V-League: On-Field Violence Begins on the Youth Coaching Bench

Three incidents in the same early-season window of the V-League. Đoàn Văn Hậu received a four-match suspension after a reckless challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Then Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn — two different players, at two different moments — each brought down Đình Bắc. The same victim. I sat in the stands, notebook open, and wrote a single line: when two different men pick the same target, it stops being clumsiness. It becomes a decision.

A decision like that does not appear in the split second of a match. It is fed long before, in places with no stands, no cameras, no red cards — the training sessions of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, where a child learns that football is a fight for survival rather than a game with rules.

That is why I read the Dân trí interview twice. Not because it says something new, but because it names the sorest spot, in a tone Vietnamese media usually avoids: it locates the problem on the coaching bench, not in the players' feet.

The backdrop is nothing new. The V-League has carried a reputation for physicality for years, and anyone who has followed it long enough knows that hard challenges have never been a passing phenomenon. The expert says exactly that: this is a long-standing feature, not an anomaly of one season.

The new part sits elsewhere. He does not blame the players. He blames the system that taught them.

The central argument is clear. Tackling technique, duel management, and on-field decision-making are all teachable skills. And Vietnamese football teaches them badly, or not at all. He points out that many youth coaches in Vietnam rely mainly on playing experience or street-football experience rather than on formal, licensed training. That is a structural observation, not a personal attack.

He also makes responsibility explicit: it belongs to both the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) and the Vietnam Professional Football joint-stock company (VPF) — the two bodies that run the league. And he asks what I consider the single most important question in the whole interview: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite disciplinary measures, one must question the effectiveness of existing penalties.

That is an audit question, not a complaint. And it forced me to look at the whole problem through different eyes.

The point most Vietnamese commentary skips: violence on V-League pitches is a pedagogical problem before it is a moral one. And pedagogy can be measured, fixed, and corrected — if anyone is willing to look in the right place.

Start with a concrete fact. Văn Hậu, a national-team player at the peak of his career, received a four-match ban. Four matches. By the standards of many leagues in the region, that is a severe sanction. But the right question is not whether the ban was heavy. The right question is: after that ban, did dangerous challenges in the league fall or rise? I have no data to answer, and the expert himself tacitly admits that such data is not tracked systematically. A disciplinary system that does not measure recurrence rates is a system flying blind. It may be working. It may also be performing. Nobody knows, because nobody measures.

The problem has three layers, and their order matters more than people think.

The first layer is individual technique. Sliding into a tackle is a skill with rules: timing, angle of contact, body position, direction of the ball. Taught badly, it becomes a weapon. In top Asian academies, this skill is drilled for years, with exercises on controlling force and distance. In Vietnam, the expert says, it is often learned through live collisions — that is, through mistakes, and sometimes through someone else's injury. A skill learned through another person's mistake is a skill taught in blood.

The second layer is competitive psychology. The expert points out that some training environments encourage young players to play aggressively or to intimidate opponents. That is a heavy accusation, because it speaks to intent, not merely technique. A player who plays aggressively because he was encouraged will never regard his behaviour as wrong. He regards it as duty. And a duty cannot be corrected with a yellow card.

The third layer is the transmission system. This is the part I consider most important, and the most underrated in every debate about on-pitch violence. Young players always look up to their seniors. If top professionals are allowed to contest brutally without consistent punishment, that behaviour becomes the norm. It is not merely copied. It is legitimised. And when that norm trickles down to amateur and youth levels, it is no longer an individual's fault. It is culture.

That is why I hold that discipline at V-League level is, in the end, a youth-development measure. It sounds counterintuitive. But it is true. Every sanction issued — or not issued — in the top flight is a lesson sent down to thousands of children training on artificial pitches on the city's edge.

Based on my experience following matches across Asia for decades, I see nothing new in this pattern. Japan went through a similar phase in the 1990s, when the J.League moved from semi-professional to professional football. The difference was not the rules. It was the coaching-licence pyramid. When a country makes it mandatory for everyone teaching youth football to hold a certificate, and when that certificate must be renewed periodically, technical quality rises slowly but surely. There is no miracle. Only time and discipline.

The 2026 season was wiped out by the pandemic, but I still kept my bet on a second-tier club in Osaka. Across four months without football, I watched them switch to remote training with GPS data, and I learned one thing: the deepest changes in football rarely happen in matches. They happen in sessions nobody watches.

But I may be wrong, and I want to be clear about where I doubt myself.

The expert's education framing has a gap I cannot ignore. It explains why tackling technique is poor. It does not explain why two different players, at two different moments, targeted the same man. That coincidence leans toward a different hypothesis: deliberate intimidation aimed at one young player, rather than two independent technical accidents. If that hypothesis is right, the story is no longer purely about teaching technique. It is about dressing-room culture, where certain behaviours are tolerated because they are said to serve the team.

And there is one more factor the expert mentions only in passing, while I consider it the forgotten link: results pressure. When starting places and contracts depend on individual matches, young players have a structural incentive to play the way they are rewarded. If a coaching staff quietly rewards aggression — by keeping the starting spot for the player who plays that way — then every lesson on the training pitch is inverted in a real match. You cannot teach a child something and then reward him for doing the opposite.

This is the point moralising commentary usually skips, and the point that convinces me the solution is not in the disciplinary courtroom. It is in contracts, in performance targets, in how a club defines a useful player.

So what needs to be done? Not more heavier bans issued in anger. But three concrete, measurable things. First, mandatory coaching licences for everyone directly teaching youth football, with periodic renewal. Second, public and consistent sanctions for similar offences, so that consistency becomes a standard rather than a slogan. Third, tracking recurrence rates instead of merely counting bans issued — turning discipline into a system with feedback.

People ask why, at 68, I still write as if doomsday is approaching. I just smile. Football has given me too much for me to sit still and watch it destroy itself with challenges from behind.

And if, ten years from now, a youth coach in Nghệ An teaches tackling technