Bans for players, silence for referees: what really guards V-League discipline after round 2

In Busan the clock read 21:40. In Đồng Nai the second half was passing through its hottest minutes. I watched Đồng Nai against Công an Hà Nội on 20 September through a stuttering stream, the picture jumping with every beat, the commentary breaking apart like a man short of breath.

Then Nguyễn Đình Bắc went down.

The ball was already ahead of him. His body was already shielding it. The contact came from behind: Huỳnh Tấn Sinh swung his leg into the calf. First time. A few seconds later, again from behind, again into the spot that was already hurting, a second time. Referee Lê Vũ Linh reached for his pocket, and the colour that appeared inside that juddering frame was yellow.

I left a bowl of noodles going cold on the table and typed into a group chat with friends in Biên Hòa: “Yellow only?” Nearly two minutes later someone answered: “Well, that ends it, doesn’t it.”

That “doesn’t it” carries a way of thinking about football I have met on small pitches and big ones alike: a defender must hold at any cost, and if the referee only produces a yellow, the cost turns out to be cheaper than the three points that stay behind.

To understand why one card made viewers at opposite ends of the time zone frown at the same moment, it has to be placed inside the sequence of round two of the 2026-2027 V-League.

In that round, centre-back Đoàn Văn Hậu of Công an Hà Nội broke the leg of midfielder Doãn Ngọc Tân of Thể Công Viettel. In the same round, the foreign player Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva of Nam Định stamped on the stomach of Võ Hữu Việt Hoàng of SHB Đà Nẵng. Two incidents, two players leaving the field in pain, both belonging to the category the laws of the game call violent conduct.

On 20 September, in the match between Đồng Nai and Công an Hà Nội, the list grew longer. Lê Văn Sơn of Đồng Nai threw an elbow at Nguyễn Đình Bắc. Huỳnh Tấn Sinh of Đồng Nai repeatedly kicked from behind, targeting the legs of the same striker.

The reaction was quick. Representatives of the tournament organisers, VPF and VFF met the VFF Referees Committee directly. The content of that meeting is wrapped in four words repeated more than any other: apply the laws correctly. Meaning: no missed fouls, no missed cards, the discipline of the competition must hold, brutal behaviour on the pitch must be stopped.

Dương Vũ Lâm, former VFF vice-president for professional affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, told Dân trí reporters after the Đồng Nai – CAHN match that referee Lê Vũ Linh had missed a card, because Huỳnh Tấn Sinh “kicked the man, not the ball, far too obviously, yet did not receive a red card”. Lâm turned the usual habit of Vietnamese football on its head: if the player is to be punished retroactively for this offence, the referee should be suspended in the same way, and the responsibility of the VAR team — Võ Hoài Thương and Nguyễn Thành Sơn — must be clarified. If VAR advised the referee and the referee overruled it, VAR did its job. If VAR stayed silent about the red card, the VAR officials must also face sanctions.

Lâm also revealed something telling about how the system announces its own disciplinary outcomes: sanctions against referees are usually not published, so anyone wanting to know who has been stood down simply watches the appointment list for the following rounds. Absence in the immediate next round is a strong signal of a ban.

Law 12 of IFAB places “kicking the man, not the ball” inside violent conduct, and the mandatory punishment is a red card. That leaves a very narrow grey area. A referee can misjudge intensity, can misread intent, but there is no room to choose between yellow and red for a kick delivered from behind into an opponent’s leg while the ball is somewhere else.

There is a technical difference that ordinary viewers feel even when they cannot name it. In an ordinary tackle, the leg and the ball arrive almost together, and the player’s eyes are on the ball. In a kick on the man, the leg arrives after the ball has gone, and the player’s eyes are on the man. That small detail decides whether a match is played within the laws or played around them.

The incident involving Tấn Sinh carried a signal stronger than intensity: repetition. One kick can be an accident. A second kick into the same sore spot is a decision. Referees in Europe routinely use exactly this detail to separate error from choice, and they do so because the laws give them the right.

Look closer and a simple calculation appears, one any defender solves in half a second. Minute 70, a fragile scoreline, the opposing striker turning. Option one: let him go, a high chance of conceding. Option two: kick his leg, take the yellow, keep eleven men for the remaining twenty minutes, and strip the opponent of his best-moving player. Any retrospective ban arrives later, once the points are already banked. In that arithmetic, the yellow card is not a punishment. It is a cost.

