V.League 2026: Signing-on Fees Are a Hidden Tax Distorting the Transfer Market

The 2026 summer transfer window gave me a deal with no officially declared fee. A national team player let his contract with the old club expire, and the new club proudly announced a free transfer. The old club walked away with nothing, not a single dong in compensation. Internal documents I obtained tell a different story: the player received a signing-on fee of 4.6 billion Vietnamese dong right after signing, 40% higher than his annual salary at the old club. No figure appeared on the official transfer sheet, no mechanism allowed the old club to audit it, and nobody called it distortion. I was wrong about youth football data, and that was the most accurate finding I have ever had. That lesson taught me one rule: when a market does not publish prices, it operates by unwritten rules. V.League is now operating that way. On the surface, the number of paid transfers in Vietnam's top league has been declining for three seasons. Below the surface, money has not disappeared; it has simply changed pipelines. That pipeline is called the signing-on fee. I spent nine years observing Vietnamese football, but only while tracking free agents from 2026 to 2026 did I see the full pattern. A survey of 47 domestic transfers, based on data supplied by a sports company, shows 68 percent of players left their clubs with less than one year left on their contracts. The average signing-on fee was equal to about 4.2 months of salary. Transfer fees in these deals had become symbolic; 11 cases used only 50 million dong to legitimize the paperwork. When I connected this data with free-agent transfers in Japan and South Korea, I found a common indicator: the higher the ratio of signing-on fees to club payroll, the less attached players are to the club that trained them. The problem does not come from one bad decision by one club. It comes from a structure of wrong incentives. A player no longer needs three strong seasons to be rewarded; he only needs to enter the final year of his contract. If he performs well, the club cannot force him to renew because his agent keeps mentioning the red carpet from another team. If he performs poorly, he can still wait safely for his release. Performance risk is pushed onto the current club, while the reward for patience goes to the next club. From a financial perspective, a free agent is an asset that is never properly priced. The old club spent money on training, paid salaries through injuries, and waited patiently for the player to mature. At harvest time, they receive nothing from the new club. The amount that should have been a transfer fee goes directly to the player and the agent as a signing-on fee. Rich clubs gain more influence, poor clubs lose players, and the entire league's payroll is pushed to an unsustainable level. Some people will tell me players have the right to choose their workplace freely. I do not oppose that right. I am simply pointing out that this market is not creating value for the development system. Vietnamese football is raising a generation of players who know how to wait more than they know how to commit. In my five seasons of watching matches, I have seen small clubs lose key players at exactly the moment they needed them most, and the reason always involved signing-on fee negotiations outside the pitch. Fans often applaud a free transfer and think their club negotiated brilliantly. The hidden cost is the balance inside the dressing room. A player receiving three times more signing money than a teammate in the same position creates a new salary benchmark. In the next window, other players will demand renegotiation. No team can avoid this domino effect with a confidentiality clause, because players always compare salaries through their agents. Data cannot measure the erosion in the dressing room, but I believe in data, and I believe even more in the mistakes data cannot measure. Signing-on fees are exactly that kind of mistake. The solution is not to ban these payments, because a ban would just push them into an underground economy. The solution is to force every free-agent contract to declare signing-on fees as part of the total transfer value, while capping this amount at a certain percentage of the player's payroll. If that happens, the summer 2027 transfer window will be less noisy, but youth-development clubs will have more money to keep their players. I may be wrong about the 4.6 billion dong figure, but I am not wrong about the direction of the money flow. When a transfer market has no published prices, the ones who pay the final bill are always the clubs that never appear in the story.