V.League Between Seasons: When the Payroll Writes Before the Table Does

There is a message I have never deleted from my phone. It arrived at 11 p.m., from a 22-year-old player at a club in central Vietnam: "Bro, I got paid." Four words. No exclamation mark, no emoji. Just four words, typed quickly in a rented room I know has no air conditioning.

I had waited three weeks for that message. Before it, he had told me his team was two months behind on wages, the team's meal budget had been halved, and the physiotherapist — the only staff member who understood hamstring injuries — had quit because he was not being paid in full. The transfer window was open, but none of the players on that team dared sign a new contract. They were afraid. Not of injury, but that their signature would end up alongside an empty payroll.

I chose to write this piece now because the annual season is entering its decisive stretch. Teams are fighting relegation, chasing continental cup places, and behind the touchline, contract talks are happening in silence. But one thing rings out clearly, even if no one wants to hear it: the sound of unpaid wages.

To understand why the story of that 22-year-old is not an isolated case, you have to look at the economic structure of Vietnamese football.

V.League 1 currently has 14 clubs. Most depend on a single financial source: a parent company or a single owner. This model has existed for nearly two decades and produces a paradox. When the parent company does well, the club can spend heavily on quality foreign players. When the company's cash flow tightens — because real estate freezes, because interest rates rise, because a project stalls — the club is the first item to be cut.

A typical V.League club's revenue falls into four buckets. First, support from the parent company, which dominates. Second, shirt and league sponsorships. Third, ticket sales, usually modest because average attendance is only a few thousand per match. Fourth, player sales — a source many clubs treat as a lifeline but which depends on someone being willing to buy.

Notably, there are broadcast rights. In many Southeast Asian leagues, this is a pillar. In Vietnam, the figure remains small relative to the total operating cost of a season. As a result, clubs lack a financial cushion thick enough to absorb shocks. One disrupted season, one sponsor pulling out, or one parent company in trouble is enough to make the payroll wobble.

And when the payroll wobbles, the first things cut are not star salaries. They are the small items — meals, accommodation, the medical department. That is why, in many of my investigations, young players and support staff are the first to suffer.

The mid-season and end-of-season transfer windows in the V.League have a feature I always stress to readers: they are not like Europe. In Europe, transfers are a market with valuations, auctions, and professional intermediaries. In Vietnam, a transfer is often the result of a phone call between two acquaintances, and a player's value is sometimes decided by relationships rather than data.

That does not mean Vietnamese football lacks valuable deals. It has them. But it means information about those deals is very hard to verify. And when information is hard to verify, rumors thrive. I was once a victim of that myself — in 2026, early in my career, I published a wrong story and had to correct it three times in one day. That lesson has followed me throughout my career: no two independent sources, no story.

Now let us get to the core. I want to use four layers of analysis to explain why a V.League transfer window is so dominated by the wage-debt story.

Layer one: cash flow and cyclicality.

Vietnamese football moves with the economic cycle, but with a longer lag and greater amplitude. When real estate and construction boom — two sectors many V.League owners are tied to — clubs spend heavily. When those sectors stall, spending is tightened. The problem is that player contracts usually run two to three years, while the parent company's business cycle can reverse within a single year.

The result is that a club can sign a three-year, high-salary contract during a boom, and by year two — when the parent company struggles — that salary becomes a burden. The most common way of handling it is not termination, because that requires compensation, but delayed payment. Delayed payment does not break the contract on paper, but it breaks trust in the dressing room.

I once spoke with a club executive who admitted: "We don't want to owe. But if we pay on time, we have to dissolve." That sentence sounds like tragedy, but it is also a confession about a governance model.

There is a detail the media rarely mentions: most wage-debt cases do not begin with the club being completely out of money. They begin with delayed cash flow. The parent company is waiting on a payment, a contract, a loan. While waiting, it transfers money to the club later than planned. To the company, that is a small delay. To the player, it is a month without pay.

Layer two: transfer value and the chicken-and-egg problem.

In the V.League, the transfer value of a domestic player is usually low. Most internal deals happen as free transfers or low fees, because Vietnamese players are rarely sold abroad for large sums. This creates a paradox: clubs need to sell players for money, but the market does not pay enough for selling to be a genuine financial solution.

Meanwhile, foreign players consume a large share of the budget. A quality foreign striker in the V.League can earn many times a domestic player's salary. When budgets tighten, clubs usually cut in two places: young domestic players and the support staff. They keep foreign players because foreign players score, and goals are what keep a coach in his job.

This is the point I want to stress: how a club handles a financial crisis reveals its true order of priorities, and that order rarely puts young players first.

