2026-2027 National Cup: Four V-League Giants Fall and the Invoices That Never Printed

There is something the scoreboard never shows: the amount of money a football club spends to play a match it does not actually want to win. Last weekend, eight qualifying-round matches of the 2026-2027 National Cup were played across two days, and the results that reached me through a group chat of three independent editors formed a list that, if read quickly, anyone would assume was just an ordinary knockout round. Four of the five V-League representatives who featured in those eight ties lost. Three of those four defeats happened right at home. Only Bac Ninh FC advanced, with a 3-2 win away at first-division side Long An. The rest of the round reads like the report card of a particularly troublesome school class: Thanh Hoa lost 0-2 to Becamex Ho Chi Minh City right in Thanh Hoa. Hoang Anh Gia Lai lost 2-3 to Hung Yen at Quy Nhon - their temporary home ground. Hai Phong lost 0-1 to Thep Can Tho at Lach Tray. Hong Linh Ha Tinh fell on penalties to Phu Tho after a 0-0 draw over 90 minutes. Four result sheets, four names that once carried weight in the top flight, four exits from the National Cup before the tournament had even warmed up.

I sat down to cross-reference each of these results with the season's spending figures, and what I saw was not in the scoreline. The contract was signed, but the printer never spat out a single page. That is the phrase I always use when a deal exists on paper but does not exist on the pitch. Last weekend, four V-League season contracts failed to print a single useful page for the National Cup. And what I want to write today is not the result - the result is already online and anyone can read it in thirty seconds. What I want to dissect is why a national cup competition has become a place where top-flight clubs walk in with the attitude of party guests and walk out with the attitude of people who want to go home early.

The National Cup is becoming an expense line no V-League club wants to declare in its financial report, and clubs without ambition are actively cancelling their tickets early to save travel money.

Context needs to be stated clearly, because a result stripped of context is just a click. The 2026-2027 V-League has just kicked off. Every club is still unsure of its position, the table is still being shaped by early rounds with fitness not yet at peak and squads not yet coalesced. In theory, this is when big clubs need more matches to audit their squads, test backup plans, and give young players real pressure. The National Cup, by normal logic, is the best free training ground a V-League club could have. But last weekend, V-League clubs behaved according to the opposite logic. They did not use the National Cup as a laboratory. They used it as an unscheduled social gathering, arrived late, played half-heartedly, and exited through the back door, leaving a first-division opponent standing in the middle of the pitch celebrating as if they had achieved something monumental.

I have followed National Cup matches in Vietnam for many seasons, and what I see repeat year after year is a pattern no one wants to write into a document: when a V-League club enters the National Cup without its best squad, the result is not "the strong team beats the weak team." The result is "the more determined team beats the team playing like it is repaying a debt." The dressing room has no cameras, but there are whispers. In this case, the whispers are not about internal conflict. The whispers are about invoices. To go on a National Cup run, a V-League club must pay for flights, hotels, meals, and living expenses for the whole delegation. The deeper you go, the more it costs. For clubs whose season objective is written in the shareholder meeting as V-League survival, every dong spent on the National Cup is a dong taken from a budget that could buy a backup defender for the final six months. The economics of Vietnamese football below the top of the table are simple: the club that survives stays alive. Everything else is decoration.

Thanh Hoa FC shows this clash of incentives most clearly. Let me tell you this story in numbers, because it cannot be told in emotions. Thanh Hoa entered the 2026-2027 season with a depleted squad. Not much budget to retain key players. Not much money to sign new ones. And the old sponsorship entanglement, as always, returned at exactly the wrong moment. On September 16, Thanh Hoa received a document from FIFA demanding the club pay more than 305,000 USD - around 8 billion dong - to Rimario Gordon after the Jamaican striker filed a complaint with FIFA. The document was not an ordinary reminder. FIFA set a 45-day deadline. If the matter is not resolved, Thanh Hoa FC will be banned from registering new players for three transfer windows. Three windows. For a club that needs reinforcements to survive, this ban means tying its own hands to the bedpost and waiting for the season to end.

