Bau Thuy Prepares to Run for VFF Presidency: The Ballot and What Lies Outside the Meeting Room

On the second-floor corridor of the Vietnam Football Federation headquarters, a clear plastic nameplate is placed on the meeting table long before anyone switches on the projector. The staff member on reception straightens it twice: first too far left, then too far right. Nobody in the corridor notices, any more than they notice the air conditioning humming overhead. At a congress that opens a new term, the name on that plate decides who sits at the head of the table for four years, who signs the documents no stand ever sees, and who stands at the microphone on the day a generation of young players misses a continental tournament.

Sources in football administration say businessman Nguyen Duc Thuy, known in the game as Bau Thuy, is preparing to stand for the VFF presidency at the tenth congress, for the 2026-2030 term. A businessman entering the race for the highest office in Vietnamese football pulls the congress out of its familiar comfort zone.

The ninth term, 2026-2026, carried a comfortable contradiction. The national team played football that produced feeling, while the professional league survived on cheques that did not always arrive on time. Under president Tran Quoc Tuan, Vietnam won the 2026 ASEAN Cup, beating Thailand 3-2 in Bangkok for a 5-3 aggregate; the women's team reached the 2026 World Cup; youth sides kept appearing at Asian finals. Those lines are beautiful enough to fill a term report.

Beneath the glaze sits drier work. The ninth-term executive committee proposes candidates, its standing meeting agrees a list, and the congress votes by secret ballot. Every step is a negotiation, and none of it is minuted in a way a small shareholder could read. A president's power lies in four places rather than in picking a left winger: running the machine, allocating the budget, managing relations with FIFA and the AFC, and holding the final word on the commercial agreements of Vietnamese football.

Bau Thuy, chairman of Him Lam Group, is known in football through sponsorship programmes and scholarships for young players. His experience differs from a coach's: cash flow, investment structure, negotiation. His candidacy raises a question Vietnamese football has avoided for two decades. Do you want the man who spends well, or the man who writes the rules well?

People call me a poet of the pitch, but I only write down what the ball whispers. In fifteen years of standing in stadium corridors, I have learned that most of what decides a football nation's fate happens two hundred metres from the touchline, in rooms where nobody is filming.

The VFF's largest revenue stream comes from the national team, not from V.League. Broadcast rights for national team matches, sponsorship tied to the team's image, gate receipts at My Dinh, and support money from FIFA and the AFC form the spine of the budget. A fourteen-club domestic league generates very little central value. The consequence is that a VFF president in practice runs a national-team machine more than a league federation, and every decision bends towards short-term results, because results are what produce money.

V.League does not lack crowds; it lacks ownership structure. Most clubs depend on one company or one individual, and when that person changes his mind, the club changes its fate. Club licensing, salary funds, tax obligations and academies have to be tightened by regulation rather than by relationship. In mature markets the federation sells rights centrally and distributes the money by division and youth-development criteria. Vietnam has no such mechanism at a scale that makes a difference.

The cost of running a decent academy for one year often exceeds what a mid-table club spends on its entire first team. No club pays that voluntarily unless the rules force it, and unless a share of broadcast money flows back. This is where a president who can negotiate creates real change, through documents nobody puts on the front page.

Based on my experience watching matches in V.League and the national team nights at My Dinh, one detail goes unmentioned: pitch quality, fixture spacing and the number of recovery sessions available to a Vietnamese player across a season vary enormously between clubs. That is the signature of a league that has not been standardised, and no sponsorship contract fixes it.

The tenth congress arrives at the moment the national team must choose a direction: extend with a foreign coach who already understands the internal resources of Vietnamese players, or open a new cycle. That decision sounds technical, yet it is a question of budget and authority. A president with a clear financial plan negotiates a coach's contract differently from a president who has only a promise.

The women's team and futsal show how allocation produces results: both have reached continental and world finals on budgets far smaller than the men's team. A federation willing to spread money across those branches builds a wider base, and those decisions never appear in a ninety-second bulletin.

Recent results show the limits of inspiration. The 2026 ASEAN Cup was a genuine peak: Nguyen Xuan Son scored seven goals, Nguyen Tien Linh and Nguyen Quang Hai produced the moments that made My Dinh shake. In the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, Vietnam exited with very few points, and the gap to Japan, South Korea or Iran is still measured in decades rather than matches.

The bottleneck sits in the design of the chair: it was built to run a national team, not yet to redistribute resources across a league. A president who is good with money can raise VFF revenue within two seasons. To change structure, he has to persuade the very people voting for him that they should be supervised more tightly.

Vietnamese football's collective memory loves the patron model, and with reason. When state money stopped arriving evenly, businessmen kept clubs alive through the hardest seasons, paying wages late, paying them early, sometimes paying with personal reputation. That affection creates a blind spot. We are looking for a man rich enough to save football, when what football needs is a system that does not require saving. J.League was designed so clubs belong to their localities and sponsors do not hold executive power; Thailand ties licensing to participation. Vietnam still negotiates case by case.

The tenth congress will have to answer a conflict-of-interest question clearly. A man tied to sponsorship and youth projects who takes the highest executive office needs a transparent mechanism for allocating resources rather than another promise. Empathy for a businessman's ambition is one thing; strictness about structure is another, and the second is the job of journalism.

A decent contract is rarer than a goal from outside the box. At federation level, rarer still is a statute written so that the successor cannot break it.

I do not know whose name will be printed on the plate in the My Dinh corridor this autumn. I know what I want to hear in the speech before the vote: a revenue-sharing roadmap for clubs, a licensing standard that can be audited, and a clear answer on who supervises the supervisor. Tactics teach us to read a match; memory teaches us to read ourselves. Vietnamese football has read enough about glorious nights. It is time to read the statutes again.