Imports Take 30% of the Payroll, Media Rights Return Under 3%: Vietnamese Volleyball Is Misreading Its Own Value

In the second stage of Vietnam's 2026 national volleyball championship, I stayed in the arena until the organisers switched off the lights, recounting the statistics sheet. The home team scored 68 attack points; their foreign opposite accounted for 29 of them. On the other bench, a 21-year-old domestic opposite, 1.93m tall with a 3.40m reach, sat out the entire fourth set. I knew the value of the import's contract: roughly 2.4 billion dong for the main stage. I also knew the monthly allowance of the domestic player: 9 million dong, plus meals and a dormitory bed.

Every match is a merger in disguise — it has a balance sheet and shareholder pressure. In Vietnamese volleyball, the largest shareholder is usually a provincial enterprise, and nobody requires that enterprise to publish the balance sheet. So I started rebuilding it by hand at the start of the 2026 season: talking to 11 administrative and finance officials across men's and women's clubs, cross-referencing competition regulations, the fixture list, and whatever is public in the media.

Vietnamese volleyball runs on two tiers. The Vietnam Volleyball Federation holds the regulations, the schedule, the referees and the domestic registration system. The clubs hold the money, and most of them belong to a provincial Department of Culture and Sports or survive on the name of a title sponsor: a cement plant, a bank, a food company, a telecoms operator.

The national championship is split into two stages, each running roughly six to eight weeks, with men's and women's competitions played in parallel at centralised venues. Live attendance is higher than a decade ago, and that part is real. The money does not follow the audience. A club's revenue has four lines: sponsorship, tickets, media rights, merchandise. The last three combined usually come to less than a quarter of the first.

Empty stands, but shareholder minutes are never empty — that is what COVID taught sports operators. Through 2026 and 2026, when competitions were postponed and arenas stood silent, many clubs saw their own revenue structure on a single page for the first time. Four years later, that structure has barely moved.

The import quota is the biggest variable in that structure. Under current regulations, each club may register a set number of foreign players, and most of them are used at the outside-hitter or opposite position — where one attacker can single-handedly solve a bad ball. For a club chasing a top-four finish, that is a cost that cannot be cut.

The import market runs through a small group of intermediaries, most deals done on personal relationships and regional tournaments. Commissions typically sit at 10 to 15 percent of contract value, and the buying club has no database to verify anything beyond video and a recommendation. The result is that Vietnam pays above the regional benchmark for the same quality, because information risk is priced straight into the fee.

Collating 11 conversations into a median figure for a club using its full import quota, the squad cost breakdown looks like this. Imports take 28 to 34 percent of the total player payroll. The domestic star group, usually three or four players, takes 15 to 20 percent. The remaining twelve to fourteen squad members take 35 to 40 percent. Coaching, medical and video analysis take 8 to 12 percent. At a few men's clubs, the foreign opposite earns more than the head coach.

On the revenue side, concentration is even more striking. Title sponsorship plus secondary sponsors account for 70 to 85 percent of revenue. Tickets, at venues that charge at all, account for 5 to 12 percent, and most of that money is collected by the competition organiser rather than the club. Ticket prices typically sit between 20,000 and 50,000 dong, with crowds ranging from a few hundred to around two thousand depending on the venue and the matchup. Media rights sit below 3 percent of system-wide revenue, because most matches are bundled into sponsorship packages or traded for airtime. Merchandise, replica shirts and paid academies are close to zero.

That percentage is nobody's trade secret. It is the consequence of having no single entity that aggregates commercial rights and prices them. Without an independent audience measurement, without an audited ratings currency, what is a 30-second board advertisement between the second and third sets worth? The sponsor's answer is: exactly what they are willing to give. Volleyball is not paid according to value. It is paid according to goodwill.

Most sponsorship contracts are signed annually, tied to a company's marketing budget, and carry no performance clauses. The money does not depend on attendance, broadcast production quality, or league position. When a contract has no performance clause, renewal becomes a matter of personal relations between club leadership and corporate leadership. That is the largest risk Vietnamese volleyball carries, and it is not on the court.

