Vietnam's Sports Subsidy: Mis-targeted, Mis-measured

In 2026, at the 29th SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur, I sat in the last row of the Bukit Jalil stands, timing every lap of Nguyen Thi Oanh in the women's 1500m. Over the first 800 metres she ran 2.3 seconds slower than she did over the final 700. That negative split was no accident; it was a pre-calculated decision, a distribution of effort that only an athlete who truly knows her own body would dare to attempt. When I sent my tactical analysis to the desk, a male editor laughed: "Women don't understand pacing." I did not argue. I went home, re-watched all the footage over three weeks, and published it myself. The piece drew 50,000 views in 48 hours and was shared by the national team's head coach.

After that I stopped asking anyone's permission before I wrote. But it took me years to realise I was still reading only half the story. The other half is not on the track; it sits in the budget line behind it. People look at the rankings; I look at what the rankings hide. And the thing most consistently hidden, for years, is how money in sport is actually distributed.

A two-speed allocation system

Vietnamese sport runs on two rails moving at different speeds. On one side is elite performance, where goals are quantified in medals, rankings and continental qualification spots. On the other side is mass sport, where the goals are far fuzzier: how many people train regularly, how many children can swim, how many community pitches survive more than a few seasons. Every subsidy and every support programme has to pass through this fork.

The main resource is still the state budget, plus a measure of socialisation and corporate sponsorship. The structure resembles a funnel: money enters wide, but by the time it reaches an individual athlete, coach or provincial training ground, the diameter narrows fast. Public opinion mostly sees the mouth of the funnel — the glittering medals at the output — and rarely looks into the neck, where it is decided who receives, how much, and through what mechanism.

The nutrition regime, wages and medal bonuses for national-team athletes are the most transparent items, because they are tied to medal targets. Beneath them, however, lies a murky lower layer: funding for grassroots sport, support for gifted children in the provinces, fees for hiring foreign experts, overseas training camps, and the cost of keeping the mass-participation competition system alive. This lower layer determines the supply of athletes ten years from now, yet it is the hardest to measure and the first to be cut.

The transfer window in the professional football leagues adds further noise. Surging transfer fees, signing bonuses and wage bills each year create the impression that money is flooding into sport. But that money circulates in a closed loop of a few dozen clubs and a handful of top players, and barely trickles down to the base of the pyramid. The noise of the transfer market drowns out the real signal: most of the system remains badly underfunded exactly where it matters most.

Four layers of error in a sports subsidy

Reading the public data on sports support programmes, I noticed they tend to make the same cluster of mistakes. Four layers of error recur from one programme to the next, no matter how appealing the name.

The first is targeting the wrong people. Subsidies are designed to flow to the most identifiable group — national teams, athletes who already have results, big events. That group already has resources, sponsors and a coaching apparatus. Meanwhile the forgotten majority are anonymous: the child in a remote district who has talent but whose family cannot afford to feed and train them, the poor worker who cannot even buy a decent pair of shoes for a morning run. They appear in no statistic, so they do not exist in policy design.

Some data does not need to be loud; it only needs someone patient enough to read it. In my own match-tracking, the biggest gap between athletes is not talent but starting conditions. A child in a big city has a pitch, a shuttle to training, a controlled diet. A child in a mountain district walks tens of kilometres of dirt road to the nearest training ground. That gap is not a gap in ability; it is a gap in opportunity, and any subsidy aimed at those who already have conditions only deepens it.

The second layer is scale too small to make a real difference. A few hundred thousand dong a day for nutrition, a medal bonus that only covers a few household items, a scholarship that cannot cover both tuition and living costs — these are numbers that exist on paper but not in practice. As the real cost of raising an elite athlete rises every year while the support level stays fixed, the gap between need and resource widens. The athletes feel it most: they top up with family money, with side jobs, with self-funded training camps.

Sitting with coaches, I often hear the same line: support exists, but not enough to be secure. The feeling of "having but not enough" is more dangerous than "having nothing", because it keeps people hanging on, keep sacrificing, without ever reaching a liveable threshold. A subsidy below the living threshold is really a gesture of encouragement, not a policy.

