V.League expansion to 18 clubs: the bottleneck is the number of solvent clubs

Six in the morning at the Hoa Xuan training ground in Da Nang, the kit manager opens a handwritten ledger and points at one line on the last page: 26. The number of matches in a 14-club V.League season, double round-robin. He wrote it down so the squad could plan family life, the mid-season break, recovery days. Just below, in different handwriting and different ink: 18 clubs, 34 matches. Nobody added a comment. The ledger closed, went into a pocket, the whistle went, and I stayed a few seconds longer by the touchline.

I have followed clubs in this country for many seasons, and I am used to the fact that the biggest plans in Vietnamese football appear first in ledgers like that one, where a logistics man does the arithmetic on behalf of an entire league. The plan to expand the V.League to 16 and then 18 clubs, tied to the 2027 roadmap and the tenth-term congress cycle of the federation, has been discussed widely in the press. What has been discussed far less is the remaining work: where the four new clubs get their money, where they get their players, and who signs their licences.

The arithmetic, and the trap inside it

A season opens with a heartbeat in a press room, before the first whistle.

V.League 1 currently runs 14 clubs. The "34 matches" line in that ledger is simply the arithmetic of a working man: double round-robin, 18 clubs means 34 rounds, 16 clubs means 30, 14 clubs means 26. Add the National Cup and any play-off fixtures and a 14-club season comes to roughly 30 to 33 competitive matches; an 18-club season comes to roughly 38 to 41. Put another way, expansion to 18 clubs adds about eight matches, more than 700 competitive minutes, to every first-choice player's calendar, while the number of recovery sessions barely moves.

Look around the region, though, and that arithmetic stops being decisive. Thailand runs 16 clubs and only 30 rounds. Malaysia 12 clubs. Indonesia 18. Japan 20 clubs, 38 rounds, split into two phases. South Korea runs just 12 clubs yet still delivers 38 matches through a 33-round regular season plus a championship and relegation split. Singapore 8 clubs. Club count does not predict match volume, and it predicts competitive intensity even less. South Korea is the clearest counter-example: fewer clubs than the V.League, more matches than the V.League, and a markedly higher standard of squad.

I keep a team's rhythm not with a drum, but by not missing a single training session in thirty years. Those thirty years taught me to separate two entirely different kinds of proposal: the one that changes the fixture list, and the one that changes the quality of football. The first gets signed in a single meeting. The second takes a decade, and usually nobody wants to claim credit for it.

The bottleneck is not the number of clubs

In 2026 two clubs were sanctioned for failing to meet the full licensing criteria. By the 2026 season, two other clubs held only conditional licences. Against a 14-club base that is a non-compliance rate of roughly 10 to 15 percent, meaning one to two clubs outside full compliance every season. Apply that rate to 18 clubs and the league acquires two to three more non-compliant members. At that point licensing stops acting as a quality filter and becomes a piece of time-limited paperwork.

Quang Nam is the most expensive lesson and the least discussed. The club survived relegation and then withdrew over its budget. An empty stadium does not stop the ball rolling; it only makes the applause arrive one beat behind the heart. The more telling detail sits elsewhere: the escape route from financial distress in the V.League is administrative survival, not player sales. A league in which a club cannot save itself by selling assets is a league that does not yet have a transfer market in the financial sense of the word.

Thanh Hoa nearly collapsed and was rescued by local authorities. Thanh Hoa, Song Lam Nghe An and Hai Phong are all clubs that would struggle badly to operate without provincial budgets. I do not regard that support as a scandal; it is the reality of a football economy in which private business has not yet found a profitable model. But it should be named correctly: a provincial budget is a contingent liability, not equity. It contracts when the province's finances tighten, and it disappears when provincial leadership changes. A club living on that source cannot credibly commit to the league for an 18-club slot over ten years.

Hoang Anh Gia Lai is the fullest case study of the limits of the one-patron model. Around 2,000 billion VND over 20 years, in the words of the club's own chairman at the federation congress, roughly 76 to 80 million USD, or 3.8 to 4 million USD per season. That is the scale of a mid-table V.League operating budget. Yet it came with a decade of continuous decline while the money kept flowing. If the club with Vietnam's most respected academy still cannot convert talent production into balance-sheet strength, then the league has no established way of monetising its core asset, which is people.

The other side deserves a fair hearing, because critics of the plan routinely skip it. Four new clubs create roughly 100 to 120 first-team squad places and around 500 to 700 additional competitive minutes per round available to young players. In a league where young players are routinely blocked by import-dependent line-ups, that is the strongest sporting argument for expansion, considerably stronger than the broadcasting-inventory argument.

The dilution risk is not spread evenly across positions. It concentrates where domestic supply is thinnest: goalkeepers, centre-backs and creative midfielders. Russia 2026 was so cold that I remembered every breath of the stands for four years afterwards, and in that cold I remember a 21-year-old goalkeeper sitting alone sorting his gloves after a training defeat. Bui Tien Dung was the image of a generation of goalkeepers pushed forward very early. Expansion will push more young players into the goalmouth in a similar way, except not all of them will have a World Cup in which to grow up.

The fairness concern, meanwhile, is structural rather than a matter of individual refereeing calls. Since the 2026 season, when a group of businesses sponsored several clubs at once and produced a conflict-of-interest dispute, overlapping ownership and cross-sponsorship relationships have never been resolved through an independent mechanism. Thirteen, fourteen years. An expansion plan is not the vehicle for fixing that, and should not be expected to be.

Where the outside view gets it wrong

The comfortable outside view is easy to like: Thailand has 16 clubs, Indonesia 18, Vietnam 14 is small, so expansion is catching up. But league size follows a country's economic and infrastructural conditions; it reflects development rather than producing it. Japan runs 20 clubs because it has 20 local economies capable of sustaining a professional club, not because it wanted 38 rounds.

The second blind spot is subtler. The plan is presented as development policy, but its operating function is to add fixtures to the broadcast package and add voting members inside the VPF. No new revenue stream has been identified to fund four new clubs; the cost side, however, exists, and it will land on provincial budgets or on a handful of private wallets. A proposal with only a cost column is a request for more money, not a plan to create more value.

The third blind spot is that the cheapest solution is on nobody's table. If the real objective is more matches, a split format with 12 to 14 clubs delivers a 38-round season without four extra administrations, four compliant stadiums and four licensing files. That mechanism is not chosen because it cannot be sold politically: nobody receives four new clubs, nobody gains a seat.

The fourth is the expectation gap. From a base of two clubs on conditional licences, reaching 16 and then 18 clubs within one to three seasons requires an unprecedented jump in club financial capability, at precisely the moment every indicator is moving the other way. Such a plan is only workable with a staggered entry mechanism, a controlled form of franchising, and nobody has yet been willing to call it that.

The next signal to watch

The next internal signal will not come from a speech at a congress. It will come from the licensing list published before the 2027 season kicks off: how many clubs are in full compliance, how many hold conditional licences, and whether the plan includes a staggered entry mechanism. Those three lines will say more about the target club count than any headline figure.

Spectators remember goals; I remember the eyes of a substitute when the whistle goes. In this story the substitutes are the clubs placed 15th to 18th, teams with no name, no budget, and nobody asking them the simplest question: next season, where is the money.