And here is where the story becomes more bitter than a simple lawsuit. The complication is that the matter dates back to the previous sponsor's tenure, while Thanh Hoa FC has now been transferred to a new sponsor. In other words, the current club must carry the invoice of those who came before, pay it with the resources of those who came after, for a player who left long ago. This is the kind of story I call the unsigned invoice. The contract has been torn up, the printer produced no trace, but the money is still there, hanging over the current leadership like a red thread no one can cut.

Four days after receiving that document, Thanh Hoa took the pitch in the National Cup. The result: a 0-2 home defeat to Becamex Ho Chi Minh City. You can read that as a sporting failure. I read it as a financial decision. When your head holds a floating 8 billion dong figure and a transfer ban counting down, the National Cup stops being a tournament. The National Cup becomes an unpaid training session. And you do not spend money on unpaid training sessions when you need cash for a survival race.

Becamex Ho Chi Minh City is no pitiable amateur. This is a club that just dropped to the first division and is now a promotion candidate. Their squad is no weaker than the hosts'. They played with the hunger of a side eager to prove it deserves to return to the top flight. In football, there is a formula I always share with young colleagues: the ambition of the lower side minus the indifference of the higher side equals a victory. It is an equation with smaller variables than you think. And at Thanh Hoa's ground, both sides of the equation were clear: Becamex wanted to win, Thanh Hoa wanted to go home.

Hoang Anh Gia Lai tells a different story but from the same chapter. The mountain-town club lost 2-3 to Hung Yen at Quy Nhon. That is not their real home. Pleiku Stadium is being renovated because its drainage fails under heavy rain. I want to pause here because it shows the National Cup is not only about money. A pitch renovation is a six-month to one-year story. A drainage overhaul is an entire infrastructure investment plan. Hoang Anh Gia Lai had to move part of its season to Quy Nhon over a seemingly small problem. And when you must play away from home just to escape the rain, another National Cup match elsewhere becomes a second storm the coaching staff does not want to walk into.

Head coach Le Quang Trai's side trailed 1-3 by the 77th minute before pulling one back from the penalty spot in the 90+4th. That scoreline reads like a chase, but inside it was an early retreat. Let me place the most important fact beside it: Hoang Anh Gia Lai had just lost two consecutive V-League matches. This season's squad is weaker than last season's. In a survival race the club faces almost every year, an early National Cup exit is not a catastrophe. It may even be a release. That is what the original report concluded, and I agree on logic - but I want to push that logic one step further. At a club where every season is a fight against relegation, deliberately abandoning a secondary competition is not a mistake. It is a strategic decision. The problem is that the club never says so out loud. And when you do not say so, you let the fans speculate. And fan speculation after a defeat is always harsher than the truth.

Hai Phong FC is the case I spent the most time analysing. The port-city club lost 0-1 to Thep Can Tho at home. Thep Can Tho is a club that just relocated from Quang Ninh to the Mekong Delta and had just lost its first-division opener. In theory, this is a side in transition, not yet stable, without identity, without the team spirit built over seasons. Hai Phong have had a decent start to the V-League. Yet Thep Can Tho won. And the scorer of the only goal was Thaileon, a striker who joined the club just days earlier, scoring in the first half. I pause on the words just days. A player who arrives days ago, whose movement no one knows, with no video analysis, no scouting report. That is a case we in the trade call an unread newcomer. And unread newcomers always enjoy a golden window of a few weeks before other clubs learn them and break them. Hai Phong were victims of that golden window.

But the Hai Phong story does not end with Thaileon. It lies in attitude. Hai Phong's V-League start was not bad, with one loss and one win. That is not the record of a worried team. Yet a National Cup exit was unsurprising. Why would a healthy club lose to a weaker one in a national knockout with no objective factor? The answer is not on the pitch. The answer lies in the pre-season strategy meeting, where someone in the boardroom said the sentence every lower-half V-League club says: the priority is survival. Once that sentence is spoken, it becomes a compass for every subsequent decision. And the National Cup is the first rudder turned the other way.

Hong Linh Ha Tinh is the last story but also the best in terms of match management. The central club fell to hosts Phu Tho 2-3 on penalties after a 0-0 draw. A goalless draw, literally a match in which neither side wanted to open the door. But one detail deserves pause: like Hai Phong, Hong Linh Ha Tinh had a decent V-League start with one loss and one win. They had enough foundation to play a serious National Cup tie. But they let the match drag to penalties. And penalties are a game of chance. When you let a match drift into the zone of chance, you hand control of the outcome to a coin. That is not the decision of a club that wants to win. It is the decision of a club that wants to get it over with.

