V-League 2026-2027: Four Violent Incidents in Three Rounds, and the Emergency Meeting at VFF Headquarters

On the stand at Dong Nai stadium on 20 September, the noise did not come from a goal. It came from a passage of play long after the ball had rolled away. Nguyen Dinh Bac lay face down on the grass, pushed himself up on both hands, and needed several seconds to get back on his feet. Referee Le Vu Linh produced a yellow card. No red. The crowd reacted, but not violently — the reaction of people long accustomed to guessing for themselves what had just happened on their own pitch. I was sitting in the press area, roughly fifteen metres from the touchline. From that distance you do not hear the impact. You only see a young striker standing up more slowly than usual, and a centre-back turning his back and walking toward the penalty area as though nothing needed saying. The way a man turns his back often tells more than the match report. I wrote two words in my notebook: missed call. By whom, I did not yet know. There were two incidents that day. Defender Le Van Son of Dong Nai swung an elbow at Nguyen Dinh Bac, striker for Cong An Ha Noi. Centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh, also of Dong Nai, repeatedly kicked from behind, aiming at Dinh Bac's legs. Both happened in the same match, before the same stand, following the same script: the ball far away, the man very close. The sequence did not stop there. Before Dong Nai met Cong An Ha Noi, round 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League had already produced centre-back Doan Van Hau of Cong An Ha Noi breaking the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan of The Cong Viettel, and foreign player Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva of Nam Dinh stamping on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang of SHB Da Nang. Three opening rounds of a season. Four passages of play that had to be watched again. Four players who left the pitch or stayed down on the grass. Under that pressure, representatives of the league organisers, VPF and VFF met directly with the VFF Referees Committee. The demand was blunt: referees must apply the law correctly, uphold the discipline of the competition, and stop violent conduct on the pitch. "Applying the law correctly" sounds self-evident. In this profession, self-evident sentences are usually the hardest ones. More concretely, the phrase targets two very measurable things: not missing fouls, and not missing cards. In other words, what is being demanded is not that referees become harsher, but that they be consistent with the law as already written. That sounds narrow. But it strikes precisely the sore point of the Dong Nai versus Cong An Ha Noi match. In the passage where Huynh Tan Sinh played the man instead of the ball against Dinh Bac, referee Le Vu Linh used only a yellow card. No red, even though this was a repeated off-the-ball kick within a single passage. That is the detail I remember most, and the detail anyone who has followed professional football understands immediately: a repeated action within one passage is not an accident. It is a choice. Former VFF vice-president for technical affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, Duong Vu Lam, told reporters after the match: "Referee Le Vu Linh missed a card in that passage. Huynh Tan Sinh's off-the-ball kick was far too blatant, yet no red card was given." Lam did not stop at the player. He continued: "If there is retrospective punishment and Huynh Tan Sinh is suspended for this, then referee Le Vu Linh must have his whistle suspended in the same way. Beyond that, the responsibility of the VAR team must be clarified." And he set out a very clear fork: "If the VAR team comprising Mr Vo Hoai Thuong and Mr Nguyen Thanh Son advised the main referee but were overruled by him, then the VAR team did its job. Conversely, if the VAR team did not advise main referee Le Vu Linh that a red card was required for the off-the-ball foul described above, those VAR referees must also be sanctioned." This is the point few viewers notice. VAR is not an automatic tribunal. VAR is an advisory channel, and the final decision remains with the main referee on the pitch. That means two entirely different scenarios of responsibility exist, and only the internal communication data between the VAR team and the main referee can distinguish who was right and who was wrong. One is an error of overruling. The other is an error of silence. Both produce the same outcome on the pitch: Sinh stays on, Dinh Bac gets up, and the red card never appears. Based on my experience covering matches across several leagues, serious missed-card errors rarely come from referees failing to see. They come from referees seeing and choosing a lower level of sanction, for many reasons: the rhythm of the match, the timing, the pressure from the stand, or simply the tolerance threshold of a man who has been criticised heavily in the preceding weeks. The problem is that tolerance thresholds are not written in the laws. And that is exactly the gap. There is a concept Vietnamese football uses often but rarely defines: retrospective punishment. It is the mechanism for correcting errors after the match, once the referee has missed something. But retrospective punishment has a structural weakness. It can correct outcomes, not matches. Dinh Bac took two kicks to the leg. Dong Nai still fielded a full complement of players for the rest of the game. No sanction can return to Cong An Ha Noi the period during which their opponent should have been a man down. A late correction mechanism is one that cannot deter during the match — the only moment when deterrence actually works. And here a question of consistency appears. Duong Vu Lam put it neatly: if a player is suspended for an off-the-ball foul, then the referee must have his whistle suspended for the corresponding missed card. The two punishments must travel together, otherwise the system is saying that the error of the man with the whistle is lighter than the error of the man with the ball — when in reality the man with the whistle is the one holding the tool to prevent the second error from happening. I have kept my promise to the stand since my first camera — every goal is a thank-you. But keeping a promise is not only about recording goals. It is also about recording the moments when the stand was abandoned, and stating clearly that such a moment has a name, a person responsible, and a process that was skipped. There is an operational detail few supporters know. Specific disciplinary decisions for referees are usually not publicly announced. Duong Vu Lam revealed how to recognise them: "But just watch the list of referees in the following rounds and you will know whether the referees involved have had their whistles suspended. If they are not appointed in rounds immediately following the round just played, the likelihood is that they are being disciplined." In other words, the punishment exists, but it exists in the form of silence. No statement, no duration, no reason. Only a name disappearing from the appointment list, and those inside the profession understanding what that means. I understand the logic behind that silence. Refereeing is a profession scrutinised second by second, under pressure from every direction, poorly paid relative to intensity, and one published mistake can follow a referee for an entire career. There are reasons to protect them. But protecting through silence produces another consequence: it prevents discipline from deterring anyone outside, and it leaves the stand with no way to distinguish a suspended referee from one merely rested for a round. Transparency here does not oppose protecting referees. It is the condition that keeps protection from being read as cover-up. At gate 4 after the match, a Dong Nai supporter said something to me that I recorded verbatim: "I don't need my team to win like that. I need to know that if someone kicks a young player's leg, what they lose is not only three points." He was not talking about referees. He was talking about being able to trust that the law is the same for everyone in the same match. In the darkness of the tunnel, I heard the heart of the whole stadium beating. Supporters are not demanding a harsher league. They are demanding a predictable one. That is where I want to place a different angle, one emergency meetings tend to skip. The entire current response is concentrated on a single link: referees. Apply the law correctly, uphold discipline, stop violent conduct — all handed to the man with the whistle. But the referee is the last link in a chain, not the first. Look at that chain in reverse. Before the referee misses a card, a player decides to kick from behind. Before the player decides to kick from behind, a head coach and a coaching staff build a way of playing. Before that, a club decides that applying physical pressure to a young striker is the cheapest route to points. And before all of it, there is a reward system that counts only points, and never the cost a team imposes on its opponent and on the league. When that entire chain is left untouched, every emergency meeting becomes a meeting about symptoms. Referees showing more cards will reduce the number of violent passages that appear on television, but it will not reduce the number of violent passages calculated in the dressing room. Three rounds, four incidents, three different clubs, and not a single disciplinary statement aimed at club level. That is the biggest blind spot in this story. The second blind spot concerns the victim. Dinh Bac is a young striker, and in a single match he was targeted twice by two different players from the same team. In football, a player being targeted twice in one match is rarely random. It is usually the mark of a specific instruction. And that is why sanctions aimed only at players — the executors — and never at teams — the organisers — will always stop halfway. A two-match suspension is a price. But if that price is not converted into a lesson for the club, the script repeats next season with another young player, at another stadium. When a player walks out of the tunnel, I see the ten-year-old inside him. That child did not start playing football in order to learn how to kick another man's leg once the ball has rolled away. He learned that somewhere on the road to becoming a professional, in an environment where winning at any cost is praised more than winning the right way. So what is the next signal to watch? Not a red card in the next match. The signal worth watching is the referee appointment list for the following round. If referee Le Vu Linh does not appear on that list, the system is operating exactly as the former head of the VFF Referees Committee described. If the VAR team of Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son is also absent, then the question of VAR responsibility has been answered, even if nobody says it out loud. And if all three names appear again the following round, then "applying the law correctly" remains nothing more than a line in the minutes of a meeting. The season is still very long. Three rounds have passed, and we already have four passages the stand had to watch again. What worries me is not those four passages. What worries me is that the response to them is being designed in a way that leaves the stand unable to verify for itself whether the system has actually responded. I still keep my promise to the stand. And this time, that promise does not lie in any goal at all.