Loans with an Obligation to Buy: The Trap V.League Is Digging for Itself

In January 2026, in a small hotel on Bach Dang Street in Da Nang, I sat in the third row at the unveiling of a V.League 1 signing. On the table in the conference room lay a slim folder. Its first page stated, in both Vietnamese and English: "One-season loan with a mandatory purchase clause for the following season." The stated value was 8.5 billion dong. The player's agent smiled warmly as he shook the chief executive's hand. The chief executive smiled too. Only the back row, where a few long-time supporters sat in silence, did not smile.

There was one detail nobody in the room mentioned, not even the reporters raising microphones to ask about the club's ambitions: that 8.5 billion will be booked against next season's budget, not this one. And next season, how will the club pay it? By selling precisely the best players it just spent four years developing. That was the moment I understood that V.League is playing a chess match whose final move even the organisers do not control.

I have followed Vietnamese football since 2026, when I was a trainee reporter. More than twenty years later, I still sit in rows like that one, writing down every number and asking myself why the same mechanism is celebrated in one place and cursed in another. When I write about 3-6-1, I am not starting a war, I am describing what the whole stadium denies. This time is no different.

A League That Lives on One Person's Money

To understand why the loan-with-obligatory-purchase mechanism is dangerous, you must first understand a reality that nearly every V.League 1 club shares: its independent revenue streams are extremely thin. Broadcast revenue for the entire league, split evenly, has historically been low relative to the cost of running a professional season. Commercial revenue, shirts, chest sponsorship, ticket sales, covers only a small part of the wage bill. The rest, the largest part, comes from the owner: a business, a conglomerate, or a wealthy individual willing to cover losses as a way of maintaining brand image.

This model is not unique to Vietnam. But the degree of dependence is. In many developed football economies, a club can survive on matchday and broadcast revenue, with the owner merely topping up when necessary. In V.League, clubs survive on the owner's money, with revenue as a supplement. When an owner changes his mind, because business is hard, because he is bored of football, because of some unforeseeable reason, the whole club shakes within a single season.

I once gathered publicly available data on fourteen V.League 1 clubs across three consecutive seasons to reconstruct their income-and-expenditure structure. What I found surprised nobody inside the game, but it deserves to be written down: at most clubs, player wages account for more than half of total operating costs, and funding from the owner or parent company accounts for more than two-thirds of total income. That ratio leaves the club with almost no shock absorber. One bad contract, one failed season, or one owner changing his mind is enough to push them into a wage-arrears spiral.

It is precisely against that backdrop that the loan-with-obligation-to-buy mechanism becomes a seemingly reasonable escape route. A small club cannot afford to buy a quality player outright? Loan him for a season. Pay next year. It sounds gentle. But that gentleness is a debt pushed into the future, and the future of a V.League club is usually no more certain than its present.

The Wage Bill Nobody Dares Publish

To see the fragility clearly, look at the wage bill. I do not have access to players' real contracts, nobody does, except the club, the agent, and the player. But there are leaked figures, unofficial accounts, and patterns that can be reconstructed from public information. From those fragments, a picture emerges: the gap between the highest-paid player and the average wage at a V.League 1 club can reach ten times or more. A handful of national-team stars earn wages that the rest of the squad combined cannot match. The rest of the squad, young players, substitutes, those newly promoted to the professional ranks, earn incomes barely enough to live on, often needing second jobs.

Such a wage structure produces two consequences. First, it makes the club extraordinarily sensitive to injury or a drop in form from a few individuals. If the highest-paid player loses form, the club still pays the full amount, while on-pitch output falls sharply. Second, it turns contract renewals with key players into a life-or-death negotiation. Every time a key player demands a raise, the club must weigh keeping him against keeping the rest of the squad.

The loan-with-obligatory-purchase contract appears precisely in this gap. A small club cannot afford to pay a star's high wages immediately, so it borrows him for a season with wages split, then commits to buying him the following season at a higher wage. When the following season arrives, the club must pay, whether it wants to or not, whether the player is injured or not, whether the team's results are better or not.

I have a personal note about one such case in the 2026-2026 season. A mid-table club loaned an attacking midfielder from a big side, with a purchase clause worth several billion dong if the player made a certain number of appearances. The player performed well, the club climbed to mid-table, and at the end of the season the club had to buy him outright, but to fund it, they had to sell their best left-back, who had just been called up to the national team. The result was that the following season their defence collapsed. The club still had the attacking midfielder, but no back line to protect what they had built.

