The V.League Transfer Window: When Small Clubs Learn to Count Every Tear

Late July, Hang Day Stadium was as empty as a classroom dismissed early. I stayed behind alone in stand B, where the seats still bore the rain marks of the previous day's match. No match was being played. Only a cleaner bent down to pick up scraps of paper, and I — a 69-year-old man with a notebook and a waterproof pencil — sat there as if waiting for something to happen.

People ask what I wait for in an empty stadium. I wait for the breath of the ball. On a quiet night on the pitch, I hear the ball breathing. It does not talk about scorelines, or about blockbuster signings. It whispers about the people Vietnamese football chronicles will never name: the ball boy in the corner, the old security guard, and the young players sent out on loan like unsold goods.

The mid-season transfer window is approaching. And amid its noise, I want to listen to the gaps. They call me a dreamer. But the ball has never hidden anything from me. I am the dreamer, and perhaps that is precisely why I see what the scoreboard deliberately conceals.

For weeks now, Vietnamese sports pages have been filled with a familiar kind of noise. This club is about to get a new foreign player. That club is negotiating with a striker who once played in Thailand. A top-of-the-table club is said to be preparing a record fee. These headlines travel faster than the ball itself, and most of them will vanish before the window closes.

But beneath that noise, another story is unfolding far more quietly. It is the story of small clubs — clubs with no budget to buy, only to borrow; clubs with academies too weak to keep their players, able only to raise them and sell them. And in every transfer window, they are placed on a chessboard where the loss has been predetermined.

I have followed football across five decades of writing, eight World Cups, eight Olympic Games, and countless seasons of Vietnamese football. My notebook still holds a few tears of Moscow. But today, I want to open that notebook to another page — a page about the small clubs of the V.League, the people I believe carry the entire sustainability of our national game on their shoulders.

What is worth noting is that the transfer window is not merely about buying and selling. It is a system for distributing power. Those with money buy proven players. Those without money must accept unproven ones, along with a clause few pay attention to: the obligation to buy after a loan.

This mechanism is gradually becoming the norm in many leagues, and it is creeping into the V.League as well. A big club wants to offload a young player but does not want to sell cheaply, so it loans him to a small club for a season. The loan contract specifies: if the player appears in enough matches, or if the small club avoids relegation, the small club must buy him outright at a price fixed from the start. On the surface, it seems fair. In reality, it is a gamble in which the small club always holds the losing card.

Imagine a club near the bottom of the table. They need points to survive, so they need players. They take a young player from a big club. He plays well, scores a few goals, helps them survive. At season's end, the clause triggers, and the small club is forced to pay a sum it never had in its financial plan. If they refuse, they lose the player and their credibility with the agent. If they pay, they blow up the wage bill, must sell someone else to compensate, and begin a new spiral.

The essence of a loan with an obligation to buy is that it transfers financial risk from the big club to the small club, while ownership of the talent remains with the big club. That is not cooperation. It is a form of lending with interest paid out of the small club's own future.

I once sat down with a coach at a mid-table club. He told me that every time he takes on a loan deal, he reads the annex at least three times. "If I play him enough, we have to buy him. If I don't play him, he loses value and the chairman yells at me. I'm trapped between two snares." He laughed as he said it, but the laugh never reached his eyes.

In the V.League, where a small club's budget may be only a fraction of the league leaders', every dong spent must be weighed. A loan that looks free can be the largest hidden debt on the balance sheet. And when the season ends, when the medals have been handed out, people remember only who won the title. No one remembers which club had to sell its number-one goalkeeper to repay a loan deal.

That is why I have always believed the real story of the transfer window is not found in blockbuster signings. It is found in the small print of contract annexes, in the clauses no one wants to read aloud on camera.

Alongside the financial story, there is a tactical one unfolding, and it too is being misunderstood in a similar way. I am talking about the return of the back-three formation.

Over the past two seasons, more and more V.League clubs have switched to three centre-backs. Pundits call it modernisation, a tactical step forward, a sign that Vietnamese football is catching up with European trends. I do not think so. I believe most of these switches stem not from attacking ambition, but from the fear of being cut open.

When a back four is repeatedly carved apart by opponents, the easiest response for a coach is to add another centre-back. It does not require re-teaching the whole team how to press. It does not require changing a philosophy. It only requires a substitution, and a little courage to accept that the attack will lose a spearhead.

In other words, the back three is in many cases a shield for the coach's reputation, not a door opened to attacking football. It makes the team look more solid in the eyes of the crowd, while in reality they are merely playing safer.

I do not deny that a back three can be highly effective when deployed correctly. Europe's big clubs have proven that. But in a league where the quality of midfielders and the ability to pass under pressure remain limited, adding a centre-back often means the ball will be played long more often, and short combinations will become rarer. The team defends better, but also grows poorer in ideas.

It is worth noting that very few V.League clubs play a back three with the full skill set required: two wing-backs who attack and defend relentlessly, two central midfielders who read the game superbly, and centre-backs comfortable carrying the ball high. Without those elements, the back three becomes a crowded but disjointed block — defending by numbers, not by organisation.

I once sat in the stands and counted the long balls of a team playing a back three. In the first half, they played more than twenty long balls, and most lost possession. When I asked an assistant coach afterwards whether that was the tactical intent, he fell silent and then said: "We need to be safe first." Safe first. Those two words, to me, are the most honest confession of the nature of this trend.

