Stud Marks and Empty Seats: When V-League Violence Returns and VAR Is No Longer a Shield

The Night the Seats Went Quiet Again: When V-League Violence Returns and VAR Is No Longer a Shield

On the night of September 20, I sat in front of a screen and found myself holding my breath over a play that had no ball in it.

At 69, I have watched thousands of matches - from the days of waiting for kickoff in front of old loudspeakers in Chengdu to the Moscow press room in the summer of 2026, when a 19-year-old Mbappé dribbled through eleven Argentina presses. But that moment - when a young attacker named Đình Bắc was kicked from behind twice in a single match, by two different players - reminded me of the empty seats of the Green Balcony project during the pandemic. That season, I video-called 50 elderly supporters and recorded 300 minutes of their memories of afternoons spent waiting for the ball to roll. Today, I heard those empty seats creak again.

Referee Lê Vũ Linh showed a yellow card. VAR - with officials Võ Hoài Thương and Nguyễn Thành Sơn - stayed silent. A day later, the VFF Disciplinary Committee convened an emergency meeting. I put down my pen and thought: people often say the pitch never betrays anyone. But the pitch also knows how to embrace - and sometimes that embrace grips too tightly.

Context: a river that seemed to have calmed

I came to Vietnamese football through my ears, but I stayed through heartbeats I cannot explain. About three seasons ago, VAR arrived in the V-League. I wrote then that technology was doing what forty years of my sports journalism could not: teaching people to play with awareness instead of elbows. Players, by my own observation across many rounds, began to contest more carefully, more cleverly, to avoid being caught by cameras. The number of crude fouls fell. It was a beautiful story, and I believed it.

Then the national team improved. From a football culture once associated with career-ending tackles, Vietnam became the image of a VAR-savvy side - one that retreats, concedes space, and keeps a cool head against the temptation of retaliation. At ASEAN Cups, in big matches, this discipline was praised as a new identity. I praised it too. Perhaps I praised it too soon.

Rounds 2 and 3 of this season handed me a different picture. In the opening match, Đoàn Văn Hậu of Công an Hà Nội - a national-team star - produced a challenge that broke the leg of Doãn Ngọc Tân of Thể Công Viettel. It was a late tackle, and by my repeated reading of the footage, it belongs to the category expert Đoàn Minh Xương once called "superfluous challenges." Superfluous because the ball was already gone and the man was still arriving.

Around the same period, Ezequiel Santos Da Silva - Nam Định's foreign player, participating in the V-League for the first time - stamped on an opponent. Huỳnh Tấn Sinh of Đồng Nai produced a "cold kick" from behind. Lê Văn Sơn threw an elbow. And in the Đồng Nai vs Công an Hà Nội match on September 20, Đình Bắc was fouled off the ball twice in the same game by two home players. Đồng Nai were then three goals down and a man down.

That is the context. No xG, no PPDA, no heat maps. Only stud marks on a young player's ankle, and an emergency meeting room exactly one day after the match.

What I actually saw: a behavioural pattern, not a tactical system

When I sat down with my notebook and replayed the incidents, I realised what bothered me was not the result. It was this: almost every notable foul belonged to the same behavioural class - off-ball fouls, committed after the ball had left the foot, or from behind the referee's back. Lê Văn Sơn's elbow. Huỳnh Tấn Sinh's cold kick. Ezequiel's stamp. Văn Hậu's late tackle. Two challenges on Đình Bắc while the ball was elsewhere.

This is not a problem of a tactical system. No team takes the field with a plan to "kick ankles." It is a behavioural pattern: players choose the moment when the ball has left the visible zone to do what they would not dare when the ball is live. And when a pattern repeats often enough, it stops being an accident. It becomes a habit.

Interestingly, the original analytical author whose material I read drew a distinction between two causes: habit and awareness. Văn Hậu fouls out of old habit - a national-team defender accustomed to a style of tackling from before VAR. The Đồng Nai players foul out of a lack of awareness - they have just come up from the First Division, where VAR is not used, where referees do not see everything, where a kick from behind can pass unnamed.

At 69, I have learned that the world still runs faster than I do, but longing stands still. And one other thing stands still: instinct. When a young player grows up in an environment without VAR, his instinct is forged in the dark. When he steps into the light, that instinct does not vanish. It only learns to hide more skillfully.

