V-League On-Field Violence: The Missed Red Card and the Responsibilities Still Unnamed

On September 20, 2026, in the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi (CAHN), viewers saw two acts of brutality aimed at the same player. Dong Nai defender Le Van Son threw an elbow at striker Nguyen Dinh Bac. Not long after, centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh, also of Dong Nai, struck Dinh Bac's leg twice from behind, at a moment when the ball had already left play. Referee Le Vu Linh showed a yellow card to Tan Sinh. There was no red card. One yellow card for two kicks at the same opponent. On the stands, the absurdity was visible. In the VAR room, the footage was visible. Yet only days later, when representatives of the VFF, the VPF and the V-League organising committee sat down directly with the VFF Referees Committee, did the question reach the table in official form: referees must apply the law correctly, uphold the discipline of the competition and prevent violent conduct on the pitch. The phrase “apply the law correctly” carries a narrow, concrete meaning in a meeting like that. Do not miss fouls. Do not miss cards. It means that in a situation so clear that a television viewer pictures the red card before the referee produces one, the incident cannot end with a yellow. The referee's eye is not calibrated by the feeling of the crowd, but by which clause was overlooked. In Huynh Tan Sinh's case, the overlooked clause was not a minor technical detail. It was the heaviest clause in the chapter on misconduct in the Laws of the Game. Four incidents in a short span formed the backdrop. Two came in round 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League: centre-back Doan Van Hau (CAHN) broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan (The Cong Viettel), and foreign player Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva (Nam Dinh) stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang (SHB Da Nang). Two came in the Dong Nai versus CAHN match on September 20: Le Van Son's elbow and Huynh Tan Sinh's two kicks from behind, both aimed at Nguyen Dinh Bac. What unites the four is that all were person-to-person contact, not person-to-ball contact. That is the line every refereeing system must redraw each season, because professional football always contains a grey zone: players need intensity to compete, but there is a level of intensity that is still football, and a level beyond which it becomes assault. Based on my experience watching matches across many seasons, spells of on-field violence in the V-League rarely appear in isolation. They appear in clusters, across two to four rounds, then subside when the organisers tighten discipline, then return when the general standard of enforcement cools. The mechanism is simple: a serious act that is not punished correctly becomes a temporary norm for those who take the field the following round. Which clause was overlooked? IFAB Law 12 divides fouls into three tiers: careless, reckless and using excessive force. The third tier — using excessive force or brutality — carries a direct red card. A heavier category still is violent conduct, applied when a player deliberately uses force or aggression against an opponent while the ball is not in playing distance. The familiar Vietnamese phrase for this is “abandoning the ball to kick the man”. It is convenient for commentary but legally imprecise. Playing in a dangerous manner is a separate category, usually applied when a player intends to play the ball but does so in a way that endangers an opponent. When the true target of the movement is the opponent's body, the applicable category is violent conduct — considerably heavier. That distinction matters, because it determines the disciplinary sanction after the match. In Huynh Tan Sinh's case, two constituent elements are clearly recorded. First, the movement came from behind, aimed at the opponent's leg — a vulnerable area with no capacity for active protection. Second, the movement was repeated twice. The repetition is not merely an aggravating detail in the report. It is evidence of intent: a player who loses control in a single moment of contact will not reproduce the movement on the next beat, after the ball has left play. A yellow card for conduct in the violent-conduct category is a missed card in its clearest form. Former VFF vice-president for technical affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, Duong Vu Lam, said plainly to the press that referee Le Vu Linh missed a card, that Huynh Tan Sinh abandoned the ball to kick the man far too blatantly, yet did not receive a red. In Lam's professional reading, the problem does not stop at one individual decision. Lam set out a principle of symmetry: if Tan Sinh is to be retroactively punished and suspended for this foul, then referee Le Vu Linh must have his whistle suspended in the same way. This is the crux of the whole story. A disciplinary system that punishes only players and not the person holding the whistle teaches the league a false lesson: bad conduct must pay, while allowing bad conduct to pass is free. The next responsibility belongs to the VAR team. Duong Vu Lam outlined two scenarios with sharply different legal consequences. If the VAR team — Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son — advised the referee that a red card should be used but was overruled by the referee, then the VAR team fulfilled its duty. Conversely, if the VAR team did not advise referee Le Vu Linh that a red card should be used for the foul described, then the VAR officials must also face disciplinary action. This is the correct reading of the VAR duty. Under the current VAR protocol, the team intervenes in four categories: match-deciding incidents relating to goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards and mistaken identity. Huynh Tan Sinh's incident falls squarely in the third category. Procedurally, this is not a grey area open to debate. It is an area where footage is entitled to speak. For a foul in a mandatory-intervention category, silence is a decision. The VAR team may have stayed silent because it could not assess the severity, or because it judged the referee's handling to be within an acceptable threshold. Both possibilities lead to the same conclusion: the ability to classify conduct within Law 12 is a systemic weakness, not one man's. In my own dataset from the 2026 World Cup, 335 VAR interventions, 335 times the law was called by name in the middle of the pitch. VAR's correction accuracy in the group stage