V-League and the Unhealed Wound: When On-Pitch Violence Begins With a Lesson Never Taught

I still remember that night. Dinh Bac lay on the grass, both hands clutching his ankle, and around him the opposing shirts dispersed like water receding from a shore. He was fouled twice in the same match. The first was Tan Sinh. The second was Van Son. Two challenges, two different men, one single target. I sat in the stand and wrote one line in my notebook: "Two men, one target, one message."

Not long before that, Van Hau received a four-match suspension after a crude challenge on Doan Ngoc Tan. On forums, people called it "an unfortunate accident." I did not think so. I thought it was a habit hardened over years, waiting for the right moment to surface. And when a habit surfaces three times in one early-season window, it stops being an accident. It becomes a pattern.

This season, V-League is facing something no league table can measure: a crisis about how the game is played. Not about results. About how human beings treat each other inside 105 metres.

In a recent interview with Dan tri, a European expert with years of experience following Vietnamese football framed the issue in a way I believe is correct: V-League's on-pitch violence should be read as a consequence of Vietnamese football never having taught football culture from the ground up. He spoke about teaching tackling technique, teaching duel management, teaching respect for opponents, and about how some youth coaching environments still encourage players to play rough or intimidate for advantage. He also asked the question I believe is the axis of the whole problem: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite punishments, then the deterrent effect of those punishments themselves must be questioned.

I have spent many years sitting in many stands listening to football. From Kazan in 2026, where I wrote my first piece about Mesut Ozil's gaze as Germany collapsed against South Korea, to Qatar 2026, where Son Heung-min called his teammates at midnight and asked only "do we trust each other." Then Paris 2026, where I sat beside a twenty-three-year-old long jumper weeping in the mixed zone after three consecutive fouls, unable to speak a word. Those experiences taught me one thing: football is not decided by what happens in ninety minutes. It is decided by what was taught in the ninety months before.

That is why I care about how V-League is handling this crisis. Suspensions, fines, condemnations from VFF and VPF — all necessary, and all happening downstream. If the river is poisoned upstream, fixing the estuary will not make the water clean again.

Start with technique. In European football, tackling is a lesson with a curriculum. A defender learns to place the front foot, to choose the moment, to approach from the side that avoids conceding a penalty, to recognise when to clear rather than to win the ball. In many AFC youth academies, tackling drills are repeated hundreds of times a week, with immediate feedback from licensed coaches. Those sessions are not exciting. They are repetitive, boring, and extremely effective. They teach a twelve-year-old that the correct tackle is the one after which the opponent can still stand up.

In V-League, as the expert described, the problem sits before technique. It sits in an entire generation of youth coaches whose experience comes mainly from having played, or from street football, rather than from a structured licensing system. That is a critical observation, and from my own experience watching matches, it explains a great deal.

A coach who was once an amateur player sees a hard challenge and calls it "commitment." A Pro-licensed coach sees the same challenge and calls it "a poor standing-foot position." These two men are not teaching the same subject. They are teaching two different subjects. And in a country where most youth coaches belong to the first group, on-pitch violence stops being the player's fault. It becomes the product of an inconsistent development system.

On-pitch violence in V-League is not created by bad players. It is created by players who were taught that playing rough is playing well.

The expert described this phenomenon gently: a habit of stopping opponents at any cost. I will describe it more directly. When a twelve-year-old learns to tackle not to win the ball but to cause pain, that child is not learning football. He is learning another sport, and V-League is paying the price for that other sport.

There is an environmental detail we must look at honestly. Heavy rain in Vietnam, poor pitch quality, unstable playing conditions — all were cited by the expert as aggravating factors. But let me be clear: a bad pitch increases the risk of collision. It does not increase the intent to harm. If a player arrives two seconds late because the ball skids faster on a wet surface, that is a technical error. If a player hunts the same opponent twice in one match with the same type of challenge, that is a choice. And choices do not come from the pitch.

Dinh Bac was brought down twice by two different players in one match. I have rewatched that footage many times. The second was not a consequence of the first. It was a message sent by a collective to an individual, with the content: you will not pass through here on your own two feet. In football, we call it intimidation. In the dressing room, we call it tactics. In sports medicine, we call it injury risk. And in a football culture never taught from the ground up, we call it normal.

The expert raised one more factor, and this is the part of his analysis I find most persuasive: early-season results pressure. Players at the start of a season are competing for places, proving their value to the coaching staff. Put simply: when a player's career depends on whether he starts, the cost of playing rough becomes smaller than the cost of dropping out of the squad. This is a structural incentive problem, not an individual morality problem.

V-League operates in an incentive system where the reward for aggression is paid faster than the punishment for brutality.

That is why any behavioural reform resting only on sanctions will fail in the medium term. A sanction works only when its cost exceeds the benefit of the sanctioned behaviour. If a player knows a crude challenge might hold his starting place for three matches, and the sanction is a two-match ban afterwards, then mathematically the behaviour still pays. And V-League players, even without reading tactical reports, can still calculate that simple equation by instinct.