I have followed many V.League teams in recent years, and I have noticed a repeating pattern. When a team falls into financial crisis, it usually takes three steps in order. First, it cuts the team's meal and accommodation budgets. Second, it delays payments to small suppliers. Third, it sells or loans out young players. Only when those three steps are insufficient does it touch foreign players' salaries or terminate a coach's contract.

Those three steps share one thing: they all target the people with the least voice. Young players have no strong agent. Small suppliers have no tight contract. And the medical department, as I said, is the easiest to cut because no one sees its value on the scoreboard.

Layer three: the dressing room and trust.

Wage debt is not only a money issue. It is a psychological one. A player who knows he has not been paid will play differently — not necessarily worse, but with a divided mind. I have watched many matches where a team underperformed, and later discovered that a few days before that match, the team had not been paid. The correlation is not always clear, but it is enough that I never judge a team purely by on-field data.

There is a metric I built in my notebook: I call it the "promise gap." It is the distance between what club leadership tells players in the dressing room and what actually happens on the payroll. When the gap is small, the team is stable. When the gap is large, the team has a problem — even if the table does not yet show it.

I remember a match I watched from the stands. The home team led 2-0 at halftime, then collapsed in the second half and lost 2-3. On television, commentators talked about tactical mistakes, about the coach making substitutions too late. But when I spoke with a player after the match, he said something that silenced me: "Bro, in the second half we were playing with rent money on our minds."

That is the kind of information no metric can capture. Expected goals cannot capture it. Pass accuracy cannot capture it. Only people can — and that is why I always stay in touch with players, not just with data tables.

It is also worth mentioning the role of agents. In an opaque market, agents become the bridge between players and cash flow. A good agent can help his client get paid on time, or find a new landing spot when the club struggles. But a bad agent can exploit a young player's ignorance for personal gain.

I once witnessed a case where a young player signed with a club through an intermediary, and when the club fell behind on wages, he discovered he did not have the original contract. He only had a photocopy, and on that photocopy, some clauses had been altered. That is the fragility of the system. Not everyone is treated this way, but the fact that it can happen is enough to show the problem.

Layer four: the licensing mechanism and the enforcement gap.

The Asian Football Confederation has a club licensing framework that includes financial requirements — for example, no overdue debts to players and staff. In theory, this is the strongest tool to protect workers in football. In practice, enforcement at the national level has many gaps.

The issue is that criteria and practice do not always align. A club can submit its file on time, sign the required commitments, and still let the payroll fall months behind afterwards. When licensing is not tied to a continuous monitoring system, it becomes administrative procedure rather than a financial barrier.

I do not have enough evidence to assert that any specific club is in violation. But I have enough observation to say this: if a player has to text a journalist to demand his wages, then the system meant to protect him has failed somewhere.

At this point, I want to offer a counterintuitive view.

The orthodox story about Vietnamese football is usually told in two directions. The first is pessimistic: clubs owe wages, the league lacks professionalism, players are treated unfairly. The second is optimistic: the league is growing, there are more sponsors, Vietnamese players are going abroad.

Both directions miss one point. The V.League's problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of a mechanism to allocate and protect cash flow. Many clubs still have substantial budgets. But that money flows along the path of relationships and one individual's will, not through a system with rules.

This explains why wage-debt crises do not lead to reform. When a wage-debt scandal erupts, the response is usually to resolve the situation — pay part of it, apologize, promise next time. But no one builds a mechanism to prevent it from recurring. And so it recurs.

I once heard an agent tell me: "In Vietnam, a contract is for signing, not for enforcing." I do not want to believe that. But I understand why he said it. Agents hide their cards, players hide their dreams — and I hide both. I hide what I know until I have enough evidence, and I hide the dreams I have heard, because I know that publishing them too early can harm the teller.

The counterintuitive angle here is this: if you think the problem is the owner's morality, you will never solve it. The problem is structure. And structure only changes when there is pressure from within — from players, from the association, from a new generation of leadership that understands a league cannot grow on empty payrolls.

I also want to pose the reverse question to the optimists. If the league is truly growing, why does the wage-debt story repeat every year? A growing league is measured not only by the number of sponsors, but by whether a 22-year-old player can be confident he will be paid at the end of the month. That is the most modest measure, and also the hardest to achieve.

This annual season will end, and a new transfer window will open. There will be contracts signed, new signings presented under the lights, articles praising clubs' ambitions. I will write about those things, because that is my job.

But I will also keep tracking something else — something that does not appear in the table. It is the gap between promises and the payroll. When that gap narrows, Vietnamese football will not only have better matches, but people who can live true to their profession.

People call broken seasons slips. I call them the place where I began to stand firm — because only by looking straight at the fracture do we know where to rebuild.