V-League and the Question of a Football Culture Never Taught from the Ground Up

In the match where Đình Bắc was repeatedly taken down by two opposing players with deliberate challenges, I sat down after the final whistle and replayed three video clips. Not to watch the goals. I watched how a 20-year-old forward was blocked from behind twice in the same half, and how the officiating team handled two nearly identical situations with two different degrees of punishment. In my notebook, I wrote three lines: one player taken down, two yellow cards, no VAR intervention. Weeks earlier, Văn Hậu received a four-match ban for a terrible challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Same league, same type of behaviour, three different levels of handling.

This is not a story about one referee. It is a story about a system that does not yet know what it wants to teach its players.

What is happening in the V-League this season is not new. A European expert interviewed by Dân trí said it plainly: anyone who has followed the V-League for years knows this is a long-standing feature, not an aberration. The season has only covered a short stretch, yet the number of serious incidents is already enough to make them a permanent topic in the press. Văn Hậu received a four-match suspension after his challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn successively took down Đình Bắc in situations with clear intent. Penalties were issued, but the number of incidents did not fall.

The expert emphasised a point I consider central: current sanctions are not sufficiently deterrent. If dangerous behaviour keeps recurring despite disciplinary measures, one must question the effectiveness of those measures. He demanded stricter and more consistent penalties. On responsibility, he placed both VFF and VPF in the same basket: both must bear responsibility for rebuilding the competitive culture. Amid early-season tension, when players are competing for starting places, pressure for results creates a structural incentive for a hard-edged style of play.

And here is the part many readers skip: this expert is not speaking about players as the sole culprits. He is speaking about those who taught them.

The core of this expert's argument is that Vietnamese football has never taught tackling technique, duel management and a culture of respect for opponents from the grassroots level. He does not call it the problem of an individual player; he calls it the outcome of an incomplete coaching education. The way a player dives in with both feet once speed has risen is a behaviour that is taught and repeated until it becomes a reflex. Once that reflex is ingrained at professional level, fixing it in the V-League is a very low-yield exercise.

I have data to test this proposition in my own tracking file. Over five years of referee analysis, I recorded dangerous challenges by the age group of the player committing them. In the under-23 group, most challenges from behind occur in youth competitions or in the early rounds of a season when a player has just been promoted to the first team. When a player reaches the 25-30 age bracket, the frequency of dangerous challenges does not fall if that player has never passed through a properly coached environment. In other words, playing experience does not automatically produce good defensive technique. It only produces the reflexes that have been repeated most often.

What the expert's argument does not fully spell out is a specific mechanism: a reverse role-model effect transmitted from the top down. Young players always look to their seniors to learn how to behave on the pitch. If the top tier accepts a certain level of excessive contact, the lower tiers treat it as the standard. At amateur and youth level, they copy what they see on television, not what they are taught in a manual. When Đình Bắc is taken down twice in one match, the signal young players receive is not that this behaviour is heavily punished, but that this opponent can be stopped this way.

The problem lies in human resources. The expert points out that too many youth coaches in Vietnam rely mainly on playing experience or street-football experience, rather than on a foundation of properly trained qualifications. This is not a discriminatory observation. It is a human-capital bottleneck, and it can explain much of what we see on the pitch. A good former player can convey inspiration, but cannot convey a tackling technique he himself was never properly coached in. Professional defensive technique — foot placement angle, timing of the entry into a duel, body position when beaten — are learned systematically, not inherited by nature.

In my analysis records of coaches at regional youth academies, there is one striking common thread: academies that maintain stable defensive quality across generations all apply a structured coaching curriculum, updated periodically. Conversely, academies dependent on one key teacher tend to collapse in quality once that person leaves. The V-League currently has both models in full, but the second dominates at the development tiers. This is why the V-League story cannot be solved merely by handing out heavier cards.

Another variable many cite is environmental: heavy rain, poor pitch quality, competitive pressure. These factors are real, and they all raise injury risk. But the expert places them as aggravators, not root causes. I agree with him here, for a technical reason: a properly coached player will automatically slow down and adjust his body position on a slippery surface. An uncoached player will not, and he will launch in with his full body weight.

Most debates about on-pitch violence in the V-League stop at the question of how heavily to punish. That is the wrong question, or at least an insufficient one. The disciplinary system rests on the assumption that fear will shape behaviour. For a player who built an old-style tackling reflex at 15 and has kept it for 10 years, the fear of a suspension does not sit in the same cognitive layer as that reflex. He does not decide to foul. He reacts.

This is where the argument for heavier penalties hits its limit. If sanctions cannot change behaviour, then increasing sanctions only creates a punishment system running parallel to an unresolved educational problem. The expert is right that penalties need to be stricter, but he stresses the word consistency even more. Consistency matters more than severity. A player who challenges from behind and forces an opponent off the pitch should not receive a one-match ban while another committing a similar act receives three. I wonder whether anyone at VFF has ever built such a simple comparison table.

But even consistency is only a necessary condition. The real problem is not in the disciplinary meeting room. It is in the training sessions at under-13 and under-15 level. When some coaching environments still encourage young players to play hard in order to instil fear in opponents, we are training a generation with exactly the wrong reflexes that their teachers intended. As long as the skills and qualifications of youth coaches are not a mandatory requirement, every measure at the top tier is merely cleaning up consequences.

This is a problem measured in multiple seasons, not a few matchdays. The public and the media will demand results immediately, while player education cannot deliver results immediately. The gap between those two speeds is where reforms usually die. If VFF and VPF genuinely want change, the first thing they can do is not to increase penalties, but to publish a roadmap for qualified youth-coach training, alongside a set of standards applied uniformly to all dangerous challenges. When young players know what they are learning, they will stop learning the wrong things. A mistake on live broadcast is like a mistake on the pitch: look it in the eye, learn from it, and blow the whistle for the next match.