People often talk about re-educating players, about disciplining harder, about handing down penalties strong enough to deter. The expert rightly asked: if dangerous incidents recur despite punishments, the effectiveness of those punishments must be questioned. I agree with the question. I do not agree that the answer is harsher punishment.

V-League's problem is not that penalties are too light. The problem is that penalties are inconsistent. And inconsistency is what players notice faster than anyone.

Imagine a young player who has watched V-League since childhood. He sees one challenge earn a four-match ban, another a one-match ban, another nothing at all. He does not learn that the behaviour is forbidden. He learns that the behaviour carries risk. And risk, for a young player fighting brutally for a place in the squad, is a variable in the calculation, not a red line.

When punishment is inconsistent, it stops being punishment. It becomes a risk tax — and nobody fears a risk tax.

In the opposite direction, there is a point the expert raised correctly but that may not have been fully understood: the reverse role-model effect. He said that if professional players accept an overly physical style, amateur and youth players will treat it as normal. This is a vertical cultural transmission mechanism, from top to bottom. How the national team plays, V-League plays. How V-League plays, the first division plays. How the first division plays, school football plays. And when a ten-year-old boy in a provincial town watches television and sees a national star go in with both feet from behind, that boy does not see a red card. That boy sees a way to become a national star.

This means a disciplinary decision in V-League is not merely a disciplinary decision. It is a lecture on culture. When VFF bans a player for four matches, it is not only punishing one man. It is teaching a generation that this behaviour has a price. When it is inconsistent, it is teaching a generation that this behaviour has a price depending on who you are.

That is why I think we must see this crisis as a governance problem, not a morality problem. Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to become violent. People wake up inside a system where violent behaviour is sometimes rewarded, often ignored, and only occasionally punished. No individual is strong enough to resist such a system, even when he wants to.

There is one more dimension I consider a collective blind spot: the story of referees. Throughout this debate, very few people speak about the conditions under which V-League referees must work. A referee must manage a match in which two teams enter the pitch expecting that hard challenges are normal, armed with nothing but a whistle and a card. In Europe, referees are protected by VAR, by multiple camera angles, by a clear post-match evaluation system. In V-League, people are still arguing over whether a challenge deserves punishment at all. And when a referee is placed between pleasing the home crowd and protecting an opposing player, he usually chooses the first.

I do not believe VAR solves this problem. The space for subjective judgement within VAR is larger than people think, and the phrase "clear and obvious error" is itself a vague clause. A challenge can look clear to one person and ambiguous to another, depending on the camera angle and on what the viewer is trying to find. But VAR can do one thing a whistle cannot: it creates a record. And a record is the basis of consistency. To punish consistently, you must first record consistently.

There is one more media risk I want to name, because I have sat on the other side of the editorial desk. When a story about on-pitch violence runs long, journalism tends to look for a character to frame. A player who challenges crudely three times can be turned into a symbol of an entire systemic problem. That approach sells papers. But it is wrong in its diagnosis, and it creates a new problem: in the dressing room, a player framed that way becomes defensive, goes silent, and can no longer learn anything from the public.

I have witnessed this in another country, in another sport. A young athlete was labelled by the media as "the failure of the tournament" after three fouls. A year later, she left the sport. No one in the newsroom who wrote that headline knew they had just ended a career. Journalism has power, and that power must be used with the caution of a surgeon's scalpel, not a butcher's cleaver.

Back to the central question. What should be done?

First, I believe a mandatory youth-coaching certification programme is necessary, with specific content on tackling technique, duel management, and education on respecting opponents. Not a one-week tick-box course. A multi-year programme, with assessment and renewal.

Second, a consistent, transparent, recorded disciplinary system. Every dangerous challenge classified by severity, with penalties matching that classification, not matching the stature of the offending player. Players should read that classification the way they read the league table.

Third, protection for targeted players. When a player is brought down twice by two different opponents in one match, that is a signal of a tactic, and that tactic must be addressed at club level, not only at individual level.

And fourth, perhaps most important: patience. A cultural reform does not produce results in one season. It produces results in one generation. If we force it to ripen in three months, we will kill it before it can flower.

I still remember Qatar. I remember how South Korea lost 3-2 to Ghana, then beat Portugal 2-1 through a stoppage-time goal, and the whole country exhaled. I wrote about Son Heung-min's tears and was criticised for painting failure in pink. I doubted myself for a week.

Then I realised this: Qatar taught me that a fall is the low ground from which a spring stands back up. V-League is in the middle of such a fall. The question is not whether they will stand up. The question is how they will stand up — by building more disciplinary rooms for offending players, or by building more schools for the children who will never commit that offence at all.

People call them players. I call them sleepwalkers in studded boots, hunting dreams inside the limits of a pitch. And a sleepwalker cannot be woken by punishment. You can only wake him by teaching him to dream the right dream from the very beginning.

I began writing in the middle of the World Cup forest, where my voice is only a leaf. But one leaf is enough to know the direction of the whole forest's wind. And the wind I feel at V-League right now is not the wind of violence. It is the wind of a football nation trying to relearn how to teach people to play football. Slow, late, painful. But blowing. And as long as it blows, spring still has ground to stand on.