Loans with an Obligation to Buy — the Silent Spiral Squeezing Small V.League Clubs

Minute 88 of a midweek V.League match. On the away team's bench, a 20-year-old player sits motionless, not once called upon. He belongs to a small club and has been out on loan since the start of the season. For those 88 minutes, there are no jeers, no cameras pointed his way. Only a contract sitting in a drawer, carrying a line few notice: obligation to buy.

I sat in the stands, notebook open, asking myself what makes a small club sign an agreement it knows is unfavourable. Every passage of play is a short poem, and I simply choose to read it slowly. But some poems are not written on the pitch; they are written in the meeting room, where the contract is signed before the ball rolls.

V.League 1 has operated with 14 teams in recent seasons. The budget gap between the leading group and the bottom group is not only about squad quality; it is about time. Big clubs can buy time — time to wait for a young player to mature, time to absorb a defeat without fearing for their jobs. Small clubs have no such time.

Based on my experience following these matches, one pattern repeats across seasons. Small clubs need points immediately to survive. They turn to experienced players, or take loanees from big clubs. The "obligation to buy" clause appears as an escape route: the big club lends, the small club uses, and after a set number of appearances or a performance threshold, the small club is forced to buy at a pre-agreed price.

At first glance, it looks like a sensible deal. The big club frees up its wage bill, the small club gets a player. But read closely, and this is a financial structure tilted entirely to one side. And it is not unique to Vietnamese football.

World football had to step in. From 1 July 2026, FIFA applied new loan regulations, capping the number of international loans each club may register, with a tightening schedule season by season. The reason is clear: loans had become a tool for big clubs to stockpile talent and shift costs onto smaller ones. V.League, with far more modest budgets, is subject to the same logic, only at a smaller scale.

Break a loan with an obligation to buy into layers. The first layer is the buy-out price — a figure fixed from the outset, non-negotiable, based on the big club's expectations rather than on actual performances. The second layer is the wage bill. During the loan, the small club often carries most or all of the player's salary. The third layer is the trigger condition: appearances, minutes, or league position.

These three layers combine to create a paradox. The more the player is used, the closer the small club comes to the obligation to buy. The more it wants to avoid buying, the more it must leave the player on the bench — and in doing so, it erodes its own competitive objective. No option is genuinely good. A loan with an obligation to buy shifts risk from the big club to the small club, while the reward, if any, stays with the big club.

Tactically, the squad instability left by loan deals is visible on the pitch. A team that wants to press high needs to understand each other over months, even years: who covers for whom, who pushes up when, who drops when. When the squad changes every transfer window, those connections never have time to form. Small clubs are forced into a safe, low-risk style, and gradually lose their identity. The price of a contract therefore lies not only in the budget, but in how a club recognises itself.

Look at the youth development layer, and the picture sharpens. Big-club academies are praised as a source of pride. But set against the data, the share of academy players who genuinely earn regular first-team minutes is below 10%. Most of the rest enter a loop: loaned out, returned, loaned again, then released. The academy operates as a stockpile of talent rather than a pathway.

Take the first cohort of the HAGL JMG Academy (2026) as an example. This is the generation regarded as Vietnam's golden one, with names such as Nguyễn Công Phượng, Nguyễn Tuấn Anh, Lương Xuân Trường, and Nguyễn Văn Toàn — names the whole country knows by heart. Yet even a nursery that successful reveals the limits of the model: a dazzling input, a narrow output. A golden generation does not automatically create a golden league.

Meanwhile, big clubs benefit twice over. They hold control of young players, and they can shift costs onto small clubs through loan arrangements. Small clubs, after a few seasons, find they have spent a considerable sum on players they do not truly own in the long term, or own at a price above their real value.

What matters is that this risk does not lie in a single contract. It lies in the structure. When many small clubs sign similar deals at once, the whole league gradually loses sustainable competitiveness. Small clubs cease to be rivals and become satellites. And a league where most clubs are satellites will eventually lose its own audience, because nobody wants to watch a race whose outcome is pre-decided.

Here, a familiar romantic story must be tested. People often say youth development is the future, that academies will save Vietnamese football. That story sounds pleasant, but it overlooks one detail: an academy does not automatically grant opportunity. A good academy, without a mechanism for young players to actually play, only creates a longer queue.

I once sat rewatching an entire season's footage just to find the pattern, after I misspelled a player's name and was scolded in front of the whole editorial group. Falling at LPL 2026, I now know where to stand firm. And that place to stand firm, in Vietnamese football, is data, not slogans.

It must also be said plainly: not every loan deal is bad. Some cases benefit both sides, especially when a player needs playing time the big club cannot provide. The problem lies in the terms, in who bears the risk, and in whether the small club has genuine negotiating power or is merely signing a pre-drafted contract.

The transfer market is only a list; the real contract is signed with love. But love cannot pay a wage bill.

If small clubs are to truly grow, a more transparent mechanism is needed: buy-out clauses tied to actual performances, a right of refusal, and a percentage of any future transfer returning to the academy. Vietnamese football does not lack talent; it lacks contracts that treat the growers fairly.

On that bench, the 20-year-old still sits. He does not know that his fate was decided before the season began. But we know. And once we know, we can begin to read a contract more slowly than we read a passage of play.