The V.League Regular Season: Squad Depth Is the Most Expensive Currency

The penultimate round of V.League 1 is always where the wage bill gets stripped bare.

Drawing on my experience watching the closing stages of the Vietnamese season up close, one pattern keeps repeating: the team that leans hardest on a handful of expensive individuals is the first to run out of air. Not because they play badly. Because the regular season in Vietnam does not award points for squad quality — it awards them for the number of intact pairs of legs.

A V.League 1 season is 14 clubs and 26 rounds. That sounds gentle, and it is gentle, if that were all of it. But a first-team player who plays league football, continental cup football and international windows accumulates far more minutes than a peer who only plays domestically. That gap does not show up in the table. It shows up in the injury list.

The injury list is the real table of the regular season.

A league with no buffer layer

To understand why, start with the financial structure. Vietnam is a football nation where broadcast revenue cannot support a club. The bulk of a V.League club's budget comes from its owner, from sponsors tied to that owner, and from small streams such as ticket sales, shirt sales and academy fees.

The consequence is not simply a shortage of money. The consequence is that a V.League club is run by one person's decision rather than by a business model. When that person wants a title, the club buys a foreign striker. When that person is tired, the club cuts wages. Between those two states there is no buffer of any kind.

On such a thin financial base, two forces press down at once.

AFC club licensing rules require any club entering the AFC Champions League Two or the AFC Challenge League to demonstrate financial structure, tax compliance, player contracts and an academy system. The standard is right, but it demands an administrative apparatus that domestic revenue struggles to fund.

At the same time, the calendar shows no mercy. International windows for national teams in Southeast Asia tend to fall in the middle of the club season rather than neatly inside the off-season. A call-up means travel, means intensity, means injury risk, and means the domestic league has to compress fixtures to catch up. The result is a 26-round season with almost no genuinely empty week.

No league in the world escapes this problem. What is different in Vietnam is that it lands on a system with very little redundancy.

Foreign-player quotas contribute to the same pressure, and they change fairly often. Every adjustment forces clubs to restructure their attack inside a short transfer window. Clubs with a professional recruitment department adapt quickly. Clubs without one buy on instinct and pay for it across an entire season.

Three structural layers of the regular season

Fixture compression is the most visible layer. Late in the season, clubs still involved in continental competition often face three matches in roughly eight days, including one long-haul flight. For a squad with only 14 players genuinely good enough to start, that problem has no optimal solution. There are two options: risk a key player's fitness, or drop points with the second string.

What stands out is that most V.League clubs choose the first. The table shows no mercy, and owners do not invest in order to watch their team play it safe.

Travel cost is the part nobody talks about. An away trip in the AFC Champions League Two can swallow a sum equivalent to several months of a mid-table club's operating budget. That money never appears in the standings, but it appears in the following season's personnel decisions, usually in the shape of a cheaper domestic contract.

The second layer is dependence on a foreign striker. When a team funnels its entire attacking output into one finisher, it does not have a tactical Plan B. It has a survival Plan B. Thep Xanh Nam Dinh in their 2026-24 title season is the clearest case. Nguyễn Xuân Son scored 31 goals in a single V.League campaign, a league record, followed by goals for the national team at the 2026 AFF Cup, followed by a serious injury in the second leg of the final in Bangkok.

I bring this up not to retell an injury story. I bring it up because it exposes a structure: when quality is concentrated at one point, risk is concentrated at the same point. The better the player, the more matches he plays. The more matches he plays, the higher the probability of injury. The problem lives in squad design, not in medicine.

There is a paradox here that few people name. V.League clubs are often criticised for signing mediocre foreign players. But that very dependence on imports is what allows some of them to compete in continental competition, where individual quality matters more than organisation. Remove the imports and the league becomes more even — and weaker when it steps outside the region.

The third layer, and the most underrated, concerns the role of academies. In Vietnam, a youth academy is usually treated as a badge of identity, something for the media to praise. For most clubs, though, it operates as a retail outlet: develop a few prospects, sell them on to another club, use the money to plug the wage bill.

FIFA's solidarity mechanism — the system that distributes a share of transfer fees to clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23 — is real money. The condition for that money to flow is that the player moves abroad. On that front, V.League clubs have a natural advantage, because the J.League and the K.League remain the traditional destinations for young Vietnamese players.

The problem is that the money returns to the wage bill rather than to the academy. A club that sells a 19-year-old and uses the fee to pay a 30-year-old foreign striker in good form is making a decision that is entirely rational in the short term and entirely self-cancelling in the medium term. The following season, the club is still short of a backup full-back.

That is why I treat the V.League regular season as a disguised long-term test. It does not test who plays the best football. It tests who has built a system that does not collapse when one link is removed.

The tactical consequences are concrete. With a thin squad, teams drift towards football that demands less synchronisation: a deep defensive block, quick transitions, set-piece reliance. That approach delivers results, but it grinds down the very players who have to run the most. The loop closes on itself: a low-risk tactic generates a higher workload for a small group of people, and that small group is precisely the group that cannot be rotated.

In Europe, when a team depends too heavily on a core of 14, the coaching staff are judged to be managing load badly. In Vietnam, coaching staff usually have no other choice, and result pressure stops them from choosing differently.

Over roughly the past decade, Vietnamese football has cycled through a recognisable pattern: big clubs burn money to win, then retrench, then a provincial club rises on better organisation and a moderate budget. Thep Xanh Nam Dinh is the latest example. The pattern is healthy, and it also carries an inconvenient message: durable success in the V.League comes from doing many small things right over several years, not from one big signing.

Where this argument could be wrong

I should argue against myself, because a hot take with no breaking point is a bad hot take.

The biggest weakness in the squad-depth argument is that it assumes every match costs the same physically. It does not. Minutes played do not measure workload. A possession team can run less than a counter-attacking team across the same 90 minutes. If so, the problem for some clubs is not the number of players but the style they choose, and that is a tactical decision, not a financial one.

The second weakness concerns national-team impact. The number of players called up from a single club rarely exceeds three or four. The effect is therefore local rather than systemic. A few clubs suffer; most do not.

The third weakness, and perhaps the most important, is coaching quality. In a league where many teams are of similar standard, what separates them is usually tactical organisation rather than squad size. A team with 16 players but clear organisation can beat a team with 20 players playing disconnected football all season.

I stand by the original claim, but I narrow its scope: squad depth decides the closing stretch, not the whole season. Across the first 20 rounds, organisation and individual quality matter more. Across the final six, when everything is spent, depth becomes the most expensive currency and one you cannot borrow.

One more point, inconvenient for the sceptics: mid-table V.League clubs are getting better at turning matches into fitness contests. They do not try to win with technique. They drag opponents into a high-intensity zone where thin squads break first. It is a rational and unpleasant strategy, and it makes the debate about squad depth more urgent, not less.

What to watch

People need data to make predictions. I only need the fixture list and the willingness to walk against the crowd.

My testable prediction for the coming regular season: the champion will not be the team that scores most across the first 13 rounds, but the team with the lowest rate of personnel change across the final six. And the first club to sack a head coach will be the one whose owner set the highest target relative to the squad's actual depth.

On the transfer market, prestige is the easiest currency to launder. In the table, it is the only currency that cannot be converted into points.