Three Names, Six Candidates: The Most Crowded Race at VFF Is Not the Chairmanship

At Hang Day Stadium, I once watched a man peel an old banner off the railing of stand A, fold it flat, and slide it into his jacket pocket. Forty minutes to kick-off, the loudspeaker reading out the referee appointments, thousands of people still hunting for seats. Nobody noticed the gesture. But it made me think of something far removed from football on grass: sheets of paper pinned to the noticeboard of the Vietnam Football Federation, and names read aloud with no applause at all.

October 19 was the deadline for nomination filings. On October 21, the list was published. Two days. A knock on a door is quieter than a drum, but it opens more doors.

The list carried three names for the chairmanship: Tran Quoc Tuan, the incumbent; Nguyen Duc Thuy, born in 2026, long known in Vietnamese football circles as bau Thuy; and Nguyen Xuan Vu, the sitting vice chairman for communications and foreign affairs.

Below that sit two tiers of deputy seats. The professional affairs seat lists Tran Huy Duc, Tran Quoc Tuan and Tran Anh Tu, who currently chairs the board of the Vietnam Professional Football joint-stock company. The finance and sponsorship-mobilisation seat lists six candidates, among them Nguyen Duc Thuy, Vu Quoc Khanh - chief executive of LPBank, Nguyen Trung Kien and Le Van Thanh, chairman of Dong Luc company.

One detail to hold onto: LPBank is the main sponsor of the V-League. Another: Nguyen Xuan Vu is the only candidate without an opponent, in the communications and foreign affairs race. And a drier one: the final list must pass a review gate run by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism before it is confirmed. The congress is scheduled for January 2027.

I have followed enough Southeast Asian federation congresses to know one thing: people usually misread the most crowded room. There is a drumbeat that keeps going after many a silent season, and in this congress cycle it sits inside the ballot paper, not on the pitch.

Six candidates for finance and sponsorship mobilisation is the place to stop, not the three names at the top. There is one chairmanship. There are six contenders for money. That concentration says funding is the scarcest resource in Vietnamese football right now, and whoever controls the money line controls the rhythm of the entire league. No federation balance sheet was published alongside the candidate list, but the structure of the ballot tells its own story.

The three chairmanship names represent three models running in parallel. Tran Quoc Tuan is continuity - a man who has served a full term, knows the machinery, knows the fixture calendar, knows the relationships with regional federations. Nguyen Duc Thuy is private capital entering the governance stage, backed by banking and construction. Nguyen Xuan Vu is the insider, promoted along the administrative path.

What stands out is how Tran Quoc Tuan filed. He appears in both the chairmanship race and the professional affairs deputy race. Bau Thuy does the same, listed for chairman and for finance. An incumbent standing for two seats is usually not a man certain of winning - it is a man who has prepared a fallback. This is not new in regional football, but it deserves recording, because it suggests the January 2027 vote is harder to predict than the published list implies.

Tran Anh Tu holds a particularly loaded position: vice chairman of the federation for term nine and chairman of the body that operates the professional leagues. Whoever takes the professional affairs seat will have to work directly with that structure. The seat decides how the national team plays, and it also touches the fixture calendar, the conditions of staging, and how clubs receive their share of revenue.

The common outside reading is that private capital is muscling into the most powerful chair. I think the opposite direction is plausible, and probably truer.

If the chairmanship were genuinely the most attractive seat, it would have drawn more candidates than finance. It did not. Finance is where the queue formed. That suggests moneyed interests understand something clearly: in Vietnamese football today, real power is not in being photographed in a handshake, but in deciding which sponsorship deal gets signed, for how long, and where the money is distributed.

In the other direction, there is a blind spot easily missed: Nguyen Xuan Vu has no opponent. A seat that needs no vote is a seat settled before the list was printed. That is no small detail. It indicates most of the leadership structure was agreed in advance, and only a few seats are genuine contests.

One risk deserves mention. LPBank is the V-League's main sponsor, and a leader of that bank appears on the ballot for the finance seat. If the vote tilts that way, the federation will have to answer an institutional question: who audits whom, when the person signing the sponsorship deal and the person receiving it sit at the same table.

For someone who watches football from the stands, I keep one habit: I do not read a congress result through names, but through what changes afterwards - the fixture calendar, the sponsorship money, the number of youth teams that get funding. A dry contract only comes alive when it is retold through applause in the stands. January 2027 is still distant, but the rhythm has already started, and it is beating somewhere the stands have not yet looked.