The Transfer Window of Blank Contracts: Vietnamese Women's Football Seen from an Empty Training Room

The final day of the mid-season transfer window finds me at the headquarters of a women's football club in southern Vietnam. Four in the afternoon. The management office is roughly thirty square metres, holds one desk, two plastic chairs, and a printer that broke last season. On the desk, next to the player registration dossier sent to the federation, lies a handwritten A4 sheet: "Squad list for next season". Eighteen names. Beside each name, a phone number, and nothing else.

No salary. No contract length. No release clause. No signing bonus. No agent. No valuation.

The club's number 10, twenty-six years old, has waited three days for a phone call. She does not know what she will sign, how much she will earn, or where she will be in two months. I ask her whether she knows the minimum wage for a women's top-flight player in Vietnam. She shakes her head. Then she asks me back: "Sister, do we get to sign a contract at all, or is it only a verbal agreement?"

That is the question I carried through this entire transfer window. And it led me to a truth few want to name: Vietnamese women's football has a transfer window, but most of its players have nothing to transfer.

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The context no one enters into the minutes

Vietnamese women's football has a history of more than forty years, from amateur provincial teams in the north in the 1980s to the national team's first women's Asian Cup finals and its qualification for the 2026 Women's World Cup. That is a proud journey. But that journey was written in the sweat of the players, not in their signatures on proper contracts.

The national women's championship currently features around seven to eight teams each season, depending on the year. Registered players range from two hundred to two hundred and fifty, spread across clubs such as Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City I and II, Vietnam Coal and Minerals, Phong Phu Ha Nam, Thai Nguyen T&T, Son La, and a few promoted sides. Each club runs a modest wage bill, usually between seven hundred million and two billion dong for the whole season, depending on the club and the sponsor.

Those numbers may sound dry. But divided across about twenty-five people, including coaching staff and medical personnel, everything becomes very concrete. On average, a women's player in Vietnam's top flight earns between three and eight million dong a month, plus a few hundred thousand in match bonuses, plus a centralised training and accommodation allowance paid by the club. At the top of that range, a handful of national team players may earn fifteen to twenty million dong a month if they are lucky enough to hold a personal sponsorship deal. But those are exceptions. And exceptions do not make a market.

For comparison: a men's V.League 1 player currently earns an average of thirty to seventy million dong a month, not counting signing bonuses and prize money. Men's national team regulars can earn one hundred million dong a month or more. The gap is not double. The gap is ten times, even twenty times, between two people playing the same sport, under the same federation, in the same country.

The current men's transfer window in Vietnam features deals valued in billions of dong, agents negotiating across multiple rounds, release clauses written to the last digit. The women's transfer window, in the same period, largely takes place over text messages.

I spent three weeks travelling through four provinces and cities, speaking with seventeen active women's players across different age groups, three head coaches, two federation officials, and two former club administrators. Not one of them could recall a single transfer between two Vietnamese women's clubs with a fee attached in the last three seasons. Not one. Not even the veterans.

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The problem is not just money — it is the absence of the contract itself

In men's football, a professional contract typically runs three to five years, with appendices covering signing bonuses, goal bonuses, trophy bonuses, release clauses, and conditions for transfer settlement. In Vietnamese women's football, most players sign one-year deals, renewed annually, and those deals usually record only three things: the player's name, the basic wage, and the duty to train and play as assigned by the coaching staff.

A player in central Vietnam tells me she signed with her club from age eighteen to twenty-two without ever reading a full contract. She was handed a sheet, told to "sign here", and signed. When I ask where her copy is, she says the club keeps it. "I didn't ask back, afraid of offending them."

The absence of a contract with clear clauses has a direct consequence: when a player wants to move clubs, she has no legal basis on which to negotiate. No transfer value for the old club. No compensation for herself. And the new club, because it pays no transfer fee, sees no reason to offer a higher wage to retain anyone.

That mechanism turns the women's transfer market into a market without buyers in the strict economic sense. Clubs receive players for free, players leave without compensation, and neither side has an incentive to raise the value of the other. That circle has locked itself shut for more than a decade.

I call it the market of blank contracts. There is a signature, there is a stamp, but there is not enough content for anyone to bid.

They do not know they have been forgotten until the wage bill is made public. And in Vietnamese women's football, where does the wage bill sit during the transfer window? Usually it does not exist publicly. There is no independent players' union strong enough for collective bargaining. There is no independent national professional players' association for women's football. There is no database detailed enough for a player to know what a peer earns at another club.

