V-League and the Crack Beneath the Foundation: On-Field Violence Does Not Begin with the Players

At the 73rd minute of an early-season match, on a pitch still marked by rain, I wrote a tackle into my notebook. Not to score it, not to log a stat. To remember. A player launched in with both feet, from behind, after the ball had long gone. The referee pulled the red card. The stands fell silent for a beat, then howled. On the opposite bench, a young player sat with his face in his hands. I did not record that challenge in the language football journalism usually uses. I wrote one word: Habit.

The notebook abandoned that year is now my treasure map. In it are hundreds of such challenges, across leagues and countries. But I must confess: in the V-League, I write more. Not because this league is more violent than any other. Because here, people call violence by another name, intensity. A problem named wrongly is very hard to cure correctly.

I am not Vietnamese. I am an Argentine-born scout who has worked across Asia for more than eight years, and what I write comes from the outside looking in. I did not come to judge. I came to excavate. A scout's voice must reach the heart before it reaches the data.

Context: when the storm arrives early

Recent weeks opened the season with a cluster of incidents that left Vietnamese public opinion unable to sit still. A national-team star, Đoàn Văn Hậu, received a four-match suspension after a brutal challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Not long after, in another match, Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn each committed acts described as deliberate take-downs of young forward Đình Bắc. The list of sanctions grew longer, but the list of dangerous challenges did not grow shorter.

Notably, these incidents did not scatter across the season. They clustered into a short window early on, the phase in which, by many insiders' accounts, players compete hardest for starting places. The pressure to prove oneself pushes the collision threshold above what is safe. On a rain-soaked surface, with balls that sometimes bounce unexpectedly, a challenge that is a few centimetres mistimed is not merely a foul. It can be a serious injury. But attributing everything to rain and poor pitches would miss the most important thing.

At the centre of that storm, a European expert, who has spoken repeatedly in Vietnamese media and held a consistent view, offered a different reading. He did not blame a specific player. He spoke of an entire foundation: the V-League needs to build football culture from youth level, and on-field violence is a consequence of an academy system that has not been standardised. It sounds distant, but I believe it is the most correctly framed diagnosis I have read about Vietnamese football.

I have spent many years watching youth academies across three continents. I have sat in stands at tournaments no one bothered to record, and I have tracked fifteen-year-olds who later became national-team pillars. Because of that, when I look at the V-League, I do not look at what happens on the pitch. I look at what happened ten years earlier, on training fields with no spectators.

Core: the ball rolls long before it rolls in the V-League

Set the bans aside for a moment. Look at technique. A safe tackle is not a soft tackle. It is a taught skill. No one instinctively knows how to place a foot into a challenge so as to win the ball without injuring an opponent. It is a chain of decisions taken in under half a second: the angle of approach, the timing of the stretch, the direction of contact, the body's centre of gravity, and finally the adjustment made the instant you realise you are late. A good tackle can collapse because one of those decisions is off. But a good tackle, coached properly, becomes a reflex. So does a dangerous one.

This is the point I want readers to face directly. On-field violence in the V-League, seen technically, is not an accident in a handful of challenges. It is the trace of a reflex formed very early and never corrected.

When a player is small, he learns football in a specific environment. If the adults around him, coaches, older boys, the crowd at a village pitch, value putting an opponent in his place as a way of showing character, the child grows up believing that is part of football. He believes intensity means playing rough. By the time he turns professional, the habit has not vanished. It has merely put on a nicer shirt and stood under brighter lights.

Against properly taught football nations, the gap is not courage. Vietnamese players do not lack heart. What is missing is a structured teaching of defensive skill: what makes a tackle legal, how to manage space so you are not late, how to observe an opponent to read the ball, and what to do once you have been beaten instead of pulling a man down. These are not instincts. They are the grammar of the game, and grammar must be taught.

I have seen this many times in different academies. When a youth team lacks tackling skill, it compensates with numbers, many players diving in instead of one clean intervention. Collisions soar. None of them want to hurt an opponent. They simply do not know another way. At youth level, the best way to reduce injuries is not harsher punishment, but better teaching.

Timing is a concrete example. A youth player without structured coaching tends to run at the ball's trajectory, not the opponent's. When the opponent changes direction suddenly, he must reach with his leg from a position of lost balance. That is the origin of most two-footed challenges. Not malice. Simply never being taught that you track the opponent's hips, not the ball.

This reminds me of an old experience. Years ago, while scouting at a big club, I spent nearly three weeks polishing a report on a young midfielder. Fourteen pages, meticulous to the last detail. By the time I sent it, the club had already finalised its promotion plan. A veteran scout told me one thing: You were too careful and became too slow. Good, but useless. I remember that whenever I look at the V-League. Because this is the moment when reform, however long it needs, must start now. You cannot wait until everything is perfect before sending the report.

Football culture: where the top falls to the bottom

There is a mechanism I think is under-noticed in Vietnam: young players always look upward to seniors to learn behaviour. When a national-team player goes in with two feet and takes a red card, it is not merely a personal incident. It is a lesson. Thousands of children watching will encode that image. Their brains file it under accepted. The European expert says that if excessive contact is accepted at the top level, it becomes the norm below. I think he is right, and that means discipline in the V-League is not just an adult matter. It is an intervention in the youth development system.