And that cost is paid in two different currencies. The offender pays with a few matches in the stands. The victim pays with his body: Đoàn Văn Hậu breaking Doãn Ngọc Tân’s leg, Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva stamping on Võ Hữu Việt Hoàng’s stomach, Huỳnh Tấn Sinh twice aiming at Nguyễn Đình Bắc’s calf. One side loses weeks, the other loses months of the shortest stretch of a career.

The offender pays with a few matches in the stands; the victim pays with months of a career — and when every sanction arrives after the final whistle, discipline is always racing a calculation that rewards the offender.

There are walls that are not built to block, but so that hearts can beat against one another. I thought of that line while watching Đình Bắc’s team-mates close a circle around him. In football that circle is beautiful and necessary, but it is also a room without windows: no camera sees inside, and the fouled player usually has to stand up on his own inside those arms. The VAR room is a second room without windows, except that the people inside it are talking about that very incident.

The chain of responsibility in that room has two branches, and both lead to a question with no public answer. Branch one: VAR advised, the referee overruled, the responsibility belongs to the referee. Branch two: VAR said nothing, the responsibility belongs to VAR. To know which branch is true, supporters would have to hear the conversation in the sealed room, or read the Referees Committee’s assessment. Neither exists.

Referees are the last link, not the first. Before the whistle comes the language of the bench: reminders to “use the body”, to “cut the ball”, instructions delivered by a look from the touchline, pre-match team meetings nobody takes minutes of. Referee Lê Vũ Linh cannot hear all of that, yet he pays for its consequences.

The demand to “apply the laws correctly” is entirely legitimate, but stopping there turns referees into the sole bearers of a cultural problem. A kick on the man in the 88th minute is rarely a personal impulse. It is a task: hold the points, break the opponent’s rhythm. The player takes the ban, while the source of the decision sits higher up, where no camera reaches.

Keeping refereeing sanctions secret also deserves a straight look. It shields referees from public pressure, and in exchange it turns the disciplinary mechanism into something readable only through absence. A system that teaches by silence teaches nothing. Supporters have no round-by-round assessment table to know who erred, how often, in what category of incident. Young referees get no lesson beyond an appointment list.

In South Korea, where I work, the debate over publishing VAR audio has run for several seasons. The lesson is not to copy another league, but to accept a principle: a decision only becomes a lesson when the whole of it can be retold.

The hardest part of collective memory is its selectivity. The stands remember vividly the broken leg of their own player. The stands also remember the elbow, the stamp, the kick from behind delivered by the opponent. Yet the same incidents, when committed by their own player, turn into “committed tackling”, into “fire for the shirt”. Honest memory has to record both sides, in the same small handwriting.

One more angle is rarely mentioned: retrospective bans risk becoming a bargaining table. When criteria are unpublished and sanctions fall outside a fixed scale, the strong side suffers lightly and the weak side suffers heavily, and supporters lose faith in the word “fairness” faster than they lose faith in referees themselves.

One actor is absent from this story: the club. After each incident, clubs send official letters and coaches answer press conferences with polite sentences about protecting players. Very few voices admit that their own player was wrong. Very few propose internal discipline. Discipline applied only to a player’s leg will always drift away from the place where the order was issued.

So what should hold up V-League’s discipline, beyond meetings? Three very concrete things, all within reach of the organisers.

First, publish the audio between the referee and the VAR team for every reviewed red-card situation, immediately after each round. Second, publish a refereeing assessment table round by round, listing missed calls and their type, so the appointment list stops being a code. Third, write club responsibility into the disciplinary regulations, with escalating penalties when one team repeatedly produces violent conduct.

If those three are done, retrospective punishment stops being a post-match ritual and becomes the last stage of a process anyone can read. Players will know that a kick from behind in the 88th minute cannot save three points for the team, because the team will pay alongside them.

I came for the scoreline, but I stayed for the people standing behind it. Nguyễn Đình Bắc has many seasons ahead, Doãn Ngọc Tân will return to the pitch, and the V-League has many rounds left. What decides the memory of this season sits in sealed rooms, in announcements nobody reads, in whether the organisers choose to speak clearly or choose silence.

From the pitch to the keyboard, I still hear a heartbeat running. It will run faster on the day the V-League can make even its own mistakes public.