Late on a weekend afternoon at the arena, I sat in the sixth row with a notebook, jotting down the registration lists of four women's volleyball clubs. Three of the four had foreign players. Two had signed deals covering a single phase tied to the remainder of the season. One played seven matches and then packed his bags before the final round closed. When I asked an assistant coach about the contract length, the answer was a shrug: "Internal team business."

There is nothing secret about short-term imports. In nine years of living in Vietnam, I have never seen a volleyball club publish the structure of its foreign-player contract. People call me a shock merchant, but I only say what others have not dared to say: Vietnam's volleyball problem is not the money spent on imports, it is that nobody knows where that money goes or what it produces.

Context: a market run on phone calls

Vietnam's national volleyball championship splits each season into multiple phases — first leg, second leg, and cups in between. That split creates a distinctive transfer market. Any club chasing a ranking will look to reinforce mid-season, and the fastest route is to sign a foreign opposite or middle blocker. Any club fighting relegation does the same, only with a thinner budget.

The current rulebook allows each club to register a certain number of foreign slots, with a cap on how many foreigners can be on court together. The exact number changes by season and by competition, but the logic is fixed: one foreign slot is one trade-off. Every rally given to an outsider is a rally not given to a Vietnamese player.

What stands out is how quietly the mid-season transfer window unfolds. There is no official page compiling transfer lists. There is no contract database to cross-check. There is no minimum disclosure threshold. Fans learn their club has a new import from a social media photo, usually posted days after the deal was signed. Nobody says how long the contract runs, what it is worth, or how the release clause is written.

I once sat with a club administrator in central Vietnam. He was blunt: foreign-player files reach the club through an agent, sometimes just a four-minute video link and a self-reported résumé. No full medical file. No historical injury data. No standard fitness test before signing. That is how a market operates when it has no information infrastructure.

The national team is affected indirectly too. The women's national team calendar runs through regional and continental events, but the squad is drawn mainly from a group of players who compete regularly at club level. When club minutes are split among short-term imports, that group does not widen. A national coach cannot call up someone who is not playing.

Losing two sponsors in 2026 taught me that the truth still needs a decent coat. So I will say this calmly: Vietnamese volleyball is not short of money. Clubs still pay salaries, still pay bonuses, still organise overseas training camps. The problem is that money is spent season by season, not invested in cycles.

Core: three months is not enough for an import to become an asset

Look at the time structure. A short-term import usually gets two to four weeks to integrate. In those four weeks he must learn the team's setting system, the running rhythm of his teammates, the coaching vocabulary, the climate, and how to travel between provinces. In volleyball, the connection between setter and hitter does not come from individual talent. It comes from thousands of repetitions in training.

The crux is here: Vietnamese clubs pay an import during the phase in which he cannot yet play at his real level, then end the contract exactly when he starts to play well.

That is a structural error, not a technical one. An import arriving mid-season usually posts lower attacking numbers than his true ability for the first three or four matches — I have seen this repeat across different seasons. His scoring rate rises sharply from the fifth match onward, once the setting system starts serving him. But right at that moment, many contracts are already in their final weeks.

Compare that with women's volleyball in Japan or South Korea — where Tran Thi Thanh Thuy has played — clubs sign full-season deals, run a long pre-season, keep their own analytics staff and follow a clear integration plan over the first two months. There, imports are judged on season-long cumulative numbers. In Vietnam, they are judged on the memory of the most recent match.

Opportunity cost is the most painful part. One import on court plus one on the bench takes two places that should belong to young domestic players. I have followed several national youth tournaments. There are 19- and 20-year-old hitters there who could handle the national championship if given fifteen consecutive matches. They are not given fifteen consecutive matches, because the club needs results this season.

That loop feeds itself. The club needs short-term results, so it buys short-term imports. Short-term imports take the slots of young domestic players. Young domestic players never accumulate elite match experience. Next season the club is short again and buys imports again. With each turn of that loop, the country's development base thins by one layer.

There is a rarely cited metric: the share of rallies in which a team depends on its import at decisive points. When I counted manually in a few key matches, that share often exceeded half of all attacking rallies in the fourth and fifth sets. It means that in the most important moments, the team is not playing its system, it is playing its contract. And contracts expire.

Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, Doan Thi Lam Oanh, Nguyen Thi Kim Lien — pillars of the national women's team — all grew up by playing continuously at club level for years. That path is narrowing for the next generation, not because those players are weaker, but because the door only opens in the short gap between two foreign contracts.

Contrarian angle: the import is not the one to blame

I have to argue against myself here, because that is the only way an analysis avoids becoming a venting session.

I may be wrong to put imports at the centre of the story. From a club's perspective, signing a short-term import is an entirely rational decision. It costs less than a long-term deal, injury risk is capped at a few months, and if the player performs, the club gets immediate results. In a league where sponsors judge performance season by season, there is little reason to gamble on a long contract.

But that very argument points to a larger blind spot. Short-term imports are not the cause; they are the symptom of a domestic transfer market that barely exists. A Vietnamese player who wants to change clubs usually has to go through an agreement between two club leaders, not through a transparent transfer mechanism with a fee, a duration and a release clause. When the domestic market does not function, clubs have only one escape route: buy from abroad.

The same thing happened in Vietnamese football for years. Clubs poured money into foreign strikers because buying a domestic striker of sufficient quality was far more complicated. Volleyball is walking that exact road, only about a decade behind. The stadiums were empty in 2026, yet I never heard the fans more clearly — and what they want is not a foreign name on the registration sheet. They want a team they can follow for five years, not five months.

A second blind spot sits in the data. When contracts are short, nobody invests in measurement. No cumulative metrics, no post-season review, no records for next season to reference. The result is that every transfer window clubs start from zero, relying on acquaintances' recommendations and four-minute videos. Data that is not retained does not produce knowledge, only repetition.

And I have to say this as well: if a foreign writer covered Brazilian volleyball the way I have just covered Vietnam's, I would probably be uncomfortable too. Insiders know many constraints outsiders cannot see. I do not live on any club's budget. I live by watching and recording, and sometimes the one who records has to say things nobody wants to hear.

What I am proposing is not to expel imports. The right import at the right time raises the standard of the whole league, forces domestic players to improve, and produces matches worth watching. What I am proposing is a change of timeframe: season-long contracts instead of phase-based ones, a proper pre-season, mandatory medical files, and a public domestic transfer mechanism so a club can buy a Vietnamese player at his peak instead of renting a foreigner for three months.

Takeaway: if three clubs announce season-long import deals next season, I will read it as a signal

I will make a verifiable prediction. If in the coming season at least three men's or women's volleyball clubs announce import contracts tied to the full season rather than to individual phases, I will read that as a sign that Vietnamese volleyball is shifting from buying results to building systems. If not, the loop stays intact and we will again be counting which club just sent a foreign hitter home after seven matches.

Fans have the right to demand more than a debut photo. They have the right to know how long a contract runs, what it costs, and who was pushed onto the bench to free up the slot. When those questions are asked often enough, the market will be forced into transparency. I am 49 years old and I still believe a single sentence can change an entire season — if that sentence is said at the right time, in the right place, with numbers behind it.

Source transparency: the observations on registration lists and attacking shares were recorded directly by me while following domestic matches. The estimates on integration time come from a personal observation sample, not from official organiser data. Reliability: medium. Any rebuttal grounded in different data is welcome.