Oily Hands and the Crankshaft of Vietnamese Football

Oily Hands and the Crankshaft of Vietnamese Football

In May, I stayed behind in Stand A of Go Dau Stadium nearly an hour after the match had ended. The plastic seats were still warm. Below me, a man in protective clothing, his shoulders streaked with oil that had not yet dried, was taking down the advertising boards along the touchline. He was not a supporter. He worked at the industrial park across the wide road. He had come to the stadium because this club bears the name of the very company that had planned that industrial park.

I watched him work. A good machine does not run well because it is powerful, but because somebody oils it every day, with the right lubricant, at the right moment, and does not stop halfway. Vietnamese football works the same way. The clubs in V.League do not live on applause. They live on oil, meaning the steady flow of money from parent companies nobody mentions when the referee blows the kickoff whistle. That afternoon, with the stands empty, I started thinking about the whole machine standing behind a Vietnamese match.

Context: a football that is fed by company names

Vietnamese football entered the professional era in the 2026-2026 season, when V.League was created to replace the earlier subsidised system. Yet few people remember that long before the word "professional," our football had lived on state-enterprise names: The Cong of the army, Cong An Ha Noi and Cong An Ho Chi Minh City of the police, Cang Sai Gon of the port authority, Duong Sat Viet Nam of the railways. A club back then was a department of its parent body, responsible for playing matches and for mass-organisation work alike.

As the economy moved to a market mechanism, state enterprises gradually withdrew from that supporting role, and a new generation of owners appeared. People called them by a short word: bau, the patron. Bau Duc with Hoang Anh Gia Lai, bau Thang with Dong Tam Long An, then Becamex Binh Duong, SHB Da Nang, Thanh Hoa, Ha Noi FC of T&T Group, Viettel of the military telecom corporation, and most recently Thep Xanh Nam Dinh of Xuan Thien Group. Every name on the electronic board is a real business entity, with financial statements, with an industry cycle, with good years and bad years.

What deserves attention is that the money feeding Vietnamese football almost never comes from broadcasting rights. In Europe's major leagues, broadcasting makes up the bulk of a club's income. In V.League, that share is tiny, not enough to pay one squad's wages. The main source of life remains the parent company's sponsorship and the owner's money. In other words, a Vietnamese club is in essence a communications and public-relations arm of an industrial, construction, banking or telecom business. The pitch is an advertising channel, and the players are brand representatives who happen to be able to run.

I once attended a sponsor-launch press conference in Ha Noi. There were flowers on the table, water, four boards printed with logos. A communications director of the sponsoring firm told me they chose football because "this is the fastest channel to reach emotions." He was right. But that sentence also reveals the whole problem: when football is a channel to reach emotions, it will be measured by communications efficiency, and it will be cut when the communications budget is cut. Every contract is a farewell wrapped in tracking and expectation.

For comparison, I think of the story of Japanese industrial brands in Vietnam. ENEOS, through JX Nippon Oil & Energy Vietnam, has been present in the Vietnamese market since 2026 and put a lubricant blending plant in Hai Phong into operation in 2026. That is a kind of long-term commitment measured in decades, not in seasons. Those same industrial brands have walked alongside Japanese football for decades, and their presence at technical exhibitions such as CONTECH VIETNAM 2026 shows they are still betting on Vietnam's industrial market. In football, the difference between a sponsor who stays twenty years and one who stays two seasons is the difference between a club and an advertising campaign.

But I do not want to slip into praising the corporate model. Because in Vietnam, that very model is producing large cracks.

The core: the crankshaft and its wear marks

Look at how a Vietnamese club rises and fades.

Dong Tam Long An is the earliest and clearest example. The club of a construction-materials business once won V.League, once produced players the whole country knew by name. Then, when the parent company's business hit trouble, the club dimmed too and eventually left the big stage. That story is not a football story. It is the story of a construction-materials business in a downcycle of the property market. Football was simply what got left behind last, like a car out of fuel parked at the roadside.

Becamex Binh Duong is a different case, and to me the most interesting. The club carries the name of Becamex IDC, the industrial and infrastructure development corporation of Binh Duong province. In the golden period, Binh Duong dominated V.League, won several titles, built an unbeaten run that made the whole league take notice. That club was built as part of a local image: an industrial province, a strong team, an infrastructure brand promoted through every goal.

Then the peak passed. Not because the players got worse overnight, but because the parent's investment strategy shifted with the cycle of urban and infrastructure development. When an industrial property company moves its focus to other projects, the club inside the system is also reviewed through different eyes. Go Dau Stadium is still there, the stands are still there, but the rhythm of investment is no longer as dense as before.

At the opposite pole is Viettel. The club of the military-affiliated telecom group has a special advantage: abundant, stable resources and a youth academy organised properly from early on. Viettel does not depend on the inspiration of one individual. It is the model of an organisation, and therefore less vulnerable to industry shocks. In exchange, that club also carries a certain distance from local supporter life, because it belongs to a corporation more than to a community.

Nam Dinh is the most recent case, and perhaps the most instructive in the short term. Xuan Thien Group, a steel business, invested heavily in the club of the southern city, and the result was a V.League title. What deserves attention is not the title, but how that club bound itself to the city. Thien Truong Stadium became one of the most passionate places in Vietnam. The business poured the oil, but the machine ran on the emotions of a whole city as well.