One point deserves a clear look: the venues. Most clubs do not own their arena. The hall belongs to the provincial sports authority or a local sports centre, and rent is waived or discounted. That is good for this year's cost sheet and bad for long-term incentives. Nobody upgrades the stands, the changing rooms or an electronic ticketing system for an asset they do not own. The result is that the fan experience stalls while the commercial value of that experience rises.

National-team windows are another hidden cost. When the national squad gathers for the SEA V.League, Asian competitions or the SEA Games, clubs lose their best player mid-season, keep paying the salary, and receive no compensation. In some cases the club also carries treatment costs if a player is injured on national duty. In other words, the club invests in the asset and another party uses that asset for free.

I said this at an industry seminar in April and I stand by it: a healthy volleyball ecosystem is not measured by trophies, but by how many clubs do not have to sell their home venue to pay wages. That is not a line for effect. It is an accounting criterion.

Look at the transfer market and the picture sharpens. Vietnamese volleyball has almost no domestic transfer fees. A player changes clubs for three reasons: her home province wants to keep her, another provincial sponsor pays more, or the meals and lodging are better. Nobody pays for development. The club that produced a player receives nothing when she leaves; the club that signs her pays nothing. Neither side has an incentive to invest in youth, and the consequence is a generation of 20-to-24-year-olds stalling at exactly the age they should break through.

Compare outward and the gap appears. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy has played in Japan and Turkey. Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen is one of the best opposites in Southeast Asia and the anchor at Ninh Binh. The same person, the same skill set, can be worth eight to ten times more in a foreign league than at home. That gap sits in infrastructure, not in talent. A league whose rights are priced, whose schedule is stable and whose audience data is audited can pay a real wage for the work.

I tend to spot this kind of differential in details other people skip. Fans watch an outside hitter score; I watch the person who drives her to the airport at four in the morning, and I look at which budget line that plane ticket sits on. Once, asking about travel costs for a women's team on a road trip, I got one answer: "The sponsor's car." A real expense vanished from the report, and at the same moment it vanished from every calculation of the league's value.

Look at another industry for a yardstick. Esports ran the lap that football took a hundred years to complete — and it is stumbling into the very tackles we know by heart. The lesson is not growth speed, but order of operations: esports built rights and data first, then sold sponsorship on top of that data. Vietnamese volleyball does it backwards. Sponsorship first, data later.

The import wave is usually defended with one line: it raises the level of the league. That argument is right about the scoreboard and wrong about the system. Count what is lost rather than what is added. A regionally elite foreign opposite averages 20 to 25 points per match, equivalent to 400 to 500 attack swings across a stage. That is precisely the number of swings a domestic opposite aged 20 to 24 needs in order to learn how to hit in the fifth set, when the block has already read her approach.

Put differently, the money buys points today, and it also buys the absence of any domestic opposite with the nerve for a fifth set over the next three seasons. That cost appears in no club's financial statement, but it appears on the national team roster.

There is another paradox worth noting: the story of "we don't have enough money" obscures how much value is created and then leaks. Attendance is up, streaming views are up, competitions such as the VTV Cup and the SEA V.League sell tickets and draw media. With no rights-holding entity, most of that value flows to streaming platforms as free viewership. Attention does not convert into revenue by itself. It converts only when someone stands up and sells it.

On the clubs' side, I want to be fair. They are not behaving irrationally. In a league where a sponsor can walk after one season, buying a proven foreign opposite is the most rational risk-management decision available. The problem is that the system offers no cheaper and safer alternative. With no compensation for youth development and no priced media rights, buying imports is the only path with a high probability of success.

What I want to see in the next two seasons is not an indictment, but a piece of paper. A centralised rights package for the national championship, with independently audited audience measurement, carrying a distribution clause tied to minutes played by domestic players under 23. Alongside it, an income floor for that age group, funded from the very budget currently going to imports. And a one-page financial summary each season, four lines only: revenue, payroll, sponsorship concentration, youth spend.

Vietnamese volleyball has an audience, has talent, and has fuller stands than any year before. What it lacks is a correct price. In two seasons, if one club publishes those four financial lines first, it will be called reckless. Three seasons later it will be considered normal, and by then people will have forgotten who went first.