The VFF Chairmanship: Three Candidates, One Question About Money

On the 19th and 21st of October, a list was published and a match began. No referee, no whistle, no scoreboard. Just thirteen names spread across seven leadership seats of the Vietnam Football Federation, and a two-day silence between the closing of nominations and the publication of the list. I have followed Vietnamese football long enough to know that such silences are usually where the real decisions happen. The transfer market is a match without a referee, where every number is a free kick — and here, the number being struck is not a transfer fee but the power structure of an entire football nation.

The 10th-term VFF congress is scheduled for January 2027. Term IX, covering 2026 to 2026, is in its final months. The man in the Chairman's seat is Tran Quoc Tuan, who has led the federation through a cycle of notable results at national-team level. He is not the only candidate. The list carries three names for the top seat: Tran Quoc Tuan, Nguyen Duc Thuy — widely known as bau Thuy — and Nguyen Xuan Vu. Three profiles, three different sources of power, and three different understandings of how a federation should be run.

Bau Thuy was born in 2026, with a background in construction and banking. He is not a sports official in the traditional sense. He is a businessman stepping onto the governance field, and his arrival marks something Vietnamese football has not seen at this scale: private capital no longer sitting in the stands, but asking for a chair in the meeting room. Nguyen Xuan Vu is the opposite. He is the insider, the incumbent Vice Chairman for Communications and Foreign Affairs, and in that category he is the only candidate. No opponent. That is the only certain outcome in the entire list.

But what held me longest is not the Chairman's seat. It is the Vice Chairman for Finance and Sponsorship Mobilization category, where there are six candidates. Six. More than any other portfolio, double the number contesting the top seat. In an election where every other position has two or three names, the number six says something very specific: this is either the seat judged most valuable, or the seat many believe has been left empty in terms of effectiveness. Possibly both.

Among those six names are Vu Quoc Khanh, CEO of LPBank, and bau Thuy himself. And here is the intersection anyone reading the list must see: LPBank is currently the main sponsor of the V-League. A candidate for federation chairman, simultaneously a candidate for finance vice chairman, simultaneously affiliated with the entity sponsoring the domestic league. Three roles, one money flow. In corporate governance, this is called a conflict of interest and requires disclosure. In sports governance, it is often called interest.

What this list truly reveals is not who will win, but that banking and construction capital is shifting from the role of sponsor to the role of decision-maker — and Vietnamese football has no public mechanism to handle that shift.

Look at the structure. At the top is the federation, which decides technical direction, appoints coaches, and sets the pathway for national teams. In the middle is VPF, the company operating the professional leagues, and Tran Anh Tu — incumbent VFF Vice Chairman of term IX and simultaneously Chairman of the VPF board — is contesting the Vice Chairman for Professional Affairs seat. At the bottom are the clubs, the players, and the fans, who bear the direct impact of every decision made above them but have almost no voice in choosing who makes those decisions.

A team is not just eleven people; it is a system of equations that knows how to run. A federation is the same, except this system of equations runs not on grass but in meeting rooms, and its variables are sponsorship contracts, broadcasting rights, and seats on the executive committee. When the main sponsor of the league has a representative sitting on the federation's leadership, the equation no longer balances in the ordinary way. It still solves, but the solution depends on who writes the equation.

Data does not score goals, but it knows where the ball is going. In this case, the data is a six — six candidates for one finance seat — set beside a three for the chairmanship and a one for communications. Read together, those three numbers draw a very clear map of priorities: communications power is settled, political power is contested, financial power is exploding in candidate count.

There is one procedural detail I consider more important than who wins. Both Tran Quoc Tuan and Nguyen Duc Thuy appear in multiple categories. Tuan contests both Chairman and Vice Chairman for Professional Affairs. Bau Thuy contests both Chairman and Vice Chairman for Finance. This raises a question the list does not answer: do VFF statutes permit one person to stand for multiple positions simultaneously, and if so, what is the withdrawal mechanism if they win both?

For an incumbent chairman, standing for two seats is a signal worth reading slowly. People do not usually build a second option if they believe the first is certain. I am not saying Tuan will lose. I am saying that the act of dual candidacy reveals a certain level of internal uncertainty, and in sports politics, internal uncertainty is usually concealed more carefully than open disagreement.

Then there is the second gate few notice: the final candidate list must pass review by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism before confirmation. This is a control mechanism with de facto veto power. Any candidate with unresolved legal, financial, or reputational issues can be filtered out before the congress takes place. The report notes the existence of this gate but not its criteria. And a gate without public criteria is a gate whose outcome depends on who stands guard.

The gap between October and January 2027 is fourteen months. During those fourteen months, the list can change. Candidates can withdraw. Candidates can be added. Backroom negotiations can occur, and usually do. This is why I do not read the list as a result, but as the first draft of a text that will be edited many more times.

What is notable is that throughout this entire story, there is not a single statement of policy. No candidate has published a platform. No one has spoken about the youth development pathway, about naturalization policy, about whether to choose a foreign or domestic coach for the national team, about how to distribute broadcasting revenue to the clubs. Three candidates, six candidates, thirteen names — and not one line about what they will actually do if elected.

That is the biggest blind spot in this picture. People are fighting over a chair without anyone saying clearly what that chair is for over the next four years. In football, people compete for a striker position by proving they can score. Here, people compete for leadership positions by proving they can mobilize capital — or by proving they were already there.

An empty stadium is a mirror: it does not reflect the crowd, it reflects the loneliness of the game. An election without platforms is the same. It does not reflect the will of those entitled to vote, but the silence of those who are not — players, coaches, and millions of viewers who believe they are watching a sport when in fact they are watching a financial negotiation with a pitch in the middle.

I am not saying private capital entering football governance is a bad thing. In many football nations, that capital built academies, bought broadcasting rights at better prices, and pulled leagues out of stagnation. But capital and governance need a wall between them, and that wall must be built from public rules rather than personal goodwill. When the main sponsor of the league can become the decision-maker on how league money is distributed, the question is no longer the ethics of that individual. The question is whether the system has a mechanism to say no, if needed.

At present, there is no indication that VFF has issued conflict-of-interest disclosure rules ahead of the congress. That is a gap, and gaps in governance are always filled by something — usually habit.

One thing is certain: Nguyen Xuan Vu will be in the term X leadership. The Communications and Foreign Affairs seat has no opponent, meaning no genuinely competitive vote. In a picture where everything else is uncertain, this is the only anchor point. And in an organization where communications is the only channel connecting the federation to the public, having that channel's steward confirmed before the congress is information with its own weight.

What remains is the question of time. Vietnamese football is used to four-year cycles, where one generation of players passes and another arrives, and in between are the people sitting in meeting rooms deciding who plays where. Term IX is nearly done. Term X begins in January 2027. Between those two markers lie fourteen months of phone calls, dinners, nominations that may be withdrawn, and a review gate with no published criteria.

The football dream never lies in the result, but in the moment the ball has not yet touched the ground. Here, the ball has not touched the ground. And what is worth watching is not who will sit in the highest chair, but whether, before the ball lands, someone will tell the public where they intend to kick it — or whether we will again only see the scoreboard after the match is over, with a list of names and not a single word of explanation.