The third layer is leakage in execution. Even when the headline figure is large, the portion that actually reaches the beneficiary can be much smaller. Administrative costs, intermediaries and complex procedures mean the most vulnerable — least able to handle paperwork, least familiar with the process — are the least able to access the support. The programme may then "meet its targets" on paper while the real objective remains unmet.

Travelling to many events, I have seen a familiar paradox: those who benefit most are often those who least need the support. An athlete with a sponsorship contract still receives every statutory bonus, while someone who finishes fourth, a few hundredths of a second behind, falls outside every incentive bracket. A performance threshold turns a blurred boundary into a sheer cliff.

The fourth layer is image priority. In the decision-making scale of policymakers, a subsidy with high media value is often favoured over one with high socio-economic impact that is hard to package as a story. Pouring money into an event with a spectacular opening ceremony is easier to sell to the public than funding tuition for gifted schoolchildren at district level — even though, in the long run, the latter is where the former is born.

The transmission chain: from budget to training ground

To understand why a mis-targeted subsidy not only wastes money but leaves long-term consequences, we have to look at its transmission chain. Money is allocated to elite sport first, because that is where targets are measurable. Mass sport is pushed back, because its benefits do not show up within a single medal cycle. In the end, ordinary participants — the population base of every sport — bear the deprivation first when budgets tighten.

The chain runs like this: a limited budget for facilities leads to dilapidated training grounds, which leads to fewer children with a place to train, which leads to falling participation, which leads to a shrinking talent pool, which leads to a national team dependent on a few exceptional individuals, which leads to fragile national results in the face of change. A break in the chain at the children's stage will choke the whole system years later, when that generation should have matured.

I witnessed this in athletics. At one SEA Games, a young female athlete shone, then almost vanished from major competition a few years later. The reason was not that she lost her talent, but that the support layer beneath her was too thin to keep her. There are talents no less gifted than champions, but born in a district with no training ground, raised in a family that could not provide adequate nutrition, and gone before the world ever learned their names. That is the data the medal table never shows.

The empty track and what it exposes

In 2026 the pandemic cancelled every event. The stadium had no one in it for months. I burned out, left the city, closed my door to re-read my master's thesis in sociology and began writing a weekly newsletter about old races, tying each to its social context. The empty track is where I hear my own footsteps most clearly.

During those months I realised something I had previously overlooked: the people left behind by subsidy programmes are not the exception but the majority. In any country's sport, the largest volume of activity comes from those who never win a medal: the morning runners, the children swimming in a community pool, the weekend kickabout groups. They create the playing field, the culture and the recruitment pool. Yet when budgets are tight, they are cut first, because their voice is smallest.

This does not mean elite sport does not deserve investment. On the contrary, top-level achievement has an irreplaceable inspirational and symbolic value. The issue lies in the allocation ratio and in the logic of selection. If sport is a house, elite performance is the roof and mass participation is the foundation. A magnificent roof on a weak foundation is the first thing to collapse before the storm arrives.

A counter-intuitive angle: the trap of glossy programmes

There is a reverse reading, hard to hear but worth considering: many sports subsidy programmes are not aimed at effectiveness but at political and media value. That explains why programmes that are easy to film, easy to put on the news and easy to turn into a moment of applause tend to prevail over quiet programmes such as tuition support, swimming popularisation or upgrading pitches in poor districts.

If the top design priority is an event with a large audience and good headlines, the inevitable result is that money goes where it is most visible rather than where it is most needed. Such programmes share common features: a loud launch, measurement by the number of "registered" beneficiaries rather than by real change in people's lives, and a habit of disappearing from the news before results can be verified.

There is a deeper paradox here. A mis-targeted subsidy can still generate political value for its proposer while leaving socio-economic costs to the system behind it. Such a subsidy does not fail in the sense of missing its goal; it fails in the sense of achieving a goal other than the one announced. The fix is not more money but different targeting: taking resources directly to those in real need instead of routing them through a glossy intermediary.