VAR as an invisible referee - and the gaps it cannot fill

Based on my experience covering matches, VAR in the V-League has done something important: it has turned the backstage into centre stage. What the referee does not see, the camera does. What the stands do not see, the screen does. And that, as I wrote a few years ago, makes players play with more awareness.

But VAR is not a god. It is a human-run system, and the humans who run it have their own instincts. In the Đồng Nai vs Công an Hà Nội match, when Đình Bắc was kicked twice, VAR reviewed and still let referee Lê Vũ Linh keep the yellow card. The question the VFF Disciplinary Committee must answer is not only "does Tấn Sinh deserve a ban," but also "why did a two-time kick from behind merit only a yellow."

I do not have data to assert VAR was wrong. But I have one observation: when the home team is three goals and a man down, an invisible pressure descends on the referee - the pressure of not wanting the match to break further. It is the instinct to protect the game. Sometimes that instinct saves a match from violence. Sometimes it forgives violence.

The contrarian point: the media itself is rewriting the rules

This is where I want to pause a little longer, because it runs opposite to most supporters' intuition.

There is a sentence I encountered in the analytical material, attributed to journalist Dương Vũ Lâm: ugly plays spread very fast and repeat many times in the media, to the point that disciplinary officials "cannot not act." I read that sentence and felt a chill - not because it was wrong, but because it was true enough to expose a mechanism.

In decades of work, I once thought the law was the law and the verdict was the verdict. But in the VAR and social-media era, the order has reversed: images come first, rulings follow. A challenge only becomes a "case" when it is replayed enough times on phone screens. And similar challenges that are not captured in close-up? They slip by quietly, unnamed.

That means sanctions are shaped by virality, not only by severity. This is what I believe is true, and what unsettles me. For if the rules of the game are written by algorithms, then those playing in less-broadcast leagues live under a different system of law - lighter, blurrier, less seen. And a football culture with two systems of law has no system of law at all.

I also want to say plainly: the claim that "violence has returned to the V-League" is built on a very small sample - two or three rounds, a handful of spotlighted incidents. I have watched enough seasons to know that a season cannot be read through three viral clips. But I have also watched enough to know that those three clips are exposing something real: the gap between the First Division and the V-League in VAR awareness is producing a class of players more prone to foul - and more easily overlooked.

Who pays for the silence?

I think of Trần Anh Khoa. Years ago, at SHB Đà Nẵng, he suffered a career-ending challenge and never returned to top-level professional football. I think of Hoàng Vũ Samson at Hà Nội FC, of Anh Hùng at An Giang in 2026. Those names came from clubs outside the power elite. It could be coincidence. But at my age, I have learned to distrust coincidence.

Empty seats still sing, because longing is also a form of supporter. And those supporters - the ones who phoned me in the Green Balcony project - do not only remember goals. They remember young players whose legs were broken and who never came back. They remember matches where they sat in the stands and knew that a certain kick would go unpunished. Their longing has a body memory.

At the 2026 World Cup, when Mbappé dribbled through eleven presses, I sat in the Moscow press room and wrote about the speed of youth. I abandoned dry score-line analysis from that night. But now I realise there is another kind of speed that also needs writing: the speed of a kick from behind. It is so fast that the referee does not see, the camera may not catch, and only the ankle of the fouled man knows. Youth is not only speed; it is the manner in which one chooses to lunge forward. And when a young player is kicked from behind twice in one match, they are not just kicking him - they are kicking the future of an entire generation.

Takeaway: a question for those holding the pen next

At 69, I no longer write to prove I am right. I write to hand the pen to those who will keep watching football after I no longer can. The VFF Disciplinary Committee's emergency meeting one day after the match is a signal. But a signal only has value when it leads to a standard, not to a seasonal tribunal.

If today we ban Tấn Sinh, fine referee Lê Vũ Linh, review VAR, and then everything sinks into the next round - we have not solved the problem. We have only cleaned the backstage before opening the doors to let spectators in for the next match. Football is not in a hurry. It only waits for those patient enough to understand. And the question I want to leave for the next generation is not "who deserves punishment." It is: do we want to write the rules with cameras, or with conscience?