V-League and the Football Culture Problem: Punish the Root, Not the Branch

On the bench, you do not watch the game; you watch fate. That sentence, which I have written in many analysis pieces, becomes hauntingly true in the early days of this V-League season. It is not about goals, not about decisive passes, but about tackles that cross the line. A four-match ban was handed out for a dangerous challenge on a midfielder. Shortly after, a young player was deliberately fouled by two different opponents in the same match. The stands were loud, the media spoke, the disciplinary committee met. Yet I kept sitting in front of the screen, rewinding every frame, asking myself: where did these men learn to tackle like that? A recent interview with Dân trí by a European expert placed exactly that question on the table. According to him, violence in the V-League does not originate from individual players, but from the way football culture is trained at youth level. He did not talk about tactics or results. He talked about habits. A habit formed in the first training sessions, when a child is taught that tackling hard is the way to show courage. If no one corrects it at the root, that habit grows with the player, becomes instinct, and then becomes a familiar image on professional pitches. What caught my attention was how this expert placed responsibility on both the VFF and the VPF, not only on players. According to him, when sanctions are issued but dangerous situations keep recurring, the first question is not “how wrong was that player”, but “how has the disciplinary system been functioning”. Sanctions need to be sufficiently deterrent, but more importantly, they need to be consistent. A heavy ban in one match, a light one in another, a tackle ignored in one round but punished in the next — all create a grey zone where players no longer know where the real line is. I dig beneath the bench, where nameless bones wait for their day to shine. And I realize that, deeper still, beneath that bench lies an entire training system that is hurting itself. A few years ago, while following the national U15 championship, I watched a boy complete over 90 percent of his passes in a final while scoring no goals. Nobody mentioned him. What got mentioned were the tall centre-backs who tackled decisively and were ready to intimidate opponents early. That is not the boy's fault; it is the fault of adults who chose short-term results over fundamental technique. The European expert was blunt: too many youth coaches today rely mainly on playing experience — or street football experience — instead of being properly trained through a licensing system. This leads to a paradox: those tasked with shaping the habits of the next generation are exactly the ones who have never learned how to do it. They teach what they have lived, including bad habits. If a youth coach believes strength and aggression are the fastest route to winning at U18 level, his students will carry that belief into the first team. In football, there is a mechanism I call the “role-model flow”. Young players always look to their seniors to learn how to behave on the pitch. If at the top a deliberate, hurtful tackle is accepted as part of the game, then below, young players will understand that this is normal. And so violence is reproduced through generations. The expert did not use that phrase, but he was describing exactly that: the habits of the first team become the hidden curriculum of the youth teams. I can picture a training session at some academy in Vietnam. Rain is falling, the pitch is slippery, and the young players are told to fight, to show fire. One student tackles late, slips, and brings down a teammate. The coach does not correct the technique, does not adjust the standing foot. He claps and shouts that this is what being a man means. I have witnessed similar things for years, and I understand that rain or poor pitches are not the cause. They are magnifiers. The cause lives in the way adults talk about the game, in how they praise a challenge, in how they teach a child what to do when an opponent is stronger. The hardest thing to accept in this interview, for me, is the emphasis that habits formed early can hardly be corrected at professional level. If a player has played violently for fifteen years, from academy to first team, a ban can keep him off the pitch for a few matches, but it cannot erase the instinct embedded in him. That is why simply increasing punishments is a superficial solution. It calms public anger, but it does not change the sediment beneath. Every ban is a layer of sediment, and I sift every grain of sand to find gold — but this time, I found a layer of mud that the whole system created together. In Japan, where I was born, the first lessons for children do not begin with winning; they begin with bowing, thanking the referee, and arranging shoes neatly before entering the pitch. It sounds distant, but those small details are the foundation of behaviour on the field. A child taught to respect those around him from the age of five or six will not easily turn a football pitch into a place to vent anger at twenty. I am not saying Vietnam should copy Japan. I am saying that football culture, like individual technique, must be taught in the first years of life — and if no one teaches it, bad habits will teach us instead. There is one detail that made me pause longer than the others: two different players, in the same match, deliberately fouled the same opponent. This is no longer a mistimed tackle. This is an intimidation strategy, a way to send a message. And if that strategy is learned in a training environment, then the problem is not about technical education but about the culture being passed down. Many coaching environments in Vietnam — not all, but not few — encourage aggression as a quality to praise. A young player is praised for being willing to play hard. The opponent is seen as an enemy to be feared. Youth football culture becomes a culture of intimidation. Based on my experience following matches in many countries, I have realized that advanced football nations do not have fewer collisions. They have fewer deliberate, hurtful tackles, because they deal with them very early. A coach in Europe will stop training immediately when he sees a malicious challenge, even from the best player. He will explain, he will correct, he will turn that moment into a lesson. In some places, that lesson is skipped, because the youth team's results matter more than the long-term development of each individual. And then that child grows up, becomes a professional, and repeats exactly what he learned — that football is a place to display force. People often say that if you love football, you must accept contact. I believe that. But there is a huge gap between physical contact and intentional conduct that causes harm. In the silence of a season full of bans, I can hear the roots of talents growing — but I can also hear the roots of bad habits being watered every day in academies. Without reform from the root, without coaches being seriously re-trained, without licences becoming mandatory, all bans are just patches on a cracking wall. The V-League does not lack talent. The V-League lacks a culture that teaches those talents how to survive a match without destroying an opponent. If we truly want a cleaner league, let us start from the first training exercises of children, from how we teach sliding tackling technique, from how we teach respect. Let sanctions do their job, but never confuse punishing adults with saving the future of children. Adults must save themselves first, by becoming real coaches, real role models. Then, perhaps, I will no longer have to dig beneath the bench to find the tackles of the past. I will find a new generation, young players who know that courage is not about hurting others, but about standing up after a fall and continuing to play the right way. That is the moment I am waiting for.