Wait until when?
General Secretary of the Vietnam Volleyball Federation - Mr. Le Tri Truong still affirms the view that Vietnamese volleyball cannot be called professional and the national volleyball tournament in Vietnam is only approaching the semi-professional level.
However, experts understand that to be called a professional volleyball depends on many factors. The Vietnamese men's and women's volleyball teams have competed in many tournaments at the Asian and Southeast Asian levels in recent years. They have achieved results, thereby making the image of Vietnamese volleyball widely known.
However, looking at the present, for volleyball to develop and be called professional, first of all, the problem of sports economics must be solved sustainably, the teams can operate independently in terms of finance, not dependent on state funding.
Up to now, the only women's volleyball team of Duc Giang Lao Cai Chemicals participating in the national championship is a team invested by a business, using the business's money and not money from the budget or State funding for operations. Another team, the Industrial and Commercial Bank (Vietinbank), is also considered to follow this model. However, Vietinbank is still a unit under State management.
2004 was the first year that the highest volleyball tournament in Vietnam was renamed the National Championship.
The Vietnam Volleyball Federation has decided that from 2025, the number of teams participating in the national championship will be reduced to 16 (8 men's teams, 8 women's teams). Limiting the number of teams is to increase expertise and also to move closer to professionalism in the organization of the seasons.
Not well prepared, hard to become professional
The National Volleyball Championship in Vietnam is now equipped with Video Eyes Challenge technology, has billboards, and has sponsors. At the same time, the tournament is regularly broadcast live on television.
However, to progress to professionalism for a sports tournament or a sport in general requires many other important factors, especially the way of organization.
A representative of the Volleyball Federation once shared that, although there was a live broadcast on television, the tournament organizers still had not sold the television rights.
Football is the only sport in Vietnam that has built a professional model and issued professional football regulations. This is achieved when football teams are managed by the Football Company and the national championship has the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) as the tournament organizer, not depending on the State.
For volleyball teams, most are under the management of local units or the parent industry. The players and coaches of the team are still bound by contracts with their parent units.
The Vietnam Volleyball Federation has issued and implemented the Transfer Regulations since 2010. Since then, there have been many cases of players (male and female) transferring between teams. However, all of them still take place according to specific cases, that is, when the athlete's contract with the (old) home team expires, he can sign a contract with the new team. There have been many cases of complaints due to players abandoning their contracts or teams luring players to come to them even though they are still under the management of the current team.
At this time, Vietnamese volleyball players were able to compete abroad. However, only a few of them had contracts to compete professionally (for example, Tran Thi Thanh Thuy and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hoa). Many other contracts were purely seasonal and were exchanges between teams, so the athletes did not have much time to compete long-term abroad (including in the Thai market).
What is a professional volleyball? It will take time, when many teams are maintained or invested with large resources, players have good incomes and the quality of tournaments increases, then managers will have enough data to answer.