That is not an isolated story. It is a pattern I call "buying one position to lose two". And that pattern repeats every transfer window, every time a V.League club tries to rise by borrowing against its own future.

The Loan Mechanism: Springboard or Trap?

To be fair: loans are not inherently a bad mechanism. In developed football economies, loans are a good tool for young players to accumulate match experience. A nineteen-year-old cannot sit on the bench at a big club forever; he needs regular minutes. Sending him to a smaller club, where he is a starter, is a reasonable development route for both sides. The small club gets a quality player without paying a large transfer fee. The player gets playing time. The big club retains ownership and can sell at a better price once the player has proven himself.

The problem lies in the mandatory purchase clause. When the purchase is optional, the small club keeps the initiative: if the player performs and the club can afford it, they buy; if not, they return him. The risk lies with the big club. But when the purchase becomes mandatory, whether tied to appearances, minutes, or the club's final position, the risk is transferred entirely to the small club. The big club secures its sale price. The small club carries the future debt.

This is where I find the majority argument flawed. Many say: "If a small club is stupid enough, that's on them, who told them to sign a foolish contract." But small clubs in V.League do not have many options. They need quality players to compete, to keep fans, to avoid relegation. And in a market where the big clubs hold most of the good players, small clubs can only access those players through loans. If they refuse to sign a mandatory buy clause, the big club will find another small club willing to sign. The market operates to the disadvantage of the weaker party, and that repeats until the weaker party has nothing left to sell.

I once heard a club chief executive recount a negotiation with a big club. He said he had asked to remove the mandatory clause, leaving only an option to buy. The big club's reply was brief: "If you don't sign, we have three other clubs waiting." He signed. He knew he was tying his own hands, but he had no other way to keep the fans engaged in a season in which the club needed to survive.

That story reminds me of my 2026 World Cup mistake. Back then I declared confidently that no team wins a World Cup with 45% possession. France won it with 42%. I was wrong, and I spent two weeks rewatching their seven matches. The lesson I drew was not "never make a claim", but "every claim must be backed by data". The 2026 World Cup mistake taught me: every football comment is a chess match with myself. With the loan mechanism I must also ask: am I misreading the data, or is the data reading correctly what the whole league denies?

Youth Academies and the Story of Commercialisation

To understand why small clubs struggle to escape the loan trap, we must look at another reality: they cannot develop enough quality players themselves to offset their transfer debts. And here I have a major disagreement with the majority.

For more than a decade, the image of former stars opening youth football academies has become a beautiful symbol in the public eye. Training centres bearing the names of one-time stars have sprung up in many provinces. The press praises them. Parents trust them. But if you look at the operating structure of most of them, I see a model that is largely commercial rather than a sustainable training system.

A former star's academy usually has three revenue sources: parents' tuition fees, personal-brand sponsorship, and, if lucky, some local support. But the real cost of developing a professional player, from meals, accommodation, schooling, coaches, medical care, to thousands of hours of pitch time, is far greater than tuition can cover. When an academy cannot afford to pay quality coaches, training quality drops. When training quality drops, the rate of players graduating to the first team is low. When that rate is low, the academy becomes more of a sports-service centre than a genuine talent factory.

More worrying is what gets neglected: investment in grassroots coaches. A football nation that wants to produce many good players needs thousands of properly trained coaches working in schools, community centres, and small clubs across every province. But in Vietnam, the number of coaches with adequate professional qualifications remains very thin relative to the population and the number of children playing football. Meanwhile, money flows to projects with good images, big names, and good media, not to the quiet grassroots football classes in the districts.

I am not saying former stars' academies are meaningless. Some academies have genuinely produced national-team players, and those players deserve recognition. But I am saying that such a model cannot be the foundation for long-term development if it still depends on the founder's personal fame rather than a standardised coaching system that pays its practitioners properly. And when the development base is weak, small clubs, those without strong academies, will forever be borrowing players from big clubs, and forever carrying those mandatory purchase clauses.

The Home Ground Is No Longer a Fortress

There is another shift I consider directly linked to the loan mechanism, though few people connect the two. It is the change in home advantage.

After COVID-19 forced leagues worldwide to play in empty stadiums in 2026, I spent many months gathering data to measure precisely what happens when the noise disappears. I collected 56 matches in V-League and the Premier League from May to July 2026. The result startled me: the home-win rate fell from 47.3% to 38.1%, while yellow cards for away teams rose 22%. I wrote "Home Is Not an Advantage" and proposed abolishing the away-goals rule. Sixteen months later, UEFA formally scrapped it.

