V-League pitch violence: VPF and VFF demand referees apply the laws

The ball had already rolled away to the right flank, but the tackle stayed behind. In the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi (CAHN) on September 20, defender Le Van Son threw an elbow at striker Nguyen Dinh Bac, while centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh twice lunged from behind into the legs of the same striker. Referee Le Vu Linh produced a single yellow card for Tan Sinh. The match ended; the images did not. A young striker walked off with stud marks on his shin, and a referee walked off with a decision that will be dissected many more times.

That incident did not stand alone. Shortly before, in round 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League, centre-back Doan Van Hau (CAHN) broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan (The Cong Viettel). In the same round, foreign player Ezequiel Santos Da Silva (Nam Dinh) stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang (SHB Da Nang). Four incidents, three rounds, a season barely underway. Representatives of the tournament organisers, VPF and VFF, met directly with the VFF Referees Committee, demanding that referees apply the laws properly, preserve the discipline of the competition and prevent violent conduct on the pitch.

In the language of administrators, applying the laws properly is not an abstract phrase. It means something specific: missing no foul, missing no card.

In the Dong Nai - CAHN match, referee Le Vu Linh missed a card. Huynh Tan Sinh kicked a man instead of the ball twice in a single passage of play, a situation carrying the hallmarks of a red card, yet only a yellow was shown. Speaking to Dan Tri after the match, former VFF deputy technical chairman and former head of the VFF Referees Committee Duong Vu Lam was blunt: referee Le Vu Linh missed the card, and Huynh Tan Sinh's offence was far too obvious to escape a sending-off.

The harder part lies in the chain of responsibility behind the whistle. Mr Duong Vu Lam raised the point: if the VFF uses retrospective punishment and suspends Huynh Tan Sinh for the offence, then referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same way. The responsibility of the VAR team must also be clarified. If the VAR team, comprising Mr Vo Hoai Thuong and Mr Nguyen Thanh Son, advised the on-field referee but was overruled, then the VAR team did its job. Conversely, if the VAR team did not advise that a red card was required for the offence of kicking a man instead of the ball, the VAR officials must also be sanctioned.

Referee discipline in Vietnam is rarely made public. Specific sanctions against referees are usually not announced widely, but the appointment list for the following rounds is a kind of public document that makes no announcement. Mr Duong Vu Lam revealed how to read it: if a referee is not appointed in the rounds immediately following the round just played, there is a strong chance he is under sanction. Discipline exists, in other words; it is simply written in the gaps of the appointment list rather than in a press release.

Based on my experience following these matches, the V-League's problem has never been a shortage of rules. The rules are all there, from retrospective punishment to suspension brackets, from VAR protocol to the on-field referee's power to overrule. What is missing is consistency in enforcement. Violence on the pitch does not fall because punishments get heavier; it falls because the probability of being punished rises. When the same offence of kicking a man off the ball earns a red card in one match and a yellow in another, players do not learn that the act is wrong. They learn that the act is a calculable gamble.

The real concern is not a player losing his temper, but that a single act can receive two different levels of treatment in two different matches. For a 20-year-old like Nguyen Dinh Bac, elbowed and then kicked from behind in the same game, the first lesson of his career is not how to escape a press but how to absorb pain. For a centre-back like Huynh Tan Sinh, the lesson received is that the cost of that passage of play is lower than he assumed.

There is another reading, and it is more uncomfortable. People habitually ask about player ethics, about a referee's nerve, about the competence of a VAR team. But the easiest reaction after each wave of pitch violence is to demand heavier penalties. Heavier penalties do not fix a missed card, do not fix a silent VAR team, do not fix a disciplinary process that runs on appointment lists. If in the next round referee Le Vu Linh is still on the pitch and the VAR team is still working as normal, then the meeting between VPF, VFF and the Referees Committee produced a media message, not a new standard.

The pitch never lies, but memory knows how to write poetry. V-League spectators have watched the same play many times: a tackle that causes injury, a few days of debate, a meeting, a few promises to tighten discipline, and then everything returns to its old rhythm until the next time. Ninety minutes compress an entire lifetime, and inside that compressed lifetime, Doan Ngoc Tan is now living through months without football.

The new generation wins with its fingertips, but still suffers with its heart. The question left behind is not for the organisers but for those who will keep playing in this league for the next ten years: if a 20-year-old must assume that every match is a chance to have his leg broken while the offender is not certain to be sent off, what exactly is this league teaching him?