VFF's Ninth-Term Review: 80 Coaching Courses, 100% VAR, and the Transfer Ban Lifted With Two Days to Spare

"Two days before the deadline."

Those three words do the loudest work in the Vietnam Football Federation's ninth-term review, and the review files them as an achievement. Dong A Thanh Hoa were under a FIFA transfer ban — a registration embargo on signing players. VFF president Tran Quoc Tuan and specialised departments pushed the legal procedure through, the ban came off, the club added players and escaped relegation. In the document, that sentence sits in the section on the federation's responsiveness.

In my reading it belongs in a different section — club-level compliance risk. I have been reading licensing files for fifteen years. In 2026 I filed an RTI for the AIFF's 2026-17 licensing decisions and pulled the audited accounts of eight I-League clubs from the Registrar of Companies. Two clubs had submitted the same ₹1.8 crore bank guarantee — one serial number, two letterheads. The duplicate bank guarantee did not fail the audit; the audit failed to ask who signed twice.

The Thanh Hoa paragraph showed me the same shape. When a federation writes in its own term review that it saved a club, the question is not how the rescue was done. The question is how the club got there, and why nobody had the news until two days before a deadline.

Context: a term's catalogue

The document reviews the VFF's ninth term, 2026–2026 — institutional legacy, written at the end. Its catalogue is clear and I set it out without shading, because the list of inputs is useful on its own.

VAR was partial in the V.League until 2026/24; from 2026/25 every match has it. Match management, medical, club licensing and referee supervision were "progressively standardised". The domestic season moved to a two-calendar-year format from 2026/24 so that dates align with AFC club competitions and FIFA international windows. Coaching education logged more than 80 courses and roughly 1,600 attendances; by 2026–2026 Vietnamese instructors were leading C, AFC and VFF courses themselves. Twenty-two member federations received 250 FIFA-standard balls each, and annual support to member federations rose from 50 million to 100 million Vietnamese dong in 2026. Below that sit a multi-tier competition structure from U11 to U21, women's football, futsal and beach football. Above it, the national team — and at the very end of the document, a World Cup dream.

It reads like a development pathway, and in most countries such a pathway stays on paper. My problem is not the pathway. My problem is that across the whole document there is not one output number.

Core: what was counted, and what was not

Start with the thing that genuinely matters. Full VAR across 100% of V.League matches from 2026/25 is a solid governance milestone and I do not mark it down. Compare the region: full coverage is still contested in Thai League 1 and Indonesia's Liga 1. There is no more direct way to cut the variance in refereeing error. But coverage is a technical-governance metric, not a performance one. The review does not say how many decisions were overturned, how much added time was played, whether penalty rates moved, or who pays for the VAR officials and the connectivity. Sustainability of 100% coverage on modest club budgets is an open account, and the document presents it as a closed one.

The two-year calendar is the most consequential technical decision in the file. The logic is straightforward: a season that matches the AFC calendar cleans up both squad planning at clubs and call-up windows for the national team. But the review says it "gradually operated stably" without a single club-level piece of evidence. Countries coming off a single-year season feel this change in three places: the length of player contracts, the mismatch with the European transfer window, and clubs' cash-flow cycles. None of the three gets a line.

The coaching figure will be quoted most and is worth least. Eighty courses and 1,600 attendances are throughput, not quality. What was the pass rate? What is the distribution across licence levels — how many at C, B, A? How many of those coaches were working with a team two years later? How many got U18 or U15 work? Eighty courses do not prove coaches got better; they prove rooms were filled. This is an old complaint of mine — U18 coaches chase results instead of technique, and counting courses does not touch that problem.

Money. Doubling annual support to member federations from 50 million to 100 million dong looks like doubling, and is. At indicative rates it comes to roughly USD 3,800 per federation per year — a figure I am deriving from the numbers in the source, and it cannot be called investment in any meaningful sense. Two hundred and fifty FIFA-standard balls to each of 22 federations is a good photograph and a bad habit: handing out equipment is the work every federation can close with a picture. My experience at grassroots is that a ball is gone in three months and the next one requires another round of that same office.

Now the part that made me reread the file. A FIFA transfer ban on Thanh Hoa is a serious disciplinary action — a registration embargo, not a warning. FIFA usually imposes it for one of three reasons: unpaid transfer fees, unpaid training compensation or solidarity payments, or breach of contract. The review does not give the reason. It gives the timing: lifted two days before the deadline. And in the same document: the club had 17 players available, and there had been a change at the leadership level.

Put those three facts together. Leadership changed, the squad shrank to 17, and a FIFA ban landed — in a season the club spent fighting relegation. That is the classic signature of distress. Seventeen players leaves no cover for an 18-man matchday sheet. It is not a marker of squad depth; it is a marker of payment and registration blockage. And a two-day margin says the club had no in-house legal or compliance capacity at the moment it needed it. I found the second signature by stopping at the first page everyone wanted me to read — here page one was "the rescue", page two was "17 players".

The quietest thing in the file: no mention of financial regulation for clubs anywhere. No FFP, no salary cap, no PSR-style framework, no published licensing decisions. "Club licensing was standardised" is written, but against which standard, on which checklist, with which appeals process — nothing. A league without a public financial-regulation framework will produce another Thanh Hoa, and next time nobody may pick up the phone two days before the deadline.

What else is missing: the name of a single trophy, the year of a single tournament, a single scoreline. The review says the term was successful and titles were won; which ones, when, against whom — absent. Quang Hai, Hoang Duc and Dinh Bac appear three times, but as templates, not as a succession plan: there is no figure for how many players moved from which youth level to the first team. Nor is there a regional benchmark — where Vietnam's AFC club coefficient stands against Thailand's, ahead or behind, is a question the document does not contain.

Contrarian: what the critics miss

I run the verification call before I write, and this time the plain record held. Full VAR and the two-year calendar are both real, and both are things most leagues in the region have not done. If I went hunting for a hidden scandal here, I would commit the error I catch in others — scepticism that never confirms anything is just another bias.

Second, and easily skipped: the rescue worked. Thanh Hoa survived, the season finished, a club stayed alive in the league. In ASEAN football the other side of federation intervention is that without it a club dies mid-season — and a 17-man squad in a relegation fight is exactly what that looks like. The question is not whether the VFF should have intervened. The question is what changed after it did. Nowhere in the text does a body appear that would look at the next such case independently. A federation that is both regulator and rescuer has no third party to say whether the club actually got healthy or the deadline merely moved. A bank guarantee is only as trustworthy as the clerk who answers the verification call — and here the call goes to the same office that demanded the guarantee.

Forward

The VFF term ends in 2026 and the presidential succession will be settled this year. The timing of the review matters: it is a legacy document, and legacy documents choose their own numbers. For me the next term's first test is not the World Cup dream. It is this: if another V.League club gets a FIFA ban, when does the news arrive — two days before a deadline, or on the day the ban was imposed. The day the answer is "the same day", I will call this file a record rather than a review.