Bau Thuy and the VFF chair: what is prepared before the ballots are handed out

At the congress hall of the Vietnam Football Federation, the most telling moment rarely comes from the financial report. It comes when the list of candidates is projected onto the screen and the room falls silent for a few seconds. In those seconds, every delegate — representing a provincial federation, a professional club, a youth academy — is recalculating their own position. The news that Bau Thuy is preparing to run for the VFF chairmanship is, read closely, a story about voting blocs being rearranged before a congress.

Nguyen Duc Thuy, known in football circles as Bau Thuy, is chairman of the board of SHB Bank and chairman of Hanoi Football Club. His club has been the dominant force in V.League over the past decade, with national titles in 2026, 2026, 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026, plus a run to the 2026 AFC Cup inter-zone final. A man who took a club from Hang Day stadium onto the map of Asia is now placing his ballot on the table of the national governing body.

The VFF chair is a seat of resource allocation, not the seat of a head coach. The VFF governs the national team, women's football, futsal, grassroots football, the refereeing system and the sponsorship contracts of Vietnamese football. The Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company runs V.League and the First Division. The two organisations sit at the same table but move to different rhythms: one needs a strong national team to sell broadcast rights and attract sponsors, the other needs a crowded fixture list to have a product to sell to television. For years, that conflict has surfaced as compressed schedules, national team call-ups cutting across the run-in, and players forced to choose between a club match and a fitness session.

The ninth congress in November 2026 closed a turbulent period, after chairman Le Hung Dung stepped down for health reasons and the VFF ran on an interim standing committee for a long stretch. The 2026–2026 term set out very concrete work: stabilising the calendar, bringing VAR into V.League, reorganising the youth development system, and preparing for continental qualifiers. A term like that costs more than a chair.

In my notebook in the My Dinh press area, there is a section I always keep separately: who sits in the third row, behind the officials. That row usually belongs to club chairmen, and the way they rise when the national team scores says more than an annual report. Some spring up quickly and sit down again; some clap twice. People remember the goals. I remember the silences between two beats of the ball.

Bau Duc once sat on the VFF executive committee. Bau Hien did too. A football businessman entering the governing body is a tradition in Vietnamese football, not an exception. What is different this time is scale: the chairman of the country's strongest club, backed by a commercial bank with a wide branch network, running for the highest office. If the ballot goes the right way, Vietnamese football will have a VFF chairman carrying two roles at once.

The first role is system builder. The second is owner of a club competing inside that system. The overlap has never been this visible at the top level.

Look at how Hanoi FC operates and you can partly predict the governance style that would arrive at the VFF. The club keeps young players on long contracts, builds from its academy rather than buying expensive, and maintains a stable core across seasons. Nguyen Van Quyet is the symbol of that method: a player tied to one club for almost an entire career, rare in a league where the transfer market runs on relationships more than on contracts. Do Hung Dung is the next piece of the same model. A training ground never lies. It only whispers to those who stay behind.

The opposite direction exists too. Nguyen Quang Hai left Hanoi FC for Pau FC in 2026, and that export route remains one of the hardest problems for a Vietnamese player: paperwork, timing, the right league, and who pays the wages in the first months. A federation cannot decide the transfer, but it can decide whether that player leaves smoothly or not.

The bottleneck few mention is broadcast rights. The largest revenue stream in Vietnamese professional football comes from rights contracts, and their value depends on the quality of the product on the pitch: the turf, the floodlights, the referees, VAR, and the absence of matches under suspicion. A chairman from banking will read this problem in the language of cash flow. That can be an advantage, and it can also be a trap: when everything is measured in cash flow, investments with no direct return — women's football, grassroots football, grassroots refereeing — are the first lines to be cut.

There is a widespread misreading of this race. Many believe that once a wealthy man takes the chair, Vietnamese football will have the money to fix everything. But the VFF runs on collective principles: the executive committee votes, the standing committee administers, the technical departments execute. A chairman cannot sign a sponsorship deal alone, cannot move a fixture alone, cannot appoint a head of refereeing alone. Real power sits in the delegates' ballots, and in who controls the number of those delegates.

There is a second misreading, the mirror image: that a club owner in the chair will make the league unfair. That risk is real, but it rarely appears as a direct request. It lives in indirect decisions — a fixture rescheduled, a stadium standard loosened, a transfer deadline shifted. Read individually, none of those decisions looks biased. Placed side by side across a season, they take shape.

Vietnamese football has been through several such cycles. The 2026 generation — from the AFC U23 final on 27 January 2026 in Changzhou to the AFF Cup title on 15 December that same year — was built on a very different foundation: a well-drilled cohort, a coach who knew how to use them, and a federation willing to stand behind rather than in front. Whoever takes the chair in 2026 will be measured against that benchmark, even though the benchmark was made by many people over many years.

What is worth watching in the coming months sits in small signals. The makeup of the new executive committee shows where the centre of power is tilting — the share of delegates from provincial federations against delegates from professional clubs. The timing of a candidacy announcement is a signal too: a late announcement usually means the votes are already counted, an early one usually means they are still being sought. And the youth development budget line in the first financial report of the term will say more than any speech.

One beat does not make a piece of music. One match does not make a football life. Keeping the beat, for me, means counting what nobody hears — and at the VFF, what nobody hears is usually the sound of a ballot already counted before the room has finished falling silent.