Misdirected Subsidy: Pakistan's Rs75 Billion and the Problem of Allocating Vietnam's Sports Money

75 billion rupees. That is the fuel subsidy programme the Pakistani government announced, running for three months, paying 2,000 rupees a month to two- and three-wheeler owners and 3,000 rupees to small-car owners. Set beside a second figure, the picture changes colour: petroleum prices in Pakistan had risen 44 to 50 percent over the preceding twelve months.

The poorest third of a country of more than 240 million people sits outside the recipient list. Without a motorcycle, there is no vehicle to register, no invoice to present. The money flows toward those who already own an asset and loops around those who own nothing.

I read that analysis on a morning in Binh Duong, and the first thing I did was reopen my spreadsheet on the structure of sports spending in Vietnam. The allocation architecture matched uncomfortably well. Only the fuel was different.

The mechanism behind Pakistan's subsidy sits in a single tax: the Petroleum Levy, set at 80 rupees per litre. National petrol and diesel consumption runs at roughly 1.5 billion litres a month. Multiply that out and an alternative appears: cut the levy by 16 rupees per litre for three months, taking it from 80 down to 64, and fund it with the very same 75 billion rupees. The same money, but with no registration, no invoices and no payment bureaucracy.

The presumed bottleneck was the International Monetary Fund. The author of the analysis argues the reverse: the petroleum levy target under the IMF programme is not binary, while the primary fiscal balance is the binding constraint. Fiscal room was not in short supply. The State Bank of Pakistan transferred 500 billion rupees above budget; the tax authority met its target. The question is which lever you choose, not how much money you have.

The precedents named were Sasti Roti, Yellow Cab and the Laptop scheme. Three programmes in three different sectors, identical in architecture. They were designed to produce political imagery in the short run, not to repair a structure in the long run.

Three conditions I use to judge any subsidy. It reaches the right recipient. It is large enough to change behaviour. It is not eroded in transit. Fail one condition and the money is demoted to ceremony. Sports money runs the same test.

Sports funding in Vietnam has three main sources: the state budget, lottery revenue and corporate sponsorship. Three sources, one destination. Most of the volume piles up at the top of the pyramid, meaning national teams, medal bonuses and hosting international events. That is where money produces photographs, press releases and a headline.

The recipient of a medal bonus is an athlete already inside the system. They already have a place, a coach, a nutrition plan, a training schedule. The bonus is an add-on to an asset that has already been built. A twelve-year-old in a district without a regulation court sits in the same position as Pakistan's poorest third: off the list, because there is nothing to register.

I once ran a measurement at Becamex Binh Duong in 2026. Over six months I collected social-media engagement data on 27 players. Nguyen Tien Linh, then 19, grew engagement 340 percent in just nine matches, 4.2 times the squad average. The original plan was to buy one large advertising campaign. I proposed the opposite: break that budget into many small line items, build personal brands for the young players, and pair it with behind-the-scenes content and livestreams. Club merchandise revenue rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The notable part is not the 28 percent. It is that the same money, divided into 27 measurable units, outperformed the same money bundled into one large expenditure. The unit of allocation determines the outcome, not the total volume.

The first four months of 2026 repeated the lesson at a larger scale. Stadiums closed, ticket revenue went to zero, and the estimated loss reached 12 billion dong. Leadership proposed cutting all communications spending. I argued against it, on the grounds that the moment ticket revenue disappears is the only moment you can convert fans into paying members, because they are short of something to watch.

We segmented 18,000 loyal fans from three years of accumulated data and designed a 99,000 dong monthly package built around online press conferences and Zoom interviews. Six months later: 4,200 members, 415 million dong, enough to keep the youth-team operating fund alive. A conversion rate of 23.3 percent. That ratio matters more than the revenue, because it is a rate of reaching the right target group, something a blanket subsidy can never measure.

Vietnamese tennis offers the clearest example of the recipient-identification problem. Ly Hoang Nam once lifted the sport to a level of attention it had never seen. But when a country has exactly one point of support, the entire industry's index gets compressed into one individual's ranking. An investment with only one recipient is not an investment; it is a bet.

Based on my experience watching matches on the ITF and Challenger circuits in Binh Duong, organising costs always sit at the event layer: courts, officials, media, guests. Court time for local children does not automatically rise with them. These two cost lines are rarely placed side by side in the same table.

Sports federations in Vietnam are usually assessed by medals at regional level, and that metric runs on a two-year cycle. Two years is short enough for a bad allocation decision to stay hidden, and long enough for nobody to be held accountable for its consequences. Meanwhile, a correct decision at grassroots level takes about eight years before it starts showing up in the medal table.

The calculation I need is a per-unit calculation: the cost of one court hour, one training slot, one trip to competition for a 14-year-old player. Without that calculation, every debate about sports budgets is a debate about nomenclature. 1.5 billion litres a month is the figure that made Pakistan's 16-rupee cut viable. Sports needs an equivalent figure at the base: the total number of court hours the system can supply each month.

Apply the three conditions to the current structure. On reaching the right recipient, medal bonuses go to those who already have a system, while grassroots scholarships go to those who have nothing. On scale, a one-off bonus set beside eight to ten years of development cost is a ceremonial sum, the same way 2,000 rupees sits beside a 44 to 50 percent price rise. On leakage, the biggest risk in sports is not cash that disappears, but assets left idle. A stadium built without a maintenance budget is, three years later, nothing more than a depreciation line.

A subsidy that cannot identify its recipients cannot quantify its results either.

The external constraint on Vietnamese sports does not carry the name IMF. It carries the name of the sponsor, and it operates on a far shorter cycle. A sponsorship contract typically runs two to three years, tied to quarterly brand-awareness metrics. An academy needs eight to ten years before it produces a national-team athlete. Those two time curves never intersect, so allocation decisions default toward whatever can prove results within four quarters. Understanding this explains why strategically correct spending so often loses in the meeting room.

The popular view in Vietnam is that sports needs more money. I do not believe that is the real constraint. The volume of money entering the system is not small, and it flows in large, bundled, photogenic line items. The problem sits in the unit of allocation, not in the total budget. Raise the total while keeping the unit unchanged, and you have only made the largest line item larger.

Hosting an international event is sold with the word "legacy". Legacy only materialises when the operating budget is locked at the same time as the hosting contract, in the same document, before opening day. After the closing ceremony, nobody is responsible for the recurring cost of the facilities just built. This is the sports version of the IMF argument in the Pakistan story: which target is the binding constraint, and who gets to choose it.

I am not immune to this class of error. In 2026 I built a model to measure sponsorship effectiveness for the World Cup using data from 64 matches. The model forecast 2.1 million reach for a beer brand; the actual figure was 780,000. It took me two weeks to find the missing variable: time zones and the Vietnamese habit of watching football late at night. The model was right about structure and wrong about timing. A wrong forecast is not a failure; it is free data for the next calculation.

New media did something many organisations did not expect: it made the real quality of each brand public. New media does not kill brands; it exposes brands with no substance. A club with no academy, no fan data and no proprietary content no longer has anywhere to hide behind an advertising board.

What I want to see within three years is a table with three columns: cost per court hour, free court hours granted each year, and the number of athletes moving from district level to national level. Those three columns are measurable, updatable, and need no event to become noteworthy.

If the choice is between a medal bonus and one free court hour for a twelve-year-old in a province with no regulation court, I would like to know which organisation dares to put that calculation in writing, in public.