The V.League People's Market: Ghost Contracts and Loans With Obligations to Buy

At two in the morning, an unknown number lights up the screen. On the other end is an agent I have known across four consecutive transfer windows, his voice hoarse from just finishing a long meeting in a hotel corridor. He says one sentence, enough to make me sit up and open my laptop: "That kid is going to Hanoi. But don't read the main contract, read the annex. A loan with an obligation to buy, signed twice — one copy for the Federation, one for the sponsor."

"A loan with an obligation to buy, signed twice." The phrase is nothing new to someone who has sat reading hundreds of annexes at the SHB Da Nang academy since he was sixteen. But in the middle of the V.League regular season, when the table is being warped by a few rescheduled matches and a few unpaid wage debts, it means something else. It is no longer about a single deal. It is about an entire structure. And that structure, this year, is tightening more than ever.

A ghost contract is never on paper — it lives inside a phone call at two in the morning.

I am not writing this to retell a sensational headline. I am writing because the next morning, when I called three other agents in my contacts, all three confirmed the same pattern. None of them was unfamiliar with signing twice. None of them was unfamiliar with a player being signed on loan from Club A to Club B while his wages are paid by a third-party company. The people's market of Vietnamese football has operated this way for years. The only difference is that when money from tickets and sponsorship shrinks, these ghost contracts begin to surface in places spectators rarely look: a club's balance sheet, the substitute list, and next season's registration slots.

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Context: What the People's Market Runs On

To understand the V.League, you have to understand one thing first: this is a league where most clubs do not live on broadcast money. The league's broadcasting revenue is distributed collectively, and for most teams it only covers part of the wage bill. Real survival comes from three places: money injected by owners, shirt sponsorship, and ticket sales — plus occasional windfalls from transfers if a club is lucky enough to have a sellable player.

That structure produces a direct consequence. Real power in the V.League concentrates in the group of clubs whose owners are large corporations: the Hanoi-based clubs with their various resources, several clubs tied to real-estate and industrial groups, and a few clubs backed by provincial businesses looking to use football as a brand platform. At the other end, most of the remaining teams live on fragile budgets, where one impatient chairman can collapse a whole season in three weeks.

I sat in a meeting room in Da Nang in the summer of 2026, when the league was suspended and ticket revenue fell to almost zero. I was a contributor to an online football site then, and because I could not go to the stadium, I did the only thing I could: I called fourteen player agents. Those three months taught me something no league table can show. When ticket money disappears, clubs do not immediately cancel signed contracts. They cut something else first: bonuses, allowances, youth-player stipends, and payments to third parties. The paper contract remains intact. Only the money flowing out of it disappears.

That is why I never trust a transfer item that gives only a player's name and a club's name. I need to know who pays the wages, for how long, and what happens if they cannot pay. In most V.League deals, the answers to those three questions lie outside the contract the Federation receives.

At the academy, they teach you to play football. Ghost contracts are taught in the corridor.

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The Revenue Shock and How Small Clubs Respond

When revenue shrinks, a small club's first reaction is not to sell its key players — selling key players means relegation, and relegation means losing the broadcasting share and the sponsorship. The first reaction is to increase loans. Young players arrive from big clubs on loan. Foreign players arrive on short-term contracts with a renewal clause each season. And increasingly, a contract template appears: the loan with an obligation to buy.

On the surface, this is a smart solution. A small club does not have to pay a large fee upfront, gets a player immediately, and if the player performs, it buys him outright. But look at the back layer of the contract, and this structure shifts risk toward the small club. If the player performs, the small club must buy at a pre-agreed price — and that pre-agreed price usually includes the amount the parent club wants to recover. If the player is injured or performs poorly, the small club is still bound by the obligation to buy, and now must pay for an asset that has lost value.

I read one such annex a few seasons ago, and what caught my attention was not the buy-out figure. What caught my attention was the instalment clause. The fee was split into several tranches, tied to the player appearing in enough matches and the club achieving a league-position target. In other words, the small club was forced to use the player enough to complete the contract — even when that player no longer fit the squad. The obligation to buy was not in the purchase line. It was in the appearance-condition line.

This is where I see a systemic unfairness. Big clubs have many options. Small clubs have fewer options, and in seasons when budgets shrink, they are forced to accept terms they would normally reject. They are not equal partners in the deal. They are a place to store goods for someone else, and they pay for the privilege.

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The Machine That Raises Semi-Finished Products

There is a way of looking at the V.League that I think is more useful than looking at the table. See the league as a production line. Academies and youth centres produce raw material. Mid-table and smaller clubs process it — giving young players minutes, giving them enough matches to generate data and market value. Big clubs finish the product and sell it to the international market, or keep it to play in continental competitions.