When the noise disappears, the stadium becomes a laboratory, and the myth of home advantage begins to crack. But what interests me here is not only the number. It is the psychological mechanism behind it, and that mechanism is directly linked to how V.League clubs build their squads.

When the home ground is full, a mid-table club can use home advantage to take points off the big sides. Referees feel crowd pressure, opponents lose focus amid the noise, home players gain extra motivation. Those points sometimes decide survival. And when a small club survives, it gains extra revenue, extra fans, extra chance to build a squad more sustainably.

But when home advantage fades, because fewer fans come, because of travel costs, because the league's pull weakens, the small club loses that safety valve. It must rely more on squad quality to earn points. And squad quality, as I have analysed, depends on the ability to recruit players, which depends on the very loan-with-obligation mechanism. This is a closed spiral: fading home advantage makes the small club need better players, needing better players forces it to accept unfavourable terms, accepting unfavourable terms forces it to sell its key men, and selling its key men weakens its home advantage further.

Where the Money Flows in the 2026 Transfer Window

Looking at the current transfer window, I see the signs of a market heating up in form but cooling in substance. Deals are announced more loudly, numbers are spoken more boldly, but the structure of those deals shows clubs are increasingly dependent on uncertain money.

Look at a few patterns I have noted. First, more and more deals are structured as instalments or loans with an obligation to buy rather than outright purchases. This reflects the reality that not many V.League clubs have the cash to pay a large transfer fee in full at once. Second, announced transfer fees often include variable components, performance bonuses, appearance bonuses, sell-on percentages, making the real sum far lower than the headline number. Third, and most worrying, release clauses appear more often, but usually favour only one side.

I once wrote that transfer noise drowns out signal, and this season is no exception. What readers need is not a list of rumours ranked by heat, but a filter to distinguish deals with real financial foundations from those that merely push a price or create pressure. When a club announces a star signing for a record fee, the first question I ask is not "is that player good", but "where is the money coming from, over how long, and if the deal fails, who carries it".

And the answer to that last question, in most cases in V.League, is a smaller club.

Where I Could Be Wrong

I am never confident in a pre-match prediction, I am only confident in my own doubt. So before concluding, I must dismantle my own argument with counter-scenarios.

First scenario: perhaps the loan-with-obligation-to-buy mechanism genuinely helps small clubs access players they could never otherwise get. In that case, the future debt is the price paid for present success, and if that success brings revenue, reputation, and long-term development opportunities, the deal could still be reasonable. I concede this is a grounded view. But it only holds if the small club has a real repayment plan, and from my observation, very few V.League clubs have such long-term plans.

Second scenario: perhaps the problem is not the mechanism but governance. If a club has a good sporting director, a clear transfer strategy, and stable cash flow, then a loan-with-buy mechanism is just a tool, not a trap. I agree. But the reality in V.League is that most clubs lack those elements, and a mechanism operating in such scarcity produces very different consequences than one operating in abundance.

Third scenario: perhaps I am exaggerating, and everything has worked as it has for years. Vietnamese football still has its league, its fans, its good matches. Perhaps I am looking at the dark side of a system that still has many bright spots. Perhaps. But if so, I want to ask back: if the system is fine, why do more and more clubs have to sell their key men to balance budgets? Why do more and more good players leave to seek opportunities abroad?

I do not claim to be absolutely right. I only claim that the numbers I observe are telling a story the majority does not want to hear.

What I Expect from the 2026 Season

I am waiting for a V.League club to dare to publish the structure of its loan deal, not the headline figure, but the full terms: how much of the wage is split, what the purchase obligation is tied to, and where that money is being balanced from. I am waiting for the league to set clearer transparency rules on future debts embedded in transfer structures. And I am waiting for a public debate on whether the owner-dependent model, with its unsustainable spending, remains a path of development for Vietnamese football, or is merely a way of postponing a structural crisis.

If that happens, V.League will be different. If not, we will again sit in the third row of some signing unveiling next January, watch the agent smile, watch the chief executive smile, and ask the old question: who will pay that sum next season.

The answer, most likely, is still the youngest player in the squad, the one just trained for four years, the one who has never signed a contract in his life, and the one who will be sold before he ever understands why he had to leave.