V-League On-Field Violence: VFF and VPF Demand Referees 'Follow the Rules' After Dong Nai vs CAHN

On September 20, at Dong Nai's home ground, the ball had already left both players' feet seconds earlier. Nguyen Dinh Bac went down, hands braced on the grass. Behind him, Huynh Tan Sinh still swung his leg in a second time.

The whistle blew. Referee Le Vu Linh produced a yellow card.

The stands went quiet for a beat. Nobody sitting there thought this was an ordinary challenge for the ball. The ball had been elsewhere for some time, and that leg still found Dinh Bac's ankle once more.

I have followed teams from the training pitch to the dressing room for more than thirty years. That experience taught me something that sounds paradoxical: violence on the pitch rarely begins with a hot-headed player. It begins with a system that believes nobody will pay a price. The dressing room does not lie — it only whispers to the right person at the right moment. That night, it whispered that this was not over.

To understand why a yellow card in Dong Nai became a story for the whole league, it has to be placed inside the sequence of events from the opening rounds.

Matchday 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League left behind two incidents the public could not ignore. Centre-back Doan Van Hau of Cong An Ha Noi (CAHN) went into a challenge that broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan of The Cong Viettel. In another match, foreign striker Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva of Nam Dinh stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang of SHB Da Nang.

Then came September 20, in the Dong Nai versus CAHN match, with two fresh incidents in a single game. Defender Le Van Son of Dong Nai threw an elbow aimed at striker Nguyen Dinh Bac. And centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh, also in Dong Nai colours, repeatedly kicked from behind at Dinh Bac's legs.

What the four incidents share is not the force of the contact. All of them fall into the category the laws of the game classify as violent or dangerous to an opponent. And all of them happened when the ball was somewhere else — the hardest signal to explain away for anyone who has played the game.

For long-time followers of the V-League, the tempo of this season's opening rounds has been unusual. Teams entered the campaign with a congested calendar, thinner squads after a short break, and result pressure pressing down from the very first matchday. That pressure does not turn an ordinary player into a brute. It simply lowers the threshold of self-restraint, at precisely the moments when a match is at its tensest.

After that run of incidents, with the risk of on-field violence returning and damaging the V-League's image, representatives of the tournament organisers, the VPF and the VFF met directly with the VFF Referees Committee. The meeting was no formality. It came immediately after a matchday whose card record did not match what viewers had seen on screen.

The meeting centred on a short phrase repeated many times: "follow the rules". For those in the room, that phrase carried a very concrete meaning — no missed fouls, no missed cards. The league's discipline, in the organisers' reading, has to be upheld by the decisions made on the pitch itself.

The Dong Nai versus CAHN match on September 20 is the clearest example.

In the incident where centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh played the man instead of the ball against Dinh Bac, referee Le Vu Linh used only a yellow card. He did not produce a red, even though Tan Sinh kicked Dinh Bac off the ball twice inside the same passage of play.

Speaking to Dan Tri reporters after the match, former VFF vice-president for professional affairs and former VFF Referees Committee head Duong Vu Lam was blunt: "Referee Le Vu Linh missed a card in that incident. Huynh Tan Sinh played the man far too blatantly, yet he was not sent off."

But the story does not stop at one card.

Duong Vu Lam framed the issue with a comparison that made many people pause: "If Tan Sinh is to be retrospectively punished and suspended for this foul, then referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same way. Beyond that, the responsibility of the VAR team must be clarified."

This is where the story moves away from the usual pattern of debate. Supporters are used to watching players, sometimes coaches, and rarely the VAR team. But the VAR team of Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son sits exactly in the middle of the match's decision chain, and according to Lam there are two entirely different scenarios.

"If the VAR team advised the on-field referee but was overruled by him, then the VAR team has done its job. Conversely, if the VAR team did not advise referee Le Vu Linh that a red card was required for the playing-the-man foul described, then the VAR officials must also be dealt with," Duong Vu Lam added.

Those two scenarios build a map of responsibility that spectators almost never get to see. On television, cameras follow the ball and the star. Nobody replays the VAR room, nobody broadcasts the communication log, nobody sees the assistant referee standing twenty metres from the incident, and nobody knows what he said into his headset.

Under the laws, playing the man counts as a serious foul when the ball is beyond the control of both sides, the force used exceeds what is necessary, and the point of contact is aimed at a dangerous area of the body. The difficulty for referees is not recognising the act, but making the call in a split second. That is precisely why VAR exists. A foul repeated twice within the same passage of play is even harder to justify with a yellow card alone.

A missed card is not the error of one man with a whistle. It is the product of a chain of decisions that goes unchecked at every link, and is only discovered once public anger has already boiled over.

What stands out is how the system corrects itself. By convention, specific disciplinary rulings against referees are not widely published. Even Duong Vu Lam could only reveal how to spot them: "Just watch the referee list for the following rounds and you will know whether the referees involved have had their whistles suspended. If they are not appointed in the rounds immediately after the one just played, the likelihood is that they are under sanction."

In other words, the verdict exists, but it only shows itself through absence.

Most of the debate after September 20 focuses on players. Tan Sinh faces a retrospective charge, Le Van Son has been named, and the matchday 2 incidents have already reached their own conclusions. That framing is comfortable, because it allows everything to close with an individual verdict.

The blind spot lies elsewhere. Modern football runs on data, but the heartbeat still sits in the dressing room. And in the dressing room, what young players learn is not how the laws are written. They learn who pays for their mistakes. When the punishment for the man with the whistle exists only as a gap in an appointment list, the signal sent to players is very simple: the risk lies somewhere else, not in the act itself.

For more than thirty years, the question I have carried through every tournament is the old one: who is left behind when the stadium lights go out? People remember the tackle; few remember the man left on the ground. Doan Ngoc Tan broke his leg from a challenge on matchday 2. Vo Huu Viet Hoang was stamped on the stomach. Nguyen Dinh Bac was kicked from behind twice in one match. Those names will come back, or they will not. A young player's career, though, may have turned in a different direction in a single instant.

I keep the rhythm of the dressing room alive with old stories, because young players need to know what they are carrying forward. What is being carried forward here is not the tale of a weak-handed referee. It is the tale of a league demanding discipline from its whistle-blowers while keeping secret how it judges those very whistle-blowers.

The next round will answer most of the questions. The referee appointment list will show who has to sit out, and how the V-League chooses to respond to this run of incidents. The whistle has sounded, but for me that match is not over yet.

A league holds its discipline not through meetings held after footage has spread across social media. It holds it when viewers believe every link in the chain can be named, including the links that never appear in the frame.