V.League and the Foreign-Player Race: When the Shortcut Becomes a Burden

There is a moment that anyone who has followed V.League long enough has witnessed: the 78th minute, the score level, the coach turns to the bench and calls a foreign player's name. A young Vietnamese player who had just taken off his training top sits back down and pulls the zip up to his chin. No one jeers, no one notices. It is only a small silence, but it repeats often enough to become a reflex of an entire football nation.

I still keep the habit of writing such moments into a private notebook. Not to publish them, but to understand what I am watching. After nearly two decades watching football from the stands, from press rooms, and from late nights rewinding match footage alone, I have learned that the most important thing is rarely in the scoreline. It sits in who is given a chance, who is left behind, and why.

V.League 1 enters the decisive stretch of the 2026-26 season with a familiar paradox. Clubs still spend on foreign players, still treat that as the shortest road to points, while the academy system, after years of building, has yet to produce a steady flow into the first team.

Under current VPF rules, each V.League club may register a set number of foreign players per match, plus a slot for naturalised or overseas Vietnamese players in certain seasons. That number shifts year by year, but the spirit stays fixed: clubs are permitted to use foreign players as a short-term fix. And they use it to the full.

To understand why, look at the spending structure. For most V.League clubs, the budget depends on a parent company or a single owner. When money is plentiful, the club buys a foreign striker. When it dries up, the academy is cut first, because an academy is an investment whose results are invisible within a season. This structure has existed for more than a decade, and it shapes how the whole game makes decisions.

What is striking is that this setting has not worsened. It simply repeats. Every season, fans hear the same story: a foreign player shines, a young player waits, and a few names are pushed into the media as proof that things are improving.

But the data tells another story. V.League's reliance on foreign players is no longer a temporary fix; it has become the default operating model — and the very stability of that model is the sign of a system that cannot correct itself.

In recent seasons, foreign players have often taken a large share of the league's scoring charts. It is not hard to find teams where more than half the goals come from foreign feet, especially among sides fighting relegation. This is the logical result of a tactical choice: when the pressure for points outweighs the pressure to develop, a coach picks the player who can deliver now.

The issue is not the quality of foreign players. Many in V.League are good, professional, and genuinely raise the standard of the competition. The issue is that foreign players are used to fill a gap the academy should fill. When that role drags on, the gap is not filled — it is merely covered.

Vietnam's training centres deserve close attention. PVF, HAGL-JMGA, Viettel, and more recently PVF-CAND have all produced players capable of performing in V.League and the national team. Names such as Nguyen Hoang Duc of Viettel or Nguyen Quang Hai, raised in the Hanoi academy, show that Vietnamese academies can create talent of continental class. But their output is uneven. One generation yields a few standout faces, then several years pass in silence. That is the mark of a system relying on exceptional individuals rather than a stable process.

Before becoming a name, everyone is only a running figure. The players we today call national-team pillars were once children running laps around a training pitch at six in the morning, known to no one. The only thing separating them from the teammates left behind was not talent. It was opportunity.

I have spent many evenings rewinding youth-match footage, not to find stars but to count minutes. The most telling figure is not the number of goals but the real playing minutes of under-21 players in V.League. In a league where every point can decide a coach's job, young players do not lack talent — they lack time.

The gap between academy and first team is not technical. It is a gap of trust. A coach only trusts a young player when he has nothing left to lose. And in V.League, almost no one is in that position.

Set against regional leagues, the picture sharpens. Competitions such as the Thai League or J.League carry the same commercial pressure, yet they build mechanisms for young players to play. In Japan, development is tied tightly to a club's playing philosophy, so a young player raised inside the system already understands how his team operates. That is not magic. It is organised patience.

In Vietnam, everything depends on one person's decision. When an owner believes in development, the academy grows. When the owner changes his mind, the academy shrinks. That uncertainty stops families from betting their children's futures on football, and stops young players themselves from daring to wait.

The counterintuitive point lies elsewhere: foreign players are a symptom, never the root cause.

If V.League banned all foreign players tomorrow, clubs would not suddenly believe in young talent. They would find another way to get instant results — buying established domestic players from rivals, driving up prices, and still leaving the academy behind. The problem is not the nationality of the scorer, but a system that rewards only short-term results.

There is another blind spot. People often say Vietnamese academies are not good enough. But if you look at the players who have matured, the problem is not the quality of coaching. It is the number of minutes at the highest level. A 19-year-old playing 30 V.League matches will improve faster than a 19-year-old training well across 30 sessions. Match experience cannot be replaced by any lesson plan.

And this is where I must check myself. I tend to romanticise academies, treating development as the answer to everything. But the evidence does not fully support that. Some clubs invest in academies methodically and still fail, because they lack a competitive environment for their young generation. Development without a stage is just a museum.

A transfer is how we name a parting so it sounds less like a parting. Every time a club signs a foreign striker, behind that contract sits a young player who has just lost a place and several years of growth. No one writes about him. There is no press conference for that departure.

Vietnamese football has reached a point where the question is no longer whether to use foreign players. What needs answering is this: do we want to build a league that buys results, or a league that produces players? The two paths are not mutually exclusive, but they need different mechanisms — and one of them is being left empty.

A good match is never fully told; it only waits for someone quiet enough to hear it. Perhaps it is time this football nation stopped listening to the roar in the stands, and started listening to the silence on the bench.