Now look across the sea.

Japanese football turned professional in 2026 with J.League, and many of its big clubs grew out of company teams: Mitsubishi became Urawa Red Diamonds, Nissan became Yokohama F. Marinos, Sumitomo became Kashima Antlers. At a glance, that model looks identical to Vietnam's: business pours money, club carries the business's name. But there is one life-or-death difference. J.League does not allow a club to be merely a department of its parent. It imposes licensing rules, forcing clubs to have their own legal entity, their own leadership, their own community strategy, their own youth system. The business remains a major sponsor, but the club exists independently of it.

Japanese industrial brands stay with football because the structure forces them to stay, not only because of sentiment. Lubricant is poured according to a maintenance schedule, not according to the inspiration of whoever pours it.

The core difference between the two football cultures lies not in how much money businesses spend, but in whether a set of institutional rules exists that forces the club to outlive its parent company. In Vietnam, club and parent are almost born and die together. In Japan, the club is designed so it could change parents and still live.

I rewatched many V.League matches to verify something I had always sensed. When a Vietnamese club loses its main sponsorship, it is not only squad quality that drops. The style of play changes. A club shifts from proactive to withdrawn, from building to holding out, from a title target to a survival target. Coaches start rotating the squad to save energy rather than to optimise tactics. The youth system contracts. Supporters sense it before the board does, and the stands begin to thin. This is not emotional analysis. It is a fairly clear chain of cause and effect between cash flow and playing style.

And here something must be said about us, the people watching.

We are used to a beautiful story: Vietnamese football lives on love, on national pride, on nights when the whole country stays awake. That is true. But love cannot pay for a youth team's training-camp flights, cannot pay the doctor's fee, cannot pay to repair the floodlights. People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. And that story, if it is to last, needs a machine kept in regular maintenance.

At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together. My years in Brazilian football taught me that every club has two lives: the life on the pitch, where emotion decides everything, and the life in the accounts office, where numbers decide who plays next season. Supporters see only the first life. A professional journalist must see both. But a decent journalist must do more: must point out that the second life is quietly rewriting the first.

That is why I care more about oily hands than about back-heels.

A counterintuitive angle: businesses are not the villains

In many conversations with colleagues and supporters, I notice one recurring pattern: business is the destroyer of football, while supporters are the soul. In that view, the solution is to reduce the power of the patrons, to return football to the community, to let the fans own it.

That view is partly right emotionally, but wrong mechanically.

Modern football cannot operate without long-term capital. No supporters' movement can pay the payroll of thirty people plus coaching, medical, analysis and administrative staff. In Europe, that capital comes from broadcasting and commerce. In Vietnam, it comes from business. If business walks away, what remains is not beautiful community football, but a league with empty pockets.

The real problem is not business, but the absence of a system of rules that forces capital to behave like long-term capital. In Europe, financial fair play forbids clubs to spend more than they earn. In Japan, licensing rules force clubs to prove independent organisational capacity. In Vietnam, almost no barrier forces a club to be independent of its parent. So when the parent sneezes, the club catches pneumonia.

Another counterintuitive angle, even more controversial: off-the-books payments, support that is never recorded as a contract, quiet agreements between business and players, are more poisonous than any publicly announced transfer fee. I see this from my experience following international transfer markets. A published transfer fee may be criticised, but at least it sits in the books and can be checked. Support that never appears on paper cannot be checked by anyone, cannot be questioned by anyone, and never bears responsibility when the club collapses. That lack of transparency erodes both trust and the quality of the league, and it is far quieter than a loud deal.

I also want to push back on another reflex: importing the Japanese model by copying its form. Many people suggest Vietnam should learn from J.League, but they see only the surface of a system built over thirty years, with a large broadcasting market, a tiered league structure, a national youth academy system and an economy with enough large businesses to act as sponsors. Copying the licensing rules without the market produces only paperwork, not money. The loop does not exist for us to endure, but for us to catch sight of ourselves in time.

Finally, there is a blind spot we often overlook when praising Brazilian or Argentine football. We talk about artistry, about the streets, about bare feet on sand. But that machine also runs on sponsorship contracts, on industrial and energy corporations, on plants and seaports. Poetry is not immune to the accounts office. If that is true in South America, it is even truer in Vietnam, where the football is younger and more dependent on business.

Conclusion: the question of a club that outlives its parent

Leaving Go Dau Stadium, I walked past the industrial park's car park. The streetlights were on. I wondered: twenty years from now, when today's industrial parks have changed owners and changed sectors, will any club in Vietnam survive without needing the name of the person who built it?

If the answer is no, we are building beautiful machines with no spare parts. If the answer is yes, then the work to do today is not to find another generous patron, but to build the frame that lets that oil flow steadily for the next twenty years.

When the pitch is empty, ordinary houses become a stand of their own. And if one day no one sits in those houses, we will understand that what ran out was not love, but oil. I still believe Vietnamese football can go further. But that belief needs maintenance, the right kind, at the right time, and without stopping halfway.