Vietnamese Players Abroad: The Sell-On Percentage V.League Clubs Keep Leaving Behind

In June 2026, I stood outside the fence of a training ground in Pleiku, waiting for a session featuring a group of players whose names the whole of Vietnam already knew by heart. No one from the coaching staff came out to meet me. The man who opened the iron gate was a security guard, and during the fifteen minutes I stood there he told me a small story: the club had just packed a young player's bags for a trial in Japan, and the luggage was so light it held only two pairs of boots and a jacket. The door opens from the groundskeeper, not from the boardroom. From that afternoon onward I began noticing something almost nobody in the V.League wanted to talk about: when Vietnamese players move abroad, the sell-on percentage, the thing European football treats as a matter of survival, is usually left behind, sitting quietly in a drawer. More than thirty-seven years in this trade is enough to teach one thing: insiders whisper, outsiders hear a fist on the table. In Spain, when a young player leaves an academy for another league, the contract runs to thirty pages and carries at least two forward-looking clauses: a sell-on percentage and FIFA's solidarity mechanism. In the V.League, the contract for a 19-year-old going abroad is sometimes a two-page loan agreement, signed in a hurry a few days before the window shuts. To understand why this matters, you have to look at the financial structure of Vietnamese football. V.League 1 runs with 14 clubs, and the broadcast money shared with each club covers only a very small slice of the overall budget. Most of the money comes from an owner or a parent corporation: a club in Hanoi, a club in Nam Dinh, a club in Pleiku, each tied to a business, with the budget depending on whether that business still wants to spend. The domestic transfer market is largely free transfers and loans, with low fees, sometimes purely symbolic. Within that structure, selling players abroad ought to be the most important revenue channel. It works the other way around. Vietnamese clubs tend to focus only on the immediate fee, a few tens of thousands, a few hundred thousand dollars, and forget the percentage of the next sale. In a football economy where a mid-table club's season budget is only a few tens of billions of dong, a fee of 200,000 USD is enough for a board to nod through in the meeting room. But if that player is sold three years later for 3 million USD, a 10 percent sell-on brings in 300,000 USD, more than the original fee. That money exists only if somebody signs the clause at the start. Nguyen Quang Hai joined Pau FC in 2026. Doan Van Hau spent time on loan at SC Heerenveen. Nguyen Cong Phuong went to Japan, then Korea, then Belgium. Line that list up and the most obvious thing is that most of the deals were loans or free transfers. When there is no transfer fee, there is nothing to split. And when there is nothing to split, the parent club has no incentive to invest in development in order to sell, only an incentive to hold a player until the contract expires and lose him for nothing. This is where Vietnamese football diverges completely from the European academy model. In Europe, an academy lives by selling young players and collecting percentages on later transfers. In Vietnam, an academy lives on the parent corporation's budget, and selling players is a side matter. FIFA's solidarity mechanism, the system that shares part of a transfer fee with the clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23, applies to every international deal, but to collect, a club must know it has a claim, must hold records proving the training period, and must pursue the money through its federation. Very few V.League clubs have the legal department to do this. The consequence stretches into a loop. Without transfer income, a club has no budget to pay competitive wages. Without competitive wages, its best players look abroad earlier, usually at 19 or 20, when their transfer value is still low. Going abroad at that age on a loan deal, the player generates no fee, and the parent club again collects nothing. The loop closes exactly where it began. Based on my experience following V.League matches across several seasons, the quality gap between the leading group and the rest of the league has become steadily clearer. The big-budget clubs in Hanoi and a few emerging football centres such as Nam Dinh can hold on to good players longer, while the rest must sell or lose players whenever an offer arrives from abroad. This concentration of finance leaves the domestic transfer market increasingly unbalanced, and makes the sell-on problem more urgent for the smaller clubs. There is another factor rarely mentioned: the structure of agent contracts. In Europe, agents are usually paid a percentage of the deal, which gives them an incentive to negotiate a higher contract value and to secure a sell-on clause. In Vietnam, many moves abroad are arranged through personal relationships rather than a properly drafted agency contract. When a personal relationship stands in for black-and-white paperwork, the sell-on clause is the first thing cut. The existing legal framework does not help much either. Vietnamese clubs entering Asian competitions must comply with the AFC Club Licensing Regulations, which include criteria on finance, infrastructure and organisational structure. But licensing criteria concern whether a club can avoid insolvency, not whether it maximises transfer value. A club can pass AFC licensing while still losing 500,000 USD of potential income on a single deal. No authority fines them for it. At this point I have to say something many people in the Vietnamese game will not like. The debate about sell-on percentages is aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not the clause that was forgotten; it is that most moves abroad by Vietnamese players carry no transfer fee to split at all. If a player leaves on loan or on a free, a 20 percent sell-on clause brings in nothing. Vietnamese clubs are arguing about how to divide a cake that was never baked. I was wrong about Coutinho, and that mistake was worth more than ten correct calls, because it taught me to look at structure before looking at rumour. The structure here says one clear thing: the problem for Vietnamese football is not a missing clause, it is a missing transfer value created at home. A player is only worth something when the market can price him. When the V.League does not produce a transparent pricing system, with no publicly disclosed transfer fees, no contract data, no real marketplace, nobody can price a Vietnamese player, including his own club. And an asset that is not priced cannot be sold at the right price, nor can a percentage be retained. Put another way, Vietnamese clubs are selling goods whose price they themselves do not know. A sell-on clause only means something when both sides know the base figure. In Spain, the release clause is written into the contract and partly public, so every deal has an anchor point. In the V.League, that anchor point usually does not exist. Age 53 does not slow the legs, it sharpens the eyes. I look back at the deals I have reported and realise: the most successful ones were not the ones with the most rumours, but the ones with the most paperwork. The lessons from COVID are the same. COVID froze the market, but do not forget that thawed water becomes a river. When the market freezes, money and relationships still flow underground, and when the ice melts, everything pours back along channels that were already connected. In Vietnam, those channels currently run toward the J.League and the K.League, where clubs have professional scouting systems and a habit of buying young players cheaply to develop and resell. If the V.League does not learn to write clauses, it will remain the cheap seller in that chain. Some clubs have started to change. Standardising contracts, hiring sports lawyers, and spelling out sell-on clauses in loan agreements are the first steps. But the first step that costs the least money is also the one easiest to skip: write everything down. A club may not win a negotiation with a Japanese partner, but it can absolutely control whether it keeps its development records. The question I leave behind is not how to get a bigger percentage, but this: if the next generation of players again leaves on two-page contracts, how many more years will pass before Vietnamese football gets to share in the money from a deal whose player it trained itself? Numbers only show the road already travelled, instinct points to the road ahead. And my instinct, after all these years standing outside the fence, says the road ahead still has plenty of blank pages waiting for a signature.