That is the biggest difference between the men's and women's transfer windows. When a men's player negotiates, he can reference the market wage, compare himself to an equivalent player at a rival club, and build a demand on that data. When a women's player negotiates, she usually walks into the meeting room knowing nothing about her peers' income.

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Forty-seven interviews and a number no one wants to hear

During this transfer window, I ran a small survey with forty-seven active women's players across different levels, from national team members to youth squads. The results kept me awake for several nights.

Only nine of the forty-seven, roughly nineteen per cent, said they had ever held a contract longer than two years. Twenty-three of them, nearly half, said they did not possess a copy of their own contract. Thirty-two, sixty-eight per cent, said their main income from football came not from wages but from centralised training allowances and match bonuses.

The most striking finding came from the final question. I asked: if a foreign club reached out, what would be the biggest obstacle? Only six of the forty-seven said "technical level". Twenty-one said "no agent to negotiate". Fourteen said "I don't know whether my current contract allows me to leave".

That figure of twenty-one is too specific to ignore. The international women's transfer market is opening up. Leagues in Europe, the Americas, and Asia are increasing spending on women's football. But Vietnamese women's players cannot enter that market not because they lack talent, but because they lack someone to hold the contract for them.

I called three professional player-management companies in Vietnam. None of them manages women's players. Their reasons were blunt: commission from a women's contract of seven million dong a month, at ten per cent, is seven hundred thousand dong. Not enough to cover parking.

People call it the margin; I call it the place where the real stories are kept. And the real story here is basic economics: where there is no commission, there is no intermediary. Where there is no intermediary, there is no market. Where there is no market, players are valued in silence.

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Huynh Nhu and the first international transfer shock

In 2026, Huynh Nhu became the first Vietnamese women's player to sign with a foreign club, joining Lank FC in Portugal. It was a landmark moment in the history of women's football in this country. But when I looked at the structure of that deal, I realised it revealed far more than a media boost.

Huynh Nhu left as a free transfer. Her former club in Vietnam received no fee. She herself received no significant signing bonus from the move, because the contract structure in Vietnam contains no clause protecting a player's interests when going abroad. She had no professional agent at the time. Everything happened through goodwill and relationships.

The result is a paradox. A player who achieved the biggest step forward in the history of Vietnamese women's football did not obtain a commensurate economic benefit from that step. Her former club received no compensation, so it had no incentive to invest in training to sell on. And her new club in Portugal, paying no transfer fee, only offered a modest wage by European standards.

I am not raising this to blame anyone. I am raising it to make one point clear: when the Vietnamese women's transfer market has no valuation mechanism, even the biggest opportunity slips through the fingers. And the player stands at the end of that flow.

After Huynh Nhu, national team players such as Chuong Thi Kieu, Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, and Tran Thi Thuy Trang were all mentioned as candidates to play abroad. But in this transfer window, I recorded only two cases of formal contact with foreign clubs. Both collapsed during negotiations, and the reasons had nothing to do with technical ability.

The first reason: no party was trusted enough to negotiate international terms on the player's behalf. The second: the current contract at the home club did not specify a release clause, so no one knew how much needed to be paid for the player to leave.

I remember one small story. A women's player was once approached by a European club. Her home club in Vietnam replied that they needed compensation. But when asked for a specific figure, they could not answer. Because her contract stated the wage and the duration, but not a transfer value. The negotiation stopped there. The player did not know. To this day, when I ask her again, she says: "I only knew a foreign club was interested. But what happened to my fate, I don't know."

That is a sum of money forgotten, and a career paused, all because of one missing line in a contract.

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Academies, training camps and the closed loop of development

In men's football, a player developed through an academy can be valued at hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dong on transfer. That fee drives academies to keep investing, to recruit more talent, to build more pitches, to hire more fitness specialists.

In women's football, the academy system is far thinner. A few large training centres attached to strong clubs such as Hanoi or Vietnam Coal and Minerals run selection intakes, but most girls come to football through school-level selection or provincial screening rounds. A women's player spends five years in training from the day she starts professionally at thirteen to her promotion to the first team at eighteen. If that investment generates no transfer value, the academy has no reason to expand.

I asked a head coach about this equation. His answer was very short: "We train players for our own use, not to sell. Sell to whom? Who pays?"

