V-League and the Football Culture Problem: When Bans Are No Longer the Answer

The opening rounds of the new season have closed, and the loudest headline in the V-League was not a goal. It was a red card. A national-team player received a four-match suspension after a dangerous challenge on a fellow professional. Days later, in another fixture, a young forward was taken down twice, in separate incidents, by two opposing players in what appeared to be deliberate fouls. The match was played in rain, on a poor pitch, with a greasy ball. But rain does not produce a tackle launched from behind. I sat with those matches afterwards, rewinding the footage at half speed, and asked myself: is this the accident of a tropical football nation, or the consequence of something taught wrongly for so long that nobody will stand up and own it? The pitch never lies, but memory knows how to write poetry. And the memory of V-League supporters regarding reckless challenges has never faded, season after season. In an interview published by Dan Tri, a European expert — a recurring voice in that outlet across multiple seasons — framed the issue in a way that breaks with the reflexive response of public opinion. He did not call it a player-discipline problem. He called it a hole in football education. That framing made me pause longer than usual. Because every time a reckless challenge appears, our default reaction is to demand a longer ban. Three matches is not enough, so make it five. Five is not enough, so make it seven. As if the problem lived in the number, rather than in what that player was taught at fourteen. The expert looks at the V-League from a different angle. He talks about teaching tackling technique, teaching duel management, teaching respect for the opponent — things he believes are under-taught or badly taught. And he locates the root of it in the youth coaching pool. This is not the first time he has spoken out. Across repeated interviews with Dan Tri, his message has stayed consistent. That consistency says two things. It points to a stable source. And it points to a problem that has been flagged many times without being solved. One thing should be stated up front: this is expert opinion, not a data report. The interview offers no expected-goals figures, no pressing intensity per match-week, no quantified foul frequency. It offers a lens. And sometimes a correct lens is worth more than a complete spreadsheet read the wrong way. The first thing to separate out: tackling technique is a taught skill, not an innate instinct. A player does not spontaneously know how to slide in at the right moment, in the right direction, with the right force. He learns it. And if his teacher does not teach it, or teaches it carelessly, he will learn it somewhere else — from on-pitch survival instinct, from amateur pitches, from collisions nobody whistles for. The European expert treats this as a training gap. He lists three skill groups: how to tackle, how to manage one-on-one duels, and how to make decisions on the pitch. All three are teachable. Which means that if they are missing, the fault lies with the training system, not with genes or some supposed national temperament. The second point, and the one that troubles me most: habits form very early and are reinforced by repetition. A player who tackles recklessly at fifteen, and is let off, will tackle recklessly at twenty. By twenty-five, playing in the V-League, that technique has entered his reflexes, has become how his body responds to danger. Fixing it at professional level is extremely low-yield work. Put another way: every red card in the V-League today is a mistake seeded ten years ago. The third point concerns environment. Rain, poor pitches, competitive pressure — all of these worsen the picture. But they are accelerants, not root causes. If the only cause were the pitch, the solution would be to upgrade the pitch, and the problem would be far simpler. It is not simple, because a properly coached player can still tackle safely on a bad surface. The fourth point, and perhaps the most uncomfortable: coaching quality. The expert argues that too many youth coaches in Vietnam rely mainly on their own playing experience or street-football experience, rather than on a structured, licensed and continuously updated training programme. That is a heavy claim, and it points to a human-capital bottleneck. If youth coaching standards here sit below those of leading regional federations, then the development ceiling of Vietnamese players may be lower than national-team results suggest. That is an inference, not a claim made in the article. But it belongs on the table. The fifth point is a reverse-transmission mechanism. Young players always look upward at senior players as role models. If forceful, even over-the-line challenges are accepted at professional level, then at amateur and youth level they become the norm. The expert is blunt: in some training environments, young players are actively encouraged to play aggressively or to intimidate opponents. If that is true, then discipline in the V-League is not only a V-League matter. It is an intervention in youth football education, whether anyone realises it or not. There is one question the expert raises, and it is the most important of the whole conversation: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite the disciplinary measures already in place, must we not question whether those measures are achieving their stated goal? This is a test of deterrence, not of severity. And it changes the entire evaluation. We usually measure by the length of bans — seven matches, eight, ten. But the correct metric is the recurrence rate. If bans get longer and incidents do not fall, we are simply increasing the dose of an ineffective medicine. The expert defines the purpose of punishment in two parts: to punish and to prevent. The second part is the important one. And the second part is now in doubt. He stresses one word I consider the key: consistency. He calls for penalties that are both stricter and more consistent. The word consistency is not redundant here. It implies that discipline is currently perceived as unevenly applied. The same act is a yellow in one match, a red in another, a two-match ban in a third. That inconsistency erodes faith in the disciplinary system itself. And here is the counter-intuitive point: the problem may not lie in the rules, but in how the rules are applied. Changing rules takes time and generates argument. Applying rules consistently requires only will. One more point worth noting. The expert names both the Vietnam Football Federation and the Vietnam Professional Football company as jointly responsible. Shared responsibility is right in principle. But it also creates a coordination risk: when two bodies are jointly responsible for a problem, neither is its sole owner. And reforms without an owner tend to stall. There is another variable the interview only brushes past: results pressure. Early in a season, with starting places still open, players compete more aggressively to impress the coaching staff. That incentive structure rewards aggression. Any behavioural reform programme that ignores this incentive structure will be surface paint. Finally, the article itself. The source is an anonymous European expert. No name, no credentials, no institution. That makes the weight of the argument depend on how the outlet frames it, rather than on the personal authority of the speaker. That is a verification weakness. And the piece ends mid-sentence, suggesting part of the argument was cut before publication. In other words: read this as directional opinion, not as verified evidence. I used to think on-pitch violence was a matter for referees and disciplinary committees. I think differently now. Referees and committees only handle the crown of a tree that grew crooked from the seed. The night of five goals, I understood I was no longer the storyteller but part of the story. Twenty years in the commentary box, and I have watched how many red cards, how many suspensions, how many waves of public outrage that then forgot. And I ask myself: have we been asking the wrong question all these years? Coaching reform, a structured youth football education programme, consistently applied discipline — all of that needs a decade, maybe more. But public pressure gives us six months. The gap between the time needed to cure and the time the public will tolerate is the deepest paradox of this football nation. The new generation wins with its fingers, but still hurts with its heart. The question before us now is not how harshly we should punish, but whether we have the patience to teach from the beginning — and whether the ten-year-olds practising slide tackles on bad pitches today will be taught properly, so that in ten years they do not become the next red card on the evening bulletin.