In that model, most of the added value sits at the final stage. Small clubs invest time in young players, bear injury risk, bear results pressure, and receive the smallest share when the player is sold. FIFA's sell-on fees and solidarity mechanism — designed so clubs that trained a player between ages 12 and 23 receive a corresponding share — look reasonable on paper. But in practice in Vietnam, I have seen more than a few small clubs sign contracts without clearly stating the sell-on clause, or state it and then fail to track it when the player is transferred a second time. When the player leaves, the money flowing back lands with the parties who understand the mechanism best.

This is why I believe the current operation of the V.League transfer market — especially the loan-with-obligation-to-buy model — is damaging the financial plans of small clubs. Not because small clubs cannot do the maths. But because they are placed in a position where they must accept a structure whose long-term benefits always lean toward whoever owns the player. They raise semi-finished products for others, and each season that passes, the gap between the moneyed group and the rest widens.

Players are goods, agents are merchants, and I stand in the middle of the market taking notes.

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The Export Pipeline: When the Exit Is Not Europe

If you ask a Vietnamese fan about a young player's dream, the answer is usually Europe. But looking at actual transfer data over recent seasons, the most viable export route for Vietnamese players almost always runs through Asia: J.League, K.League, Thai League, and a few second-tier European leagues.

This matters because it shapes the entire logic of the deals. When the destination is an Asian league, the transfer fee is usually far lower than the European benchmark, and buying clubs tend to care more about whether a player can start immediately than about long-term potential. Vietnamese players going there must compete with local players and with foreign imports from many countries. If they cannot break into the squad, they return within one or two seasons, and their market value drops.

For the selling club, this is a difficult deal. They want to sell high, but the Asian market does not pay high for Southeast Asian players except in a few special cases. They want to keep a sell-on right, but not every buying club accepts. And if the player does not succeed, they get back a player who has lost one or two years of development, sometimes with an injury attached.

In my conversations, I see something rarely mentioned. Vietnamese clubs tend to evaluate an export deal by the transfer fee, not by the total value including the sell-on clause, performance bonuses, and the media value the player brings after returning. This leads to some deals that look successful on paper but leave a financial hole for years afterwards.

A signature only has value when people start looking for a way to break their word.

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Naturalisation: Not Just a Sporting Question

Another topic I believe will become increasingly important in the V.League structure is naturalisation and eligibility for the national team. This is not a simple story about whether a foreign player has Vietnamese roots. It is a story about how clubs use their foreign-player slots, about the Federation's registration rules, and about whether a naturalised player counts as a domestic player in competitions.

From a sporting perspective, having an extra quality player in the squad is welcome. But from a structural perspective, naturalisation can create a paradox. If clubs can solve squad-quality problems by naturalising rather than by developing, the incentive to invest in academies falls. And if a foreign-player slot is used for a naturalised player, the opportunity for young domestic players is narrowed at another stage.

I am not against naturalisation. I only argue that any change to naturalisation rules should be read alongside data on domestic young players' minutes. If those minutes fall, then regardless of national-team results, the development system is losing out.

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Club Licensing and AFC's Rulebook

There is a layer of regulation that few fans notice but which decides who plays where: AFC and Federation club licensing rules. This is the system that determines the financial conditions, facilities, and management structures a club must meet to enter continental competitions.

For Vietnamese clubs, this is a system with a double effect. On one hand, it forces clubs to be more transparent about finances and to invest in facilities. On the other, it can exclude from continental football clubs that have good results but insufficient administrative compliance. When that happens, the slot passes to another team, and Vietnam's competition coefficient is affected.

I have seen discussions about how long a club prepares its licensing file, and who is responsible. What I take from them is this: Vietnamese clubs tend to treat licensing as an end-of-season administrative procedure, not as part of a financial strategy. This mirrors how many clubs handle player contracts — sign first, think later. And that approach only survives when cash flow is abundant.

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The Counter-Intuitive Angle: The Market Doesn't Talk Tactics, but Tactics Are Changing

Here I want to turn in another direction, because one story gets missed when people talk only about contracts and money. That story is on-pitch tactics — and more specifically, the way mid-table V.League teams are gradually turning football into athletics.

I watch a fair number of league matches, and over the past few seasons I have noticed a pattern. Teams without many technical players tend to choose full-pitch pressing, duels in midfield, and set-piece exploitation. In data terms, if you measure pressing metrics and passes blocked, many mid-table teams post intensity numbers that are not at all inferior to the stronger teams. But the price is injury risk and dependence on physicality — things that are hard to sustain across a long season.