And this is where the two stories — financial and tactical — meet. A small club has no money to buy top-class attackers, so it chooses to defend to earn points. It borrows young centre-backs from big clubs, builds a back three, and tries to keep a clean sheet. The result is that it depends on the big club for personnel while losing its own attacking identity. It becomes a club living from day to day, not a club with a plan.

There is a paradox few mention: it is precisely the small clubs that face the greatest relegation pressure, and therefore the clubs most easily swept into the borrow-buy-sell spiral. They have no time to build. They only have time to survive. And survival, in football, often means having to give up the most beautiful things.

The scoreboard cannot reflect the heart, and football writes poetry in those places. But the balance sheet reflects the heart very clearly — it shows who is suffering because of someone else's decisions.

Look at how the media reports during the transfer window. A rumour that a star might move to a big club gets published on dozens of sites and shared thousands of times. But news that a small club must sell its captain to balance the books is barely mentioned. Public attention is drawn toward where the money is, and that in turn makes the places without money even more invisible.

I always wonder: if we spent half the attention we give to blockbuster signings on how small clubs manage to get by, would the game become more sustainable? Perhaps. But that question does not sell advertising, so it is rarely asked.

During the transfer window, I have learned to sort information by credibility. A piece from an official club is worth something different from one from an agent, and entirely different from one from a social media account of unclear origin. Agents always have their own motives: they want to create pressure for more contracts, to raise prices, to put their clients in the sights of more clubs. Reading transfer news without understanding the motives of the messenger is like watching a match by looking only at the ball and not at the players.

And here, once again, the small clubs are the ones who lose out. They lack a communications department strong enough to correct unfavourable rumours. They lack an agent of sufficient stature to negotiate fairly. They enter the transfer window with less information, less money, and less time.

On a quiet night on the pitch, I hear the ball breathing, and I think of the young players sent out on loan. They are people stuck between two shores. At the big club, they have no place. At the small club, they are a tool to satisfy a contract clause. They play for love, but their love is priced in figures they will never see.

There was a young player I once followed. A big club loaned him to a small club. He played well, scored, was loved by the fans. At season's end, the small club could not afford to buy him outright, so he had to return to the big club, sit on the bench for another season, and then be pushed elsewhere. I recorded the moment he left the pitch in the final match of that season. He did not cry. He just stood looking at the stands for a long while, as if trying to remember the faces of those who had once called his name.

That is one of the moments I believe matters more than any goal. It told me about a system operating in a way that turns people into transferable numbers. And it forced me, a dreamer, to question the very system I have been attached to for five decades.

At 69, I still believe a beautiful pass is a declaration of love. But I also believe a carelessly written contract clause can be a cruel farewell. Football is not beautiful only in what happens on the pitch. It is also beautiful — or ugly — in what happens in meeting rooms, in the offices where people decide the fates of human beings the fans will never know by name.

What I want to say is not to deny the necessity of the transfer market. Without it, football cannot function. But I want to say that the market is being run in a way that makes the weak always pay the price. And if we do not look that in the eye, we will keep celebrating blockbuster signings while small clubs quietly disappear.

Now I will say something many will likely disagree with. I believe that small clubs repeatedly losing their players is not a sign of a healthy market, but a sign of an unbalanced one. In a healthy market, both seller and buyer have the right to choose. In today's football market, small clubs often have no choice at all. They sell because they are forced to, not because they want to.

And here is the blind spot of collective memory. We remember the stars who left. We remember the goals they scored for their new clubs. But we forget the clubs left behind, the clubs that raised them when they were still unknown players. Football's collective memory always leans toward the winners. It has no room for those who lost in silence.

I think about that every time I read a headline about a big transfer. People write about the buying club, about the star, about ambition. No one writes about the selling club. No one asks whether they wanted to sell. That silence is not accidental. It is the result of a way of telling stories shaped long ago, and we — writers and readers alike — are all part of it.

I am not writing this article to complain. I am writing to document. Because I believe that if no one records what is happening to small clubs, then one day, when they are gone, no one will remember they ever existed. And a football that does not remember its weakest is a football digging out its own foundations.

So what should be done? I do not have a complete answer. But I have a few thoughts. First, loan clauses with obligations to buy need to be more transparent, and there must be a mechanism to protect small clubs from hidden debts. Second, small clubs need to be encouraged to build academies and keep their players, rather than being pushed into selling to survive. Third, and perhaps most important, the media needs to make room for stories that are less glamorous but more necessary.

I know these proposals sound naive. People will tell me football is business, that money is money, that the strong survive and the weak must adapt. I understand that. But I also understand that a football with only a few strong clubs and the rest living from day to day cannot be called a developed football. It is just a game whose rules are written by those with money.

When the radio goes on air in the middle of the night, the pitch sleeps quietly, and football knows how to wait. I know how to wait too. I am waiting for a day when small clubs no longer have to sell their dream to repay someone else's. I am waiting for a transfer window where people count not only the money, but also the tears.

Modrić cried, I took notes, and neither of us knew we were living through history. Perhaps it is the same in the V.League. Those quietly enduring every transfer window may not know they are writing the history of our national game. But I know. And I will keep taking notes, until my notebook runs out of blank pages.