VFF Term 10: Three Chairman Candidates, Eight Vice Chairmen, and the Real Race Sitting in the Finance Seat

On October 21, a drawer in the records office at the Vietnam Football Federation headquarters was still left open. The candidate list for Term 10 had been read aloud in a short meeting, but several nomination files from member organisations had not yet arrived. Three chairman candidates. Eight vice chairman candidates. Thirty-one executive committee candidates. No applause, no cameras, no anthem. I have sat in enough stands to understand that the moment a federation counts itself always happens in silence. The stadium is empty, yet memory queues along the terraces.

The congress is expected in late December 2026 or early 2027, finalising the 2027-2031 term. The ballots for chairman and vice chairmen are secret. The electorate is not the television audience; it is 57 member organisations — provincial federations and clubs. Which means the outcome of this race is not in the news bulletins, it is inside meeting rooms that football reporters rarely get to enter.

At the chairman's seat there are three names. Trần Quốc Tuấn, the incumbent, born in 2026, who has held the chair for a full term. Nguyễn Đức Thụy, born in 2026, a construction and banking businessman linked to Sài Gòn Xuân Thành from 2026 to 2026 and to Ninh Bình since 2026. Nguyễn Xuân Vũ, born in 2026, VFF vice chairman for communications and external relations, and concurrently chairman of the Vietnam Table Tennis Federation.

Among those three, Trần Quốc Tuấn holds something no one can replace within a single term: international positions. He sits on the AFF Competitions Committee, within the AFC structure and at FIFA. For a football nation that has more than once needed an outside voice to untie knots at home, losing a seat in those committees is a tangible price. That is his real strength, and the reason those who want change still have to weigh the cost.

Five years in office is long enough for the same record to be read two ways. Those who want continuity will call it stability. Those who want change will call it standing still. There is no data in public hands to settle the argument, and that absence is itself a problem.

But looking only at the chairman's seat misses most of the story. The vice chairman seat in charge of finance and sponsorship is the place that sets the breathing rhythm of Vietnamese football for the next four years, and only two names stand there: Nguyễn Xuân Vũ and Nguyễn Đức Thụy. This is a contest between two kinds of capital. Vũ brings relationship capital — a long-serving bank board member, described as having broad cross-sector relationships, already inside the VFF leadership in Term 9. Thụy brings cash capital — construction, banking, and two separate investments in football.

With Thụy, one detail deserves more than a single line. At the start of the 2026-2026 season he transferred the chairmanship of Ninh Bình club to his daughter, Nguyễn Ngọc Mỹ Anh. Separating personal assets from an incoming federation office is the familiar clearing move before entering sports politics — it shows the man believes he will have a seat, and wants to pre-empt any conflict-of-interest challenge. The contract not yet signed has already told a whole life story.

The counterweight belongs right beside it: Sài Gòn Xuân Thành, where Thụy was involved from 2026 to 2026, was dissolved. A man who once ran a club that ended up disappearing, now standing for the post that controls the money flow of an entire football ecosystem, deserves harder questions than questions about ambition. I do not raise this to eliminate anyone. I raise it because Vietnamese football is far too familiar with grand projects that end with a sign being taken down.

At the professional affairs vice chairman seat the story differs. Trần Anh Tú holds that post and concurrently chairs the board of Vietnam Professional Football JSC — the body that runs the V-League. One person sitting simultaneously in the rule-making body and the competition-organising body is a visible conflict-of-interest structure; it requires no speculation. Keeping that structure means choosing continuity; changing it means declaring that a new term will not walk the old road.

The professional seat is not an honorary chair. It decides who leads the national team, which youth development philosophy gets priority, and which direction the competition regulations are written. A head coach appointment made there flows across four years, through two major qualifying cycles and at least one generation of young players. Few remember the name on the appointment paper. But that signature draws the boundary of a decade.

And one procedural detail matters more than all the rest: Trần Quốc Tuấn is nominated for both the chairmanship and the professional affairs vice chairmanship. The statutes state one person may stand for one position only, yet the list shows the opposite. That is the signature of a defensive candidacy: if the chairman vote falls short, there is still a door into the standing committee. Nguyễn Xuân Vũ appears in three possible slots: chairman, finance vice chairman, or communications vice chairman. Three doors for one man, when the statutes open only one.

Here is where I depart from the familiar reading. The story being told is "generational renewal" — 2026, 2026, 2026, three ages spread across ten years. It sounds convincing. But no campaign platform has been published, no poll exists, no delegate count exists, and there is not a single direct quote from any candidate in the entire released information. The claim that one candidate enjoys broad confidence is the writer's opinion, not data. It may be true. But it has not been demonstrated, and a football ecosystem making decisions on undemonstrated claims is playing a gamble with no scoreboard.

My experience following V-League matches teaches something different: the big decisions in Vietnamese football are usually settled by bloc votes among provincial federations and clubs, not by the story in the newspapers. People do not remember the scoreline; they remember how a pair of boots left its print on the grass — and in the voting room, those boots are each club's interest, not each candidate's image. Anyone calculating the result without a map of the 57 member organisations' interests is only guessing.

Another figure worth unpacking: of the 31 executive committee candidates, 12 come from V-League clubs, 5 from the First Division, 1 from the Second Division. Eighteen out of thirty-one. Club interests hold a structural majority in the federation's decision-making body — meaning any reform agenda must win the top-tier clubs first, or it dies at the implementation stage. The list also carries two women candidates, among them Nguyễn Thị Mỹ Dung, a member of the FIFA Disciplinary Committee — a rare and valuable external signal.

Then there is the last door few mention: vetting by state management agencies. The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism must review the list before it is finalised. This is the most opaque step in the entire cycle, and the one that can override member organisations' nominations. Add the fact that the list is still incomplete, and the current 3/8/31 structure is provisional — and a provisional list is a list that can change after the door closes.

What nobody has published, and what is the largest risk, is the federation's own financial picture. No broadcasting revenue, no sponsorship structure, no debt figure appears anywhere in the released information. A new leadership team may inherit obligations it has never seen. In football, clubs examine a player's knee before signing a contract, yet rarely examine the books before handing over a chair.

Another signal lies in the composition: five vice chairman candidates come from business backgrounds. This list indicates Term 10 will prioritise commercial capability over football-technical grounding. That may accelerate sponsorship and broadcasting revenue, but it may also subordinate technical development to commercial priority — and the consequence of that choice will only surface a decade later, in a youth team where nobody remembers why the strikers disappeared.

Term 9 closes with a list that has not closed. Term 10 opens with a question no one has answered: does Vietnamese football need a man who signs sponsorship papers, or a man who knows why a fifteen-year-old in a mountain district has never seen a properly built artificial pitch? The two questions do not exclude each other. But over the next four years, the ballots of 57 member organisations will answer on behalf of all of us — and they will be cast in silence, exactly the way they have always been cast.