Imagine a twelve-year-old watching the match in which Đình Bắc was taken down twice by two different players. That child may think: if a good forward is treated like that, that is how you stop him. The following week, on a dirt pitch in a children's match, he tries it. No one tells him it is wrong. The adults on the touchline even applaud. The loop begins.

In Argentine football, where I grew up, we also have a street culture that speaks often of garra, of fire. But there is a difference I noticed as I grew. In serious academies, from a very early age, properly trained coaches draw a clear line between intensity in a legal duel and behaviour that harms an opponent. Children are allowed fire, but within the laws. Here, I notice a gap. Coaching environments are not always standardised, and sometimes a youth coach is simply someone who once played street football and passes on his experience without ever attending a pedagogy course.

This is not an insult. It is a human-capital bottleneck. A man with a street-football past can teach courage, endurance, the ability to take punishment. But teaching a ten-year-old to tackle safely with correct body weight, correct timing, and correct reading of an opponent's run before the ball arrives, that requires a different pedagogical foundation. It requires a licensed coach, continuously updated, who understands that youth development is a profession, not just the passing on of fire.

I remember an afternoon at a training centre I once visited. A coach in his forties was teaching children how to fall. Not how to fall to win a penalty, but how to fall to reduce injury when tackled. He spent the whole session on falling sideways, on rolling on landing. It is a skill many consider pointless. Yet it is the foundation of safety. A child who knows how to fall is less injured when tackled. A senior who knows how to fall is less likely to retaliate. That small detail appears in no statistical table. But it is part of football culture.

In Vietnam, I wonder how many academies spend time on skills that seem pointless. How many youth coaches are taught that teaching children to fall matters as much as teaching them to shoot? The answer may be very few. And it is precisely those small gaps, compounded across thousands of sessions and thousands of children, that produce a specific football culture.

Testing the assumption: does harsher punishment solve it?

This is what I want readers to think through carefully, because it runs against most fans' instincts. When violence occurs, we immediately reach for punishment. A four-match ban. Another ban. Then a longer one. The numbers climb, and we feel reassured that justice has been done. But ask a simple question: if bans were deterring, why do dangerous challenges keep recurring?

The European expert asked exactly that. He said that if dangerous incidents recur despite disciplinary measures, one must question the effectiveness of current penalties. And he stressed that the purpose of punishment is not only to punish, but to prevent.

The crux is here: deterrence depends on consistency, not severity. An extremely heavy ban for one player and a light one for another in a similar challenge destroys the deterrent system faster than any leniency. When players believe they can predict the likelihood of punishment, they adjust. When they believe punishment is a lottery depending on which referee takes the match, or on which club faces media pressure, playing rough becomes a gamble worth taking.

I once witnessed this in a survey I joined at a club during a football shutdown. We tracked twenty-seven youth players over several weeks and recorded clear declines in sprint speed, ball feel, and confidence. But what I remember most is not the numbers. It is the tears of a seventeen-year-old when his contract was not renewed. He did not cry for football. He cried because he did not understand what had happened. The system abandoned him without explanation. In the V-League, I worry the same thing is happening to young players: pushed into an environment where violence is normal, punished when they cross a line, but never taught that another way exists.

There is a paradox worth stating. If a disciplinary system punishes players without teaching them anything, it produces two kinds of people: those who no longer dare to challenge, and those who learn to challenge without being caught. Neither is a better player. The first loses the legitimate intensity that Vietnamese football has and should be proud of. The second becomes cunning at concealing bad behaviour. Neither helps the game.

Systemic structure: who is responsible?

Another point I read from the expert's view: responsibility does not belong to players alone. The Vietnam Football Federation and the Vietnam Professional Football company, the two bodies that govern and run the league, are both placed under pressure. That is morally right. But it also creates a coordination risk. When responsibility is shared without clear ownership, reform stalls easily. Each body may believe the other should act first.

The league is at a crucial moment. Media pressure is high. Major outlets report continuously. But I ask myself: is that pressure enough to change a football culture that has existed for decades? Certainly not. Football culture does not change in one season. It changes in one generation. That is why the expert's framing, starting at youth level, matters so much. It is not a quick fix. It is the only fix consistent with the real cause of the problem.

From outside, I see something interesting. Vietnamese football has a national team many regional peers envy. It has players abroad. It has increasingly better academies. But beneath those achievements lies an unconsolidated foundation. Every building is built from its base. If the base has a crack, a building can rise as high as it likes, and it is only a matter of time before it shows.

Core: coach education, not player reform

Let me frame it this way. There are two doors to solving on-field violence. The first is the players' door: punish them harder, ban them longer, strip their right to play. The second is the coaches' door: teach them how to tackle safely, how to manage emotion, how to read the game so they are not late.