I sat down and counted the matches. Eight qualifying ties. Four of five V-League representatives lost. Three defeats at home. If this is an indicator, what does it say? It says the elimination rate of V-League clubs in the National Cup qualifying round is at a level the world of sport calls a systemic trend, not a random streak. If it were an isolated case, you could explain it by bad luck, by a first-division side's fine day, by a penalty not awarded. But when four of five clubs lose in the same round, and three of them lose at home, you are looking at a structure. And this structure was not built on the pitch. It was built in the accounting office.

This is where I must say something hard to hear. Vietnamese football fans are very good at finding fault with players. They point at a slow defender, a striker who blasts the ball skyward, a goalkeeper caught out of position. But they rarely point at the right place. In this case, the fault is not in the players' legs. The fault is in a governance decision made at the top, relayed down through a soft chain of command, and finally materialising as a starting eleven with seven substitutes and three young players who have never started a V-League match. Slow players are not lazy. Slow players are slow because they know this match is not theirs. And when a player knows the match is not his, his legs slow down before his head realises it.

On the opposite side, first-division clubs play these matches with a hunger the V-League clubs have lost. To them, the National Cup is an audition. A final without a trophy. A chance to prove to the board they deserve a longer contract, a raise, to be retained when the season ends. Becamex Ho Chi Minh City played with the determination of a side just relegated and eager to prove relegation was an accident. Hung Yen played with the ambition of a club wanting to write its name on the football map. Thep Can Tho played with the recklessness of a relocated club wanting to assert itself. Phu Tho played with the patience of a club that knows the chance comes once a season. And when two teams take the pitch with such divergent determination, the divisional gap is no longer enough to compensate.

There is something I want to make clear, because I do not want my article read as a simple criticism of clubs for choosing which competition to prioritise. The board of a lower-half V-League club faces a problem outsiders never fully see. They have a finite budget, a thin squad, a long season, and a chairman waiting for end-of-season results to decide whether to inject more money next year. In that equation, sacrificing the National Cup to focus on survival can be a correct decision. Not correct emotionally. Not correct in image. But correct in terms of survival.

But there is also something club boards must understand. They are withdrawing from a tournament for which fans bought tickets. They are selling viewers a product advertised as a serious match, then delivering it with a reserve squad. And in a football culture where fans are already tired of doubts about transparency, an abandoned National Cup tie is a drop in a full glass. Fans can forgive a defeat. They struggle to forgive a carefully planned indifference.

My pen needs no ink, only a gap. And the gap here lies between pre-season statements and the actual starting eleven. No club declares it will abandon the National Cup. But the lineup is a confession that requires no signature. That is why I always read the team sheet before the scoreline. The scoreline tells you what happened. The team sheet tells you what was decided beforehand.

Now let me do what few football writers bother to do: offer a view running counter to this very article. Because a true muckraker should not carry only one gun.

There is another explanation for the four defeats last weekend, and it rests not on indifference but on a forgotten truth: the gap between the V-League and Vietnam's first division is no longer as large as people think. For years, Vietnamese football built a tiered system on the assumption that the upper division is stronger. But that assumption rested on a financial foundation. As the finances of lower-half V-League clubs tighten, and as top first-division clubs are invested in properly to win promotion, the quality gap may have shrunk to a single small step. Becamex are promotion candidates. Hung Yen are hungry. Thep Can Tho just relocated with a long-term plan. Phu Tho have home-ground foundations. These four opponents are not the old first-division sides who came to V-League grounds for experience and left with a heavy scoreline. They came to win. And if that is true, we face much better news than the headlines are sowing.

A V-League club losing to a first-division club is not necessarily a governance disaster. Sometimes it simply means the first division is getting stronger. And a stronger first division is good for football, because it creates a competitive base harsh enough to develop players, attractive enough to draw investment, and serious enough to make promotion a real achievement. If Becamex beat Thanh Hoa at Thanh Hoa, we should read that as a signal about Becamex's quality, not only about Thanh Hoa's neglect.