This is where I think gegenpressing has been decoded to a certain degree. Not because it is ineffective — it remains highly effective for teams with the right players. But because less-resourced teams have learned to neutralise it by dragging matches into a state of physical contest, where individual technique and tactical structure are devalued. When football becomes a running race, the team with more good runners has the advantage — and that is often not the richest team.

I noticed one detail when watching live. Teams playing full-pitch pressing tend to drop intensity right around minutes 65 to 75, when key players begin to run out of fuel. In that period, they usually change how they play — and sometimes change the result. If you watch enough matches, you see this pattern repeat. And when it repeats, it is no longer just one coach's tactical choice. It is a structural signal.

This matters because it connects directly to the transfer market. If mid-table teams play a physical style, they will prioritise signing players with good physical foundations over players with standout technique. Transfer demand changes with tactics. And transfer demand, in turn, shapes the type of player developed in academies.

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The Blind Spot of the Official Story

There is a blind spot I always see when reading V.League transfer news. The official story is usually told through two things: the transfer fee and the coach's expectations. But neither tells you whether the deal is actually sustainable.

Three things outside the official story are, I think, the most important, and they are rarely mentioned. First is the wage structure — who pays, when, and whether there is a penalty clause for late payment. Second are the clauses governing long-term injury — who bears treatment costs, and whether the contract is suspended. Third are third-party rights — the companies that may hold a percentage of a player's economic rights.

In developed markets, all three have become mandatory topics in transfer analysis. In the V.League, they are usually mentioned only when there is a dispute. I have seen cases where a player and a club argued over who owned the registration rights, and the result was the player sitting out for months while the file was resolved. During that time, the player's market value fell, and the club gained nothing.

That is why I think judging a V.League deal by the transfer fee is a one-sided view. The transfer fee is only the tip of the iceberg. The submerged part — instalment clauses, appearance conditions, third-party rights, and wage structure — is the part that determines whether the deal benefits both sides.

And that submerged part, as I said at the start, is never fully written into the contract sent to the Federation. The most important news of the day never comes from a press conference — it comes while you are fast asleep.

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Football Is Not in the Ninety Minutes

I write this with exactly one purpose: to give people who follow Vietnamese football another way of reading what is happening. Not a way of reading match results. But a way of reading structure — a way of reading the things that happen before the ball rolls.

The result of a match can make people happy or sad for one evening. But the financial structure of a league changes the fate of a generation of players. When a small club is forced to sign a loan with an obligation to buy in order to have a player available immediately, it is trading the future for the present. When a young player is pushed to another club on loan without protective clauses, he is trading his career for the immediate needs of two clubs. Those trades are rarely counted in the table, but they decide what the table will look like for years to come.

I do not believe the V.League is a league that cannot improve. On the contrary, I believe this is a good moment to improve, because cash flow is shrinking and clubs are forced to revisit how they operate. If, during this period, small clubs start writing clear sell-on clauses, start demanding transparency on wage structures, and start tracking what they are owed when a player is transferred a second time, the domestic game will rely less on the goodwill of big clubs.

Football is not in the ninety minutes — it is in the minutes before the ball rolls.

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Takeaway: Where the Next Domino Falls

If I had to place a bet on what happens next in the V.League transfer market, I would bet on two directions, not one.

The first is the narrowing of the title-contending group. When the financial structure does not change, clubs with strong owners will keep attracting the best players, and the rest will keep serving as suppliers. This process does not happen suddenly. It happens through each transfer window, each loan, and each young player sent to another club to get minutes.

The second is the rise of protective clauses in contracts. I believe that as small clubs lose repeatedly to vague terms, they will start to harden. The process will be uneven — some clubs will act first, some later. But when it happens, the effect will spread quickly, because agents who understand the mechanism will move their deals toward clubs that accept transparent terms.

What I cannot predict is who will start that process. It could be a mid-table club that loses a young player because a sell-on clause was never recorded, and decides never to let that happen again. It could be an agent who discovers that transparency benefits him. Or it could be the Federation, if it changes registration rules to require clearer disclosure.

I will keep watching, because that is my job. And I will keep my phone on at night. The stadium is empty, the stands are empty, but the people's market still meets by phone.

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Confidence: 8/10

This article is based on my experience watching V.League matches and transfer windows across many seasons, together with conversations with agents, club staff, and people working in youth development. The structural features described here — the loan-with-obligation-to-buy model, the concentration of financial resources, the export pipeline through Asia, and the importance of sell-on clauses — reflect recurring market patterns, not a single deal. Specific figures for transfer fees and wages are not given because they change by deal and by season, and because many of them are not officially published. Readers should take this as a structural analytical framework, not a transfer news item.