The Ghost Squad of V.League: When a Name Takes Up Space but Never Takes a Minute

On an afternoon in late June, in the cramped office of an assistant coach at a V.League club, I was handed the squad registration list from the season that had just ended. Thirty-four names arranged in two columns, printed neatly on a single sheet of A4 paper. I asked the man across from me one simple question: of these thirty-four people, how many played at least one minute? He tapped a few keys, waited for the computer to answer, then read out a figure that silenced the room. Eleven. Eleven players who did not get a single minute on the pitch across the entire season. They still trained every morning, still drew their wages on schedule, still had their names on the paperwork submitted to the organizers. It was simply that no one ever saw them touch the ball in a competitive match. I still call that group the ghost squad. Every club here carries something like a phone stuffed with old data: files nobody opens, nobody looks at, but that stay there all the same, still taking up space, still quietly eating into the storage no one notices. You delete a few photos, you think the phone feels lighter, but somewhere in a folder, the backups, the cache files, the unfinished videos remain untouched. They are invisible, and because they are invisible they are never cleared. A football club is the same. We are used to looking at the starting eleven, at the substitutes' bench, at the signings announced with fanfare. But behind everything that gets put on display, there is always one more layer: names buried deep in the list, never announced, never mentioned, never appearing in any news item. They are the storage being consumed that no one ever audits. The 2026/25 V.League season closed in a year when Vietnamese football had just lived through an emotional peak: the national team won the 2026 ASEAN Cup in December 2026 after beating Thailand in a two-legged final. Nguyen Xuan Son scored seven goals to become the tournament's top scorer, before suffering a serious injury in the second leg of the final. The whole country spent days drenched in red flags. But once the national team's glow faded, the clubs returned to their familiar problem: a compressed season, a packed calendar, a tight wage budget, and a registration list longer than it needed to be. That is the backdrop in which the ghost squad breeds. Not because clubs enjoy carrying surplus people. But because the system operates in a way that makes carrying surplus people safer than letting go. The anatomy of a ghost squad is not hard to recognize if you are willing to sit down and read. Among the eleven names with no minutes last season, I grouped them into three categories. The first is young players just promoted to the first team, old enough to be registered but not yet mature enough to be given a chance. The second is players past their peak, still under contract but no longer starters, and whom no one wants to pay a fee to take away. The third is cases from deals that never worked out: signed to fill a position, then that position was filled by someone else. These three groups share one trait: they are neither bad enough to be cut outright nor good enough to be used. They sit in a grey zone where keeping them is cheaper than clearing them out. And in a season with a packed calendar, keeping someone as injury cover sounds like a reasonable decision. The problem lies elsewhere. It lies in what I call the invisible cost. A player who sits out the whole season does not merely consume wages. He consumes a registration slot, a place on the bench, a spot in the dressing room, a share of the coaching staff's time in training. And more importantly, he consumes another person's opportunity — a young player who should have been promoted, a contract that should have gone to someone more deserving. Based on my experience watching matches across many seasons, I have come to see that clubs often do not see this cost, because it does not appear on the balance sheet. It lives in the gaps no one measures. When a team loses because it lacks a creative midfielder, few people ask whose hands the registration slot that should have gone to that player is in. Among the numbers of the transfer market, I find the pulse of a heart. Because behind every occupied registration slot is a human story. There are young players who came from the provinces, renting rooms near the training ground, still arriving on time every morning, still warming up, still running, still waiting. They know they will not get on the pitch. But they keep coming, because this is their profession, and because behind them a family is counting on the monthly wage. I once had coffee with one such player. He was twenty-two, and had signed his first professional contract three years earlier. In those three years, he played a total of forty-seven minutes, scattered across four matches. He told me something I have never forgotten: "I train like someone who will start, but I prepare like someone who will never be called." He did not complain. He was simply existing in a void that both the club and he himself knew was pointless, but that no one had the courage to end. That is why I never view the ghost squad as a purely financial matter. It is a matter of people, of waiting, of afternoons of training when the whistle never sounds for you. But if I stopped there, I would make the same mistake as all the outsiders. Because the ghost squad, however notable, is not yet the deepest layer of hidden waste in a football club. The deeper layer is role confusion. I call it the hidden waste of misplacement. A player trained for ten years as an attacking midfielder, who upon reaching the first team is deployed as a full-back. A goalkeeper taught to play with his feet, who upon becoming the starter is asked to launch long balls. A centre-back strong in the air, who upon taking the field is pulled to the flank to cross. These misalignments do not show up in any statistical table, but they erode a player's value in ways no one sees. This is where I differ from most people who analyze football through data. They look at the metrics and conclude a player is performing poorly. But the metrics do not tell them that the player is being forced into a role that is not his strength. A playmaker pushed to