But I want to stress one thing: these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. A first-division club can grow stronger while a V-League club is still deliberately abandoning a competition. And when both happen at once, the result is a National Cup round in which the weak beat the strong, and everyone has reason to feel satisfied - except the fans who bought tickets.

I have a principle when writing about this kind of event: I do not conclude on behalf of club boards. I only raise the questions I want them to answer. And the first question concerns Thanh Hoa's story, because it has the most concrete consequences.

Rimario Gordon is a Jamaican striker who once wore the Thanh Hoa shirt. He filed a complaint with FIFA, and FIFA issued a document demanding the club pay more than 305,000 USD, roughly 8 billion dong. The deadline is 45 days from September 16. If unresolved, Thanh Hoa FC will be banned from registering new players for three transfer windows. And here is the point I want to dwell on: the matter dates back to the previous sponsor's tenure, while the club has now been transferred to a new sponsor.

This is not a problem unique to Thanh Hoa. It is a problem of the whole Vietnamese football system. Vietnamese clubs frequently change sponsors, owners, and management structures while financial obligations from the past hang like unexploded bombs. When a new sponsor takes over, they inherit a club, a wage bill, a player list - and a debt list they may not fully know. And when FIFA knocks, FIFA does not care that the club changed hands. FIFA only cares who owns the legal entity on the current registration.

This means a club can be punished for a decision made by predecessors whom the current staff cannot control. And that punishment - a three-window registration ban - can amount to a financial death sentence for a small club. Because in modern football, the ability to reinforce is the ability to survive. Losing that ability is losing the framework that guarantees existence.

If I were an investigative journalist covering Vietnamese football right now, this is the story I would pursue. Not the match. Not the score. But the chain of contracts signed, financial obligations left behind, and how they are inherited or buried when a club changes hands. This is where Vietnamese football buries what it does not want to say. And this is where small lawsuits can cause far larger consequences than media scandals.

Looking back at last weekend, I see a picture I want to sketch in three clear strokes.

The first stroke is a rule established over many seasons. V-League clubs without ambition do not treat the National Cup as a main stage. The deeper you go, the more travel and accommodation cost, and the more squad concerns pile up, while V-League survival matters far more. To them, the National Cup is a competition whose costs are calculated first and benefits second. The result is these clubs approach the cup with indifference, enabling first-division sides to spring surprises by showing greater desire. This is not a novelty. It is a business model.

The second stroke is a structural change I have observed in recent years. Vietnamese first-division clubs are becoming stronger organisationally. They invest in facilities, youth academies, scouts, and data analysis. They know how to prepare for a National Cup tie against a V-League club as if it were the most important match of the season. And that means the gap between the two tiers is no longer decided only by wage budgets. It is decided by preparation, by hunger, and by who wants to win more on a given night.

The third stroke is a dark side last weekend did not show directly but exposed through Thanh Hoa's story. V-League clubs carry financial legacies from the past - contracts, debts, traces of former sponsors - and those legacies can become time bombs at any moment. When clubs switch sponsors, they do not switch cleanly. They carry luggage no one inspects properly. And when FIFA knocks, that luggage becomes a fine.

I will leave one final question for those who read this far and care about the future of Vietnamese football: if you were a sponsor considering taking over a V-League club, what would you check before signing? Would you read the current season's wage bill, or would you read every contract signed in the past ten years? Would you trust the published financial reports, or cross-check them against documents from FIFA yourself? And if you found a hidden debt waiting, how would you handle it, knowing that a three-window registration ban could be the consequence of ignoring it?

In football, as in any business, a lack of transparency does not cause immediate consequences. It accumulates. It lies still. It waits for the right moment to explode. And when it explodes, it is usually when the club faces its most important match. That is why I always tell young colleagues: do not just read the table. Read the books. And do not just read this season's books. Read the books of all the seasons before, until you find the trace of a signature no one remembers signing.

They forget that a contract can be read backwards. And in a football world where clubs change hands like shirts, reading old contracts backwards is the only survival skill that truly matters.

Last weekend, four V-League clubs were eliminated from the National Cup. That will be written into the tournament's history as a surprising round. But I want to write it into a different history: the history of expenses Vietnamese football has never paid on time. And that history is the story truly waiting to be written.