit down, listen to every story, piece together every trace, to try to understand what is truly happening behind a contract. Because, after all, people see contracts, while I see the people sitting behind the negotiating table.