the wing will see his key passes drop sharply, and the statistical table will record that he is declining. But the truth is that he is being placed in the wrong spot. The rhythm of a match is not in the scoreline, but in the silence between two passes. And that silence is often where a player is trying to do something he was not trained to do. When you see a player hesitate for half a second before passing, sometimes it is not a lack of confidence. It is that he is having to think in a language that is not his mother tongue on the pitch. I have spent a great deal of time tracking how V.League clubs register and use their squads. What I found is that most teams carry a list longer than they need, yet lack depth in exactly the positions that matter. They have thirty-four players, but only one true holding midfielder. They have five full-backs, but none of them trained to defend one-on-one at high speed. In other words, the ghost squad is not a sign of excess. It is a sign of misallocation. Clubs do not carry too many people. They carry too many in the wrong places, and too few in the right ones. I once watched a match in which a team had to send a centre-back up front for the final twenty minutes, simply because every real striker was injured. On the bench, three attacking players had still not entered the game. But all three were players who had not played a single minute all season, and the coaching staff did not trust them enough to throw them in at the decisive moment. The ghost squad, at the moment of greatest need, turned out not to exist as a real option. That is the central paradox of every ghost squad: people keep them for when they are needed, but when they are truly needed, people dare not use them. The registration list runs to thirty-four names, but in the coach's mind only fourteen names are real. So why do clubs keep doing it? The answer lies in the incentive structure. A coach is judged by immediate results. Promoting a young player and giving him a chance is a risky act: if he makes a mistake, the coach is responsible. Keeping an old player on the bench is a risk-free act: if the team wins, no one remembers him; if the team loses, people blame the one who played, not the one who sat. In that system, keeping unused names is a rational decision. It shields the coach from risk. It shields the club from having to explain why it let a player leave without getting anything back. It shields the player himself from facing a future without football. Everyone is protected, except the one thing that most needed protecting: opportunity. I remember a technical director once telling me that he knew his team was carrying four players it could not use. But if he terminated their contracts, he would have to pay compensation, and that sum would be questioned by the board. If he kept them, the spending would be spread across the monthly wage bill, unnoticed. Choosing between a visible loss and a hidden loss is an easy choice, even when the hidden loss is far larger. This is where I must say something many outsiders will not want to hear. Seen from the outside, people often conclude that V.League clubs are badly managed, that they waste money, that they lack professionalism. But if you sit in that room, you understand that every decision to keep an unused player is a calculated one. It is not laziness. It is adaptation to a system in which cleaning up is punished more harshly than hoarding. My counter-intuitive view is this: the ghost squad is not the thing that needs to be deleted. It is a symptom. What needs to be deleted is the incentive structure that created it. If you merely cut the unused players, you treat the symptom but leave the disease intact. Next season, a new ghost squad will grow in exactly the same spots, because the incentive that produced it remains. And here is what I consider the deepest paradox: the ghost squad, as a problem, is in fact far easier to see than the real problem. People talk about it, write about it, criticize it. But the more dangerous hidden waste — the misplacement of players — is almost never mentioned. Because it has no list. It has no names. It is simply players who are playing, being paid, being praised or criticized, while in reality being used in the wrong place. An attacking midfielder turned into a full-back will never appear on any hidden-waste list. He starts every week. He counts as part of the team. But his true value is being quietly lost, and that loss is far larger than the wages of eleven players sitting out. I keep the rhythm for those running on the pitch — that is how I belong to the match. But I have also learned that keeping the rhythm is not only about counting the steps in motion. It is also about noticing the steps that should be in motion but are not. And in Vietnamese football, there are a great many such steps. So what is the next internal signal I am watching? It is not the number of players cleared out in the coming transfer window. That is a superficial indicator, easy to measure, easy to show off. The real signal lies elsewhere: whether clubs begin to redefine roles for their players. Whether an attacking midfielder is returned to his rightful position. Whether a young player is given a chance in the place he was trained to shine. If that happens, the ghost squad will shrink on its own. Because when every registration slot is used in the right place, there will be no room left for names lying still. Cleaning up properly is not about deleting the files you can see. It is about finding the files you cannot see, and understanding why they are there. For now, as the new season approaches, I will again hold in my hands those endless registration lists. I will count again. And I know that somewhere in the corner of every list, there will again be names quietly waiting for a whistle that will never sound for them. My question for the people who run football is not how many names they will delete. It is whether they dare to admit that the thing taking up the most space was never the names at all. There are apologies that need no tolerance, only a stand wide enough to receive them. And there are truths about Vietnamese football that need no thick reports, only someone willing to sit down, read all thirty-four names, and ask one very simple question: has this man played a single minute yet?