That answer is correct, and it is precisely the problem. A transfer market cannot exist without goods that are valued. And the goods here are a player's right to play. That right is only valued when there is a specific contract, with a transfer clause, with a third party confirming the value. Without those three conditions, every transaction is an act of goodwill, not an economic transaction.

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Television money, sponsorship money and the voice of empty stands

During this transfer window, the television rights value of Vietnam's national women's championship remained at effectively zero. Matches are streamed free on platforms or broadcast by the national broadcaster as a public-service duty, not as a commercial product with buyers.

A coach once told me something I wrote in my notebook: "Entry is free already, so where is the money to pay players' wages?"

True. But this is a two-way story. Entry is free because there are no spectators. No spectators because there is no product staged well enough to attract them. No attractive product because there is no investment. No investment because there is no revenue. That circle is also closed, and it also locks everything down.

What is notable is that in countries with developed women's football, the same sport, the same rules, the same number of players generate an entirely different revenue. When the Vietnamese women's national team first played in the Women's World Cup, millions of Vietnamese watched. I was among them. I saw stadiums in New Zealand and Australia packed with spectators, saw foreign companies paying sponsorship money to women's teams, saw women's shirts sold as official merchandise.

And I asked myself: why, in Vietnam, was that historic moment not converted into contracts of real value?

The answer may lie here: after the tournament ended, not a single Vietnamese women's national team player signed a long-term personal sponsorship contract of significant value. They returned to their clubs, continued to receive the same wages, continued to wait for each small trickle of bonus money. The World Cup glow did not convert into cash. And when the glow does not convert into cash, the next transfer window still has nothing to value.

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The flip side of meagre wages: a shadow economy

As I write these lines, I am not only looking at club wage bills. I am looking at what women's players do on the side to survive.

Twelve of the forty-seven players I interviewed said they hold additional jobs. Selling online. Coaching children's football. Helping at food stalls. Riding for ride-hailing apps. Handing out flyers. Modelling for sports photography. Teaching fitness at gyms.

A player who once wore the national youth jersey told me she coaches children's football every Sunday morning, earning three hundred thousand dong a session. She said it calmly, without complaint. When I asked whether she felt her wage matched her labour, she smiled: "Sister, we're used to it. And what can we do? We play for the love of it."

Love is the answer I have heard most in twenty years in this profession. Love is a precious thing. But love does not pay rent. And when an industry relies on workers' love to compensate for wages that cannot cover living costs, that is not a business model. That is an exploitation model, whatever elegant name it is given.

I say this not to criticise clubs. Their budgets are tight, and they struggle too. I say it to point out that Vietnamese women's football survives on an invisible subsidy that the workers themselves pay. Women's players offset the lack of investment with their own labour outside the pitch. And when that outside labour runs out with age, their careers end in a financial void that has never been filled.

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Confronting the "commercial value" logic

This is the part where I must be most forceful, and also the part most easily misunderstood.

The common argument I hear whenever I raise the question of pay inequality in women's football is: "Women's football has lower commercial value, so low wages are reasonable." This is an intuitive argument, and it is wrong in economic terms.

Commercial value is not a natural constant. It is the result of investment. Vietnamese men's football had very low commercial value in the 1990s. But when businesses poured money into V.League advertising, when television rights were auctioned, when shirts appeared in stores, that value grew over time. No one said "men's football's commercial value is low, so let it stay low" in 2026. They invested, and the value came later.

In women's football, the logic is inverted. Commercial value is used as the reason not to invest, and because there is no investment, the value never rises. That is a self-naturalising loop, not an objective law.

If we applied proper commercial logic, then when the Vietnamese women's national team played in the World Cup and attracted millions of viewers, television rights, sponsorship deals, shirt sales, and the personal brand value of players should all have risen accordingly. But they did not. Therefore, the "low commercial value" argument cannot explain the current situation. What explains it is the absence of a commercialisation infrastructure built specifically for women's football, from distribution channels to business partners to agents.

I call this the commercial paradox of women's football: the more you wait for commerce to arrive naturally, the less it arrives; the less you invest in building commercial infrastructure, the less commerce there is to benefit from; and the players pay the price of that loop.

During this transfer window, I never heard a men's club say it would not sign a player because commercial value was not high enough. They sign, and they create the value afterwards. So what justifies a different standard for women's football?

