Last week Nguyen Thi Huynh Nhu made history as she became the first female Vietnamese footballer ever to join a European club. The 30-year-old striker signed a one-year loan contract with Lank in Portugal. With Quang Hai in France’s Ligue 2 and Huynh Nhu in Portugal’s Liga BPI, Vietnamese football has marked its presence in Europe in both men's and women’s football. In recent years there have been many voices from media and football experts urging Vietnamese players to go abroad while blaming many factors including the club, the federation, and the system for not making it happen.
However, there are very few articles that address this issue from the players’ POV. What’s in their mind and do they really want to play abroad? Hopefully, some arguments given in this multi-part series will help you answer those questions.
#1 Finance. Vietnamese players are richer than you thought!
One of the biggest misunderstandings of international coverage of Vietnamese football is the players’ income. People look at the country’s GDP per capita of just roughly 4000$ per year and lazily conclude that Vietnamese players playing abroad will definitely earn more money than the ones on home soil. IT’S WRONG. Let me explain why.
A typical footballer in Vietnam has four main sources of income: salary, bonus, signing-on fee, and commercial deals. The last one, commercial deals, are only available for a small group of players who have been widely popular on the internet or in the entertainment industry. In Vietnam, most of them are members of the National team or youth levels like U19 and U23. Superstars like Nguyen Quang Hai or Nguyen Hoang Duc could earn hundreds of thousand USD or more each year from commercial deals: attending events, social media posts, TV ads, etc. It’s worth mentioning that this revenue often significantly reduces when they are playing abroad. I don’t know why as I’m not a marketing expert, but when scrolling through Nguyen Quang Hai’s 2.5 million follower Facebook profile and you could see very little “commercial content” since he joined Pau FC in Ligue 2. Perhaps the brands prefer someone based in Vietnam to attend their event or he just wants to completely focus on football in the first months in France, I’m not sure.
Salary is a complicated issue. For players in the lower tier, it’s their most important (probably the only) source of income. For the top ones who are considering moving abroad, it’s not worth spending too much time talking about salary at the negotiation table. Of course the more talent you have, the higher the salary number you get. But the same as workers in other economic sectors in Vietnam, footballers don’t get rich by saving their monthly salary. It’s the signing-on fee, the grandiose number you often find on the headlines.
“Phan Van Duc got 10.5 billion in his new three-year contract”.
“Ha Duc Chinh got 2.5 billion per year when joining Topenland Binh Dinh”.
“Nguyen Quang Hai denied a million-dollar offer from Ha Noi”.
What makes signing-on fee so great for most footballers? Basically, it’s a large chunk of money that is guaranteed to pay for them for the duration of the contract, regardless of their health condition or their contribution to the team’s performance. Unlike in other countries, signing-on fee is the most important part of a player’s income in Vietnam, and paying an unreasonably high signing-on fee is the best way to attract the best players to your club. According to this article, in 2011, Lee Nguyen received a 250k USD signing-on fee when signing a one-year contract with Becamex Binh Duong plus 12k USD per month in salary. Back in the US, he only received around 150k USD a year in salary and no signing-on fee, less than half of what he got in the country where GDP per capita is only 1/18 of the US. In the case of Nguyen Quang Hai, Vietnam media reported his salary at Pau FC is just around 200k USD per year, while Hanoi FC put an offer worth 200k USD per year in signing-on fee plus nearly 20k USD monthly salary. It’s fair to say the golden boy of Vietnamese football has to sacrifice financial interests to pursue his European dream.
Because of the “youth development contract” that keeps the players at the club until he’s 25-year-old, most of them have only a few times in their career to negotiate such a big amount of money from signing-on fees. For example, player A has six years of peak career between 25 and 31 years old and he signed two different clubs in that time, he could pocket at least a few billion VND from those two contracts to help his financial stability for the rest of his life (after retiring). Going abroad is much riskier and doesn’t give the same option because most foreign clubs don’t give such high signing-on fees.
The final one is also the most interesting one, the bonus. At the beginning of the season, each club promises a certain amount of money for each match, depending on the result. For instance, 500 million VND for an away win, 300 million VND for a home win or an away draw, etc. This chunk of money is divided among the players, coaches, and staff, depending on their contribution to the team’s performance. The closer to the end of the season, when the matches become more and more important, the bigger the bonus. According to bongdaplus, the new owner of Nam Dinh FC has rewarded the team with an amount of 2.2 billion VND (nearly 100k USD) after their two victories against SHB Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City FC recently. A regular starter could earn an extra few thousand bucks each month from the match’s bonus, all tax-free. These big bags of cash becomes incredibly vital in the relegation race when you have very limited choices of motivation tool to encourage the players.
To end this newsletter, I want to use a quote from Paulo Futre, a Portuguese former football, in the recent Netflix documentary about the transfer of Luis Figo from Barcelona to Real Madrid in 2000. He made 1.5 million euros for the role in that transfer, connecting Real Madrid president Florentino Perez and Luis Figo’s agent Jose Veiga.
“At the end of the day, what counts isn’t the medals, the Ballon d’Or. It isn’t even the Champions League. At the end of the day, what’s important is the money, the money that you make.”
In the next newsletters, we’ll discuss other reasons for the players to stay at home instead of moving abroad. Stay tuned.