An alternative exists and is relatively easy to implement: shift part of the budget from showcase programmes to programmes with direct impact — scholarships for gifted children at the grassroots level, adequate nutrition support for young athletes, community pitches and safe pools in remote areas. These are low-glamour expenditures but they have the highest spillover effect and are the hardest to spin.

Re-reading the numbers without shouting

Re-reading years of resource-allocation tables, I see a rule rarely spoken aloud: money goes where indicators are easy to measure, not where money is most needed. Medals can be measured, qualification spots can be measured, registrations can be measured. But equal opportunity for a rural child, or the confidence of a parent letting a child pursue sport, sits in no table. And what cannot be measured is hard to fund.

Rebellion does not have to be loud; sometimes it is quietly rearranging the numbers. After years of writing, I chose this path. I draw allocation charts, compare the share of budget between elite and mass sport across years, and cross-check against the actual number of beneficiaries in each group. Placed side by side, the story reveals itself without a single slogan. That is the power of modest data: it persuades not by volume but by consistency.

A small example sits in tennis. When Ly Hoang Nam made his mark internationally, many immediately demanded heavier investment in elite tennis. But pouring more money into the top layer without widening the base only funds a few individuals, not a foundation. How many children in the provinces can access a decent tennis court, or a coach able to teach them free of charge for a few early years? That number barely exists. And because it does not exist in the data, it does not exist in policy.

Elite sport is the art of repetition — and of breaking repetition. Nguyen Thi Oanh broke repetition with an unusual race. But for her to reach that track, a system behind her had to repeat often enough not to drop her. Vietnam's problem is not a lack of recurring talent, but a system not yet stable enough to keep that talent.

Professional football makes this clear. During the transfer window, people track every deal, every fee, every move by an agent. The noise of the transfer market creates the impression that sport is getting richer. But behind every multi-billion-dong contract are thousands of children on bare pitches short of grounds, balls and competitions. The commercial structure of the top layer does not automatically flow down to the base; sometimes it even drains the upward chances of the base.

Reading the silence between two points

A lesson I always give young writers: do not read only the score; read the silence between two points. In sport, silence is the time an athlete breathes, the distance no one sees, the 5 a.m. session with no audience. The same holds for sports policy. Most of the truth lies in the detail no one notices: who benefits, who is excluded, where the money stops at an intermediary. Look at the silence and you understand why some talents shine and then fade, when they should have matured steadily.

My experience of following competition shows a sobering rule: countries that build sport from the base, by giving children free access from an early age, are more sustainable than those that focus only on grooming a group of elite athletes. Raising a few good people is relatively easy; creating a steady stream of good people is hard. And that stream begins with quiet investments with no groundbreaking ceremony and no ribbon-cutting.

Some sports support programmes, read closely, resemble a price subsidy that never reaches the poorest. It seems to be helping someone, but in fact it only helps those already able to access it. Those in greatest need — the child in a poor district, the manual worker who wants a pitch after work — never enter the target group. This gap comes not from cruelty but from laziness in design: choosing the easiest recipients instead of the right ones.

Where to fix the blockage

If I had to propose three points, I would propose them in the reverse order of current spending habits. First, set measurement on outcomes for beneficiaries rather than on money spent: how many children actually train, how many young athletes are adequately nourished, how much infrastructure is still usable after several years. Second, reduce the number of intermediary layers in the allocation chain, so money goes straight to where it is needed rather than around formal organisational stages. Third, build access-equity indices that measure programme coverage in remote and difficult areas, so vulnerable groups become the centre of policy rather than the forgotten edge.

These three points do not require more money; they mainly require a change of aim. And changing the aim is usually the cheapest move and the least media-friendly — which is precisely why few want to make it.

What is worth doing next

Sport is a language we can teach anyone, anywhere, if we truly want to. A child in a remote district can learn to run, to swim, to keep rhythm and to know where their strength lies, if only someone opens the door. Opening that door is not technically complicated; it only asks policymakers to be patient enough to read the data that makes no sound. When sports money finds a way to reach the right hands, every medal behind it will stand on a firmer foundation — and then a sports writer like me will no longer have to re-read the medal table to find the part that was hidden.