The answer may be prejudice. Prejudice that women's football is a minor sport, that spectators do not want to watch, that women's players are less attractive to watch. That prejudice has been repeated long enough to become a precondition rather than an assumption. And that self-fulfilling precondition blocks every commercialisation effort before it begins.

Policy does not change from the desk; it changes from voices that refuse to be silenced. And in Vietnamese women's football, those voices usually come from empty training rooms on Sunday mornings, when women's players coach children's football for an extra three hundred thousand dong.

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The fault is not in the money, but in the duration

Let me be clear to avoid misunderstanding: the core problem is not only low wages. If it were only low wages, the solution would simply be to raise subsidies. The deeper problem lies in duration and contract structure.

A Vietnamese women's player signs a one-year deal, renewed annually, on a low basic wage, with no clause guaranteeing minimum income during injury, no clause protecting her during pregnancy, no clause for payment if the league is cancelled for objective reasons. That is the structure of a semi-professional contract, not a professional one.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a series on this. When all leagues were cancelled, women's players had no income. No wages, no match bonuses, no training allowances. Many returned to their home provinces, took other jobs, sold the prizes they had accumulated over years. Several provincial departments of culture and sports later issued support packages, and benefactors contributed. Those were commendable actions. But they were situational solutions, not structural ones.

If women's player contracts were designed for three to five years, with a minimum wage clause benchmarked to professional standards, income insurance during injury, maternity protection, and compensation when leagues are cancelled, then the transfer window would change too. A three-year contract has transfer value. A one-year contract does not.

This is the point I want sports policymakers to see. Simply raising the budget for women's football will not make everything better. The contract structure must change so that players have bargaining power, income insurance, and a legal basis for compensation. When that structure exists, the transfer window will generate value on its own. Not the other way around.

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Signs of change, small but real

Over twenty years writing about women's football, I have learned one thing: big changes do not come from a single federation decision. They come from small changes, repeated, driven by people who refuse to be silenced.

In this transfer window, I recorded four small signs. First, a few women's clubs have begun drafting two-year contracts for promising young players, with automatic renewal clauses. This is the first step, and it matters more than it looks. Second, two Vietnamese women's players hired lawyers privately to read their contracts before signing. Not through agents, but through personal connections. But it is a start. Third, a few benefactors have begun signing sponsorship deals directly with women's players rather than only donating to clubs, meaning money is starting to flow directly to the workers. Fourth, a domestic sports media platform has begun buying image rights to women's matches for paid replay.

None of those four signs is big enough to create a vibrant transfer market. But four signs appearing in one season is unprecedented.

I believe in small changes, because over the past twenty years, every step forward in Vietnamese women's football has begun with a small change. From the women's national team's first Asian Cup appearance. From the first women's player going abroad to play. From a benefactor sponsoring fifty million dong for a young women's team in Hanoi after reading an article that had been rejected by a newsroom. From a provincial sports department issuing a one-hundred-million-dong support package after seeing the story of a player who sold her medals to pay her mother's hospital bills.

I write about people who have no place in the standings but whose names are in history. And the history of Vietnamese women's football will continue to be written either in two-year, three-year, five-year contracts, or in the silence of another decade. That choice lies with the people sitting in the office with the broken printer, holding the handwritten A4 sheet with eighteen names and eighteen phone numbers.

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What I carry away from this transfer window

When I left the club headquarters in the south on the final day of the transfer window, the number 10 was still waiting for a call. She told me she would wait another week, and if no one phoned, she would return to her home province to help her mother sell goods. She still wants to play. But she also needs to live.

I am not writing this article to tell a sad story. I am writing to pose a specific question: if the Vietnamese women's transfer window continues to take place over text messages, over handwritten A4 sheets, over contracts with no transfer clauses, then in five years, how many more players will leave the pitch because they cannot make a living from the game, and how many talents will be missed because no one negotiated for them?

I do not have a complete answer. But I know one thing for certain: every time a women's contract is drafted with full clauses, every time a woman's player hires a lawyer to read her contract, every time a benefactor signs directly with a player, the Vietnamese women's transfer market moves one step closer to having real value. Conversely, every further season that passes with contracts still blank sheets, we lose another generation.

When the training room is empty, their voices carry farther than ever. But an empty training room does not echo forever. At some point, it goes silent. And when it goes silent, the people who were once inside will not come back. The question for the next transfer window is not how many women's players are bought and sold, but how many of them still have enough faith to sign the next contract — one that now has clauses, or one that does not.