V-League 2026: The Kicks Behind the Referee's Back and VFF's Emergency Meeting

In the edit suite I have a habit my colleagues tease me about: rewinding a single shot until it loses all its original meaning.

On the night of September 20, I did exactly that with a four-second clip. A Đồng Nai player ran in behind his opponent. The ball was already gone. He still swung his leg. Not a challenge on the ball, but a kick into empty space that nobody needed to touch.

Four seconds. Slow motion. Rewind. Rewind again. By the twelfth pass I had stopped seeing a passage of play. I only saw a foot making a decision.

What stopped me was not the kick. It was the silence of the stands just before it, the instant when nobody yet understood what had happened.

I do not write about goals. I write about the silence before the roar.

Context: two rounds, four wounds

This V-League season is only two rounds old. In those two rounds the league has recorded one broken leg, one stamp on an opponent's stomach, one kick delivered behind the referee's back, and one young striker fouled off the ball twice in a single match by two different players.

Doãn Ngọc Tân of Thể Công Viettel broke his leg in the opening fixture. The man who went into him was Đoàn Văn Hậu, a defender on the books of CLB Công an Hà Nội and a long-serving national-team player. Ezequiel Santos Da Silva, Nam Định's foreign import, stamped on an opponent in his first ever V-League appearance. Huỳnh Tấn Sinh, Đồng Nai's centre-back, kicked an opponent from behind after the ball had gone. And Đình Bắc, CAHN's young forward, was fouled twice in one match by two separate Đồng Nai players.

I list these names not to pass sentence. I list them to show that they are not scattered across a long season. They sit inside a very short window, and most of them sit outside the central referee's field of vision.

On September 21, one day after Đồng Nai hosted CLB Công an Hà Nội, the Disciplinary Committee of the Vietnam Football Federation called an emergency meeting. That is the only fact in this whole story that can be read as a number: one day. From the final whistle to the meeting room, one day.

When the lights go out, the match truly begins. This time it began in a room with no spectators.

The core: a kick that belongs to no tactical framework

It needs saying plainly, because most bulletins slide past it: what we are discussing is not tactics. There is no shape here, no pressing system, no wide combination. Every incident above belongs to a single class of behaviour, and it has its own name among players: the off-ball foul.

It happens when the ball has already left the foot, when the referee is turning to follow the attack, when the television camera is tracking the ball. That moment, and only that moment.

Between two passes there is a world the lens cannot catch.

In eighteen years in the edit suite I have learned that guilt in football rarely sits where the crowd is. It sits at the edge of the frame. Huỳnh Tấn Sinh's kick on the night of September 20 was an almost perfect technical example: pick the moment the ball has gone, pick an angle the referee cannot see, pick a movement short enough not to make a loud noise. Three conditions stacked together do not happen by accident.

Expert Đoàn Minh Xương talks about superfluous challenges. I prefer the word superfluous to the word vicious, because it is more accurate. A vicious challenge is something everyone spots immediately. A superfluous one requires you to sit down and watch it slowly.

But there is a more important detail, and it sits on the Đồng Nai side.

Đình Bắc was fouled twice in one match by two different players. This is the centre of the whole story, and also the most ignored point. A player fouled twice by two separate opponents is not coincidence. In football it is a deliberate behavioural pattern, and it has an old name: softening up. You pick the youngest, fastest forward, the one not yet used to contact, and you touch him where the referee is not looking. It does not need to hurt. It only needs to be remembered.

I have watched a great many V-League matches, and I believe the most dangerous thing on a pitch is not a malicious tackle. It is an intention that repeats. Accidents are finite. Intentions are not.

Running alongside this is another story, mentioned far less: VAR.

VAR arrived in the V-League roughly three seasons ago, and for most of that time it has been described as a civilising milestone. People inside Vietnamese football tell me that since VAR, players have had to compete more carefully and more cleverly, because the kind of incident that once escaped a referee now sits in a room with a screen.

That is a beautiful argument. But it has a hole in the data: we have no statistics at all on the number of violent incidents per season. No process data, no measurable index. Everything is impression, and impressions are easily steered by viral clips.

There is another angle I find more persuasive, and it belongs to the structure of the league. Đồng Nai have just come up from the First Division. There, VAR is not used or barely used. Players from a newly promoted club arrive in the V-League carrying a set of habits forged in a different environment, one where such incidents are rarely recorded. Ezequiel, Nam Định's foreign signing, is the same: first time in the V-League, first time in a league where every camera angle can become evidence.

