The VFF Chairmanship: Three Candidates, and Six Contenders for a Single Finance Seat

On 19 October, the deadline for nominations to the Vietnam Football Federation executive committee closed. Two days later, on 21 October, the list was published. Nobody explained the forty-eight hours in between, and for me that gap is the most readable part of the whole story.

Five years of covering Vietnamese football from the stands at Hoa Xuan, from half-empty press rooms and long evenings alone with a spreadsheet, taught me one thing: an A4 sheet of candidate names usually says more than ninety minutes on the pitch. A match has a scoreline for people to argue about. A candidate list does not. It simply lies there and invites the reader to work out who will pay for their football dream over the next four years.

From the stands, I learned to count time in breaths rather than minutes. Those forty-eight hours were the same. They were the breathing space between the moment nominations closed and the moment the public was allowed to see who was in the race.

Three doors into one room

The tenth-term VFF congress is scheduled for January 2027, following the ninth term that ran from 2026 to 2026. The chairmanship has three names: incumbent chairman Tran Quoc Tuan; businessman Nguyen Duc Thuy, commonly known as bau Thuy, born in 2026; and Nguyen Xuan Vu, the sitting vice chairman for communications and foreign affairs.

Those three names are three different routes into the same room. Tran Quoc Tuan is continuity. Nguyen Duc Thuy is private capital knocking at the door. Nguyen Xuan Vu is the insider, riding the machine's own elevator.

There are other seats on the ballot. The vice chairmanship for professional affairs has three candidates: Tran Huy Duc, Tran Quoc Tuan and Tran Anh Tu. The vice chairmanship for communications and foreign affairs has one: Nguyen Xuan Vu. The vice chairmanship for finance and sponsorship mobilisation has six: Nguyen Duc Thuy, Vu Quoc Khanh, Nguyen Trung Kien, Le Van Thanh and other names on the list.

Six people for one seat. That ratio catches the eye before the chairmanship does.

Above all of it sits a gate few people notice: the final list must pass review by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. That is the real control point of the process. Any file with unresolved legal, financial or reputational questions can be filtered out before the congress convenes.

Reading a list the way you read a line-up

I still read candidate lists the way I read a starting eleven: not by looking at who starts, but by looking at where two men are standing in the same slot.

Six for finance. Three for professional affairs. One for communications.

What does that structure say? It says that in the eyes of the people filing papers, money is the hardest job, the most important job, or the job currently judged to be underperforming. A committee everyone wants to join is usually a committee that allocates. A committee everyone wants to join can also be one that has just failed and needs fixing. Two readings, one set of facts.

The vice chairmanship for finance and sponsorship mobilisation is the real centre of this congress, and the fact that it drew six candidates - the most of any portfolio - shows the financial world understands that better than anyone watching from outside.

Attached to it is a detail that needs to be placed correctly. LPBank is currently the main sponsor of the V-League. Nguyen Duc Thuy is linked to LPBank. Vu Quoc Khanh is LPBank's chief executive and also appears on the candidate list for the finance seat.

The biggest structural risk of this congress is that a single corporate entity both sponsors the league and has a representative competing for the federation's financial governance seat. That is the overlap every professional sports organisation has to handle with explicit conflict-of-interest disclosure rules. In Vietnam, no such rule appears in any document I have read about this congress.

Further down, the consequence reaches the clubs directly. If the finance seat goes to someone tied to LPBank, the V-League's sponsorship terms could be extended, restructured or renegotiated in a different direction. For clubs that live off broadcast and sponsorship distributions, that is a meaningful income line, and an equally meaningful risk if the money depends on a single corporate entity.

The professional affairs seat deserves a longer pause than it usually gets. It decides more than who coaches the national team. It decides the youth pathway, naturalisation policy, and the choice between an expensive foreign coach and a properly trained domestic one. Three candidates, potentially three very different philosophies, and none has published theirs.

Tran Anh Tu holds the VFF vice chairmanship of the ninth term and chairs the board of the Vietnam Professional Football joint-stock company. If he takes professional affairs, the line of influence from federation to league becomes far shorter than it is today. Nguyen Trung Kien is recorded as finance vice chairman of the fourth term - a name returning from the past, carrying the institutional memory of another era. Le Van Thanh chairs Dong Luc company, representing construction capital.

And Nguyen Xuan Vu, the only candidate without an opponent, has in practice secured a leadership seat regardless of who wins the chair.

Collective memory is misreading the match

There is a familiar memory template in Vietnamese football: whenever a tycoon appears, the story is immediately framed as bosses versus the federation. Club chairman, the man with the money, the man who funds the team, the man on the executive committee. That template is real, and it was accurate for nearly two decades.

But it is making us misread this congress.

What is new is that the capital entering the room is no longer one man buying goodwill for one city, but the capital of a bank and a construction firm looking for a seat inside football's national governance machine.

Bau Thuy arrives as a governance candidate, not a club patron. Vu Quoc Khanh arrives as a holder of capital flows, not a supporter. Money always wants to sit near where decisions are made, and that is the ordinary logic of professional sport everywhere. What matters is that Vietnamese football does not yet have a thick enough rulebook to handle that proximity.

People remember the name of the scorer, but I remember his run ten seconds earlier. The chairmanship is the goal. The finance seat is the run. In football as in governance, the run is what decides whether the goal arrives at all.

The pitch never lies; we are simply not slow enough to listen. A candidate list is the same. It does not shout. It just puts six names in one box and lets the reader understand that the box is where the money is.

A silence fourteen months long

The detail I consider more important than who wins is the distance between October and January 2027.

The list is out, but the congress is far away. Fourteen months is long enough for one name to withdraw, another to appear, an alliance to be built in rooms without cameras. Today's list is the start of a process, not its outcome.

For readers drowning in daily transfer news, this is where a different filter is needed. Transfer reports can be wrong and corrected within hours. A candidate list that is wrong has to be corrected through a procedure, and procedures have no transfer window to shelter them.

No candidate has yet published a concrete policy platform on where Vietnamese football should go. A vote without a platform is a vote built on memory and relationships, and neither can answer what kind of football Vietnam intends to play by 2030.

Then the conflict-of-interest rules. If one person stands for chairman, stands for the finance seat and is tied to the league's main sponsor, the federation needs a clear disclosure mechanism before the ballot. Without it, every vote can be questioned, including the cleanest ones.

And the outcome of the two-ministry review. That is the narrowest gate and the least discussed.

I once sat at Hoa Xuan in an empty stand, hearing studs on grass more clearly than any crowd, and understood that some things only appear when nobody is around. A federation congress is one of those things. No scoreline, no goals, no cheering. Only names, and the money standing behind them.

In silence, I hear a whole generation waiting for something reckless. They are not waiting for a new patron. They are waiting for a machine capable of answering where Vietnamese football's money will go over the next four years, and who gets to answer without having to explain themselves to the person paying.

Every contract is a promise, and every promise is a sadness waiting to happen. The V-League's largest sponsorship contract is being discussed in a different room from the one people usually watch. That is where I will sit, waiting long enough, and writing it down.