reached only 68.4 percent, rising to 91.2 percent in the knockout rounds. The gap between those two figures was not about technology. It was about whether referees and VAR teams shared a single reading of the clauses. When two sides read the law in two different ways, VAR becomes expensive decoration. In the V-League, the same question is being asked without a transparent mechanism to answer it. Disciplinary sanctions against referees are usually not publicly announced. Duong Vu Lam revealed how to tell: watch the referee appointments in the following rounds. If the officials involved are not assigned in the rounds immediately after, the likelihood is that they are being disciplined. A disciplinary system that operates by inference weakens itself. When a sanction is not named, it deters no one outside the system, but it frightens everyone inside it. Referees do not learn a new standard. They learn that a mistake can remove them from the appointment list, without knowing precisely where the mistake was. Placing the four incidents side by side reveals a problem larger than one red card. Doan Van Hau broke Doan Ngoc Tan's leg, Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva stamped on Vo Huu Viet Hoang's stomach, Le Van Son used an elbow, Huynh Tan Sinh kicked from behind twice. Four acts, four levels of potential harm, and so far no public comparison table showing that sanctions matched the danger of each movement. Inconsistency destroys discipline, not leniency. A league can accept light sanctions if those sanctions are applied evenly. But when the same type of conduct draws different treatment depending on the referee, the timing and the weight of public opinion, players optimise by probability rather than by law. They will kick off the ball in the moments a referee is least able to see. That is why I argue that quiet punishment of referees can backfire. When the threat of a whistle suspension is opaque, the rational response from a referee is self-protection. He may push hard decisions to VAR, or blow more frequently to avoid accusations of missing fouls. Both responses fragment the match without making violent conduct disappear. Another counter-intuitive point: retroactive punishment cannot replace the red card on the pitch. A suspension only affects the next match, while the shield protecting players is the red card at the exact minute the act occurs. The purpose of on-pitch sanction is not retribution but stopping a sequence before it repeats three minutes later. Behind individual acts there is also match structure. Off-the-ball kicks tend to appear in two situations: when a team is trailing and needs to break an opponent's rhythm, or when a team is leading and needs to protect a result in the closing minutes. In both, the bad act has a clear incentive. If the price is a yellow card, the player is getting a bargain. No club coaches players to kick off the ball. But a competitive environment where a survival point is worth more than a few matches of suspension teaches it by accident. Performance pressure is a variable that never appears in a referee's report, yet it appears in every decision a player makes before going into a challenge. What deserves credit in the meeting between the VFF, the VPF, the V-League organisers and the Referees Committee is that league leadership chose direct conversation over a press release. What remains is whether the outcome of that conversation enters operations. A meeting only matters if the next round shows similar incidents handled in the correct category. Through a referee's eye, you cheer for no one. You only look for who is right. In this story, the wrong is clear enough: a player who kicked an opponent twice from behind, and on-pitch decisions that let the act pass. What is missing is not a verdict for the player. What is missing is a verdict for the process. Force majeure is where duty begins. But there was no force majeure here. The ball had left playing distance, the footage was clear, the protocol permitted intervention, and the law has provided for this situation for a long time. When every condition is favourable, a wrong decision can no longer be explained by professional difficulty. The sensible direction is three layers of transparency. First, publish the audio exchange between referee and VAR for incidents in mandatory-intervention categories after the match. Second, publish the list of incidents reviewed each round, with a conclusion of upheld or corrected. Third, publish referee sanctions in a standardised form — no need for personal detail, but the existence of a system rather than a list of absent names must be visible. None of those layers requires new technology, a change of competition format or significant funding. They require one administrative decision: to let the public see how the law is read. Then debate over a card changes in nature. Fans stop arguing about which referee favours whom and start arguing about which clause fits which frame. On the other side, clubs need a new yardstick. A club that protects its players by staying silent about those players' bad conduct is transferring risk onto itself in the next round. On-field violence is contagious, and it does not distinguish home from away. The club that sows the habit of kicking off the ball is the club that reaps injuries the following round. Back to Le Vu Linh and the VAR team of Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son. What I want is not the heaviest possible sanction but a named conclusion. If the referee erred, state in which category. If the VAR team failed to advise, state which protocol was ignored. If the VAR team advised and was overruled, state that too, so responsibility rests at the original position. A professional league can live with mistakes. No league has a perfect decision rate. What a league cannot live with is blurred responsibility, because that void gets filled by speculation, and speculation always harms both referees and players. The law is dry? A meeting between four organisations, a yellow card instead of a red, a silent VAR team and a whistle suspension that may never be announced — four facts are enough to conclude that a league's discipline depends on whether it dares to name who was wrong. If next round a player again drives his boot into an opponent's leg after the ball has gone, and the referee again produces a yellow, the lesson the V-League is sending will be unmistakable. If instead the red card comes at the right moment, alongside published footage, the pitch will teach players how to leave the ball alone.