The first door looks fast. The second takes years. But only the second reaches the root. And the sad part is that the first door has a side effect: it turns players into public enemies, while the unstandardised coaching environments, where habits are actually seeded, remain outside the criticism.

When we see a player go in with two feet and take a red card, we tend to think of him as a villain. But most of these players do not walk onto the pitch intending to injure. They are reflexing. They are playing the way they were taught, or worse, the way they were never taught otherwise. The tears of the seventeen-year-old I remember are not the tears of a guilty man. They are the tears of a product of a system.

I think of this when reviewing the disturbing early-season challenges. There was a small detail I noticed: many dangerous challenges occurred in what people call the phase of competing for starting places. That is an important clue. If a player believes his place depends on proving intensity, he will play intensely. Whatever behaviour the system rewards, players repeat. This is not an individual moral problem. It is an incentive problem.

In my work, I usually evaluate young players on two layers. The first is measurable: sprint speed, endurance, ability to handle the ball in tight space. The second is what machines cannot measure: decision-making under pressure, emotional control, the ability to accept defeat without retaliating. To me, the second layer matters more. A player may be the fastest in the league, but if he cannot control his emotions, he will never reach his ceiling. And the second layer is not innate. It is taught. It is nurtured. It is formed in the years no one watches.

Looking back at the data: what numbers cannot say

I am a man who believes in data. But I also know data does not say everything. Cards, bans, injuries, those are what get recorded. What does not get recorded matters most. The tears of young players are not tabulated. Tomorrow's sessions on dirt pitches, where an unlicensed coach teaches a child to put an opponent in his place, do not appear on the scoreboard. Split-second wrong decisions, made not from malice but from missing skill, have no metric.

In my industry, people evaluate youth through output metrics: speed, fitness, pass accuracy, ball recoveries. But I learned that for youth, input metrics matter more. How were they taught? How were they shaped? Do they have the technical vocabulary to understand why a challenge is wrong? Those are the questions we scouts must answer before judging a talent. Because a fifteen-year-old with wonderful skill and bad habits becomes a twenty-five-year-old with unfixable habits.

In the V-League, I believe this is one of the biggest blind spots. People invest in buying expensive foreign players to solve on-field problems. No one solves the problem below. Yet it is precisely below, the children, the untrained coaches, the under-standard training environments, that produces the habits we complain about on V-League pitches.

This also holds when comparing the development pace of young Vietnamese players. I have compared eighteen-year-olds here with peers elsewhere. Technically, they are not behind. In speed and agility, they are sometimes ahead. But in decision-making in tight space, in defensive positioning, in reading the game, they tend to lag. This is not a talent problem. It is a coaching problem. And what is not taught at eighteen will never be learned at twenty-five.

Blind spot: fairy tales consumed and discarded

There is something readers should know about my work. Fairy tales in lower leagues are consumed and discarded. Media loves stories of a poor player rising, of a small club having a miraculous season. But when the story ends, the structures, resource allocation, training access, facilities, remain unchanged. Real reform never arrives. Vietnamese football is the same. People will talk at length about the need to reform youth development in the coming weeks. But will anyone actually act? Will a fund be invested in youth-coach training courses? Will there be a mandatory licensing programme for everyone working in youth development?

This is why I write. Not to criticise one player. Not to name one ban. But to remind that real reform requires the patience of excavation. It is not banning a player. It is training a generation of new coaches, men who do not teach children to put opponents in their place but teach them safe contest, respect for colleagues, and how to win without hurting another person.

I recall the veteran scout's line: You were too careful and became too slow. Good, but useless. He said it about me, but I think it also applies to an entire football nation. A football nation can be very meticulous in handling incidents after they occur. But if it does not act fast enough to prevent them at the root, that meticulousness becomes useless. And I believe Vietnamese football is at that fork.

A progressive thought for the future

I believe Vietnamese football has potential. I have seen young talents here, people with wonderful technique and spirit. But I also believe that potential will be suppressed if the foundation is not repaired. A football nation cannot advance if it teaches its children that violence is part of intensity. It can only advance if it teaches that real intensity is intelligence, technique, patience.

As this season passes, bans will be enforced. Players will be suspended. Media will keep reporting. And many will believe the problem has been handled. But the ten-year-olds on suburban dirt pitches, who do not read sports pages and do not watch television, will keep playing the way they were taught. The real problem is not tonight's match. It is tomorrow afternoon's session.

Every young player is a layer of sediment, and I am the excavator. But the most important layer lies beneath the one we are all looking at. That is where football culture is formed. And that is the only place a real reform can begin.

I will keep writing in my notebook. I will keep watching dangerous challenges and asking how this player was taught when he was ten. And I will keep believing the answer to V-League on-field violence does not lie in a disciplinary courtroom. It lies in classes no one streams. It lies with unlicensed teachers and children never taught how to fall. It lies in an investment decision no one will applaud, but which will change everything within ten years.

The transfer market is like geological strata: those who know how to look will see minerals. And in Vietnam, the most valuable untapped mineral is not an expensive foreign striker. It is a generation of young coaches who know how to teach children that the finest intensity is the intensity that leaves no one carried off the pitch.