That is not an excuse. It is a training and standardisation gap the league has not closed.

And here a resource paradox appears. CLB Công an Hà Nội, institutionally backed and well resourced, faced a newly promoted side three goals down and a man down. When a team is heavily beaten and short-handed, football history shows behavioural control deteriorates sharply. Referee Lê Vũ Linh, in that match, produced only a yellow card for the kick from behind.

One yellow card. For a passage of play in which the ball had already gone.

There is a question nobody has answered satisfactorily this week: if VAR reviewed the incident, why was the outcome still a yellow? Three possibilities. First, the camera angle was not clear enough. Second, the people in the VAR room read it differently. Third, and this is the one I do not want to consider, it was handled leniently because the match was already settled. I have no evidence for the third. But I have an observation: when one side is three goals and a man down, referees tend to manage the game by lowering the temperature, and sometimes that cooling quietly becomes a form of tolerance.

If you were a Đồng Nai player in that situation, you could read the yellow card several ways. But if you are a young forward kicked twice in one match, you can only read it one way: that it is still possible.

The contrarian angle: violence did not return, attention did

The headline of most commentary this week is a variation of one sentence: violence returns to the V-League.

I do not believe it. Not because I think Vietnamese pitches are clean. But because we do not have enough data to say they ever were.

Look at what we actually have: two rounds, four major incidents, one emergency meeting. On that sample, nobody can assert a trend. What changed is not behaviour on the pitch. What changed is our ability to see behaviour on the pitch.

An expert I spoke with, Dương Vũ Lâm, told me something I wrote down verbatim: ugly passages spread very fast and very repeatedly across the media, and that pressure leaves disciplinary bodies unable not to act.

I think he is right, and it is good news and bad news at once.

Good news: incidents now have consequences. Bad news: the consequences are determined by virality, not by a fixed tariff. A kick in a match nobody watches can pass by. The same kick in a match with millions of views produces an emergency meeting within twenty-four hours.

Professionally, this feels familiar. In documentary film it works the same way: a shot is remembered not because it is the truest, but because it is screened the most.

And here is the second, more uncomfortable contrarian point.

The real worry is not that the V-League has too many violent players. The real worry is that no club is being asked about responsibility.

Look at the whole story and something strange appears. All blame flows to two groups: players and referees. People discuss Đoàn Văn Hậu's habit. People discuss the Đồng Nai players' awareness. People discuss whether referee Lê Vũ Linh should be reviewed, and the VAR team of Võ Hoài Thương and Nguyễn Thành Sơn.

Nobody talks about the clubs. Nobody talks about training sessions, about whether a coach told his players that kicking from behind is unacceptable. Nobody talks about what preparation a newly promoted club received for an environment with VAR.

A player can change his shirt number, but he cannot change the memory he carries on his back. That is true. It is equally true that nobody carries memory alone. If a behaviour repeats, it has become a habit. And if it is a habit, it was cultivated somewhere.

There is a historical fact I always carry when writing about this subject. In 2026, at An Giang, player Nguyễn Anh Hùng was fouled and his career ended. At SHB Đà Nẵng, Trần Anh Khoa was tackled from behind and never returned to the top level. Hoàng Vũ Samson was stamped on while wearing a Hà Nội shirt.

What those men share: none belonged to the strongest clubs of their moment, or to the protected class. Victory is what gets printed in the papers. Collapse is what gets carved into the heart.

So the right question is not: how do we punish harder. It is: who is being protected, and who is being made to endure.

Takeaway: the heaviest punishment is the one you can read

Deterrence through punishment has one strict rule: it only works if people can read it before they act, not after they are caught.

In three days the Disciplinary Committee will announce its rulings. The numbers may be three matches, five, or more. But the number is not the message. How it is explained is the message.

If the outcome states clearly that an off-ball kick is punished more heavily than ordinary contact, then players at every club, First Division included, will understand. If it is announced with a single line, it is just another media event, and next week there will be a new clip.

In football, as in film, what people remember most is the silent scene.

So the question I leave behind is not for the Disciplinary Committee. It is for the people sitting in club technical meetings, in training sessions with no cameras. When the league reaches round three, how many coaches will say one sentence to their players about what happens after the ball has gone?

If the answer is nobody, then we will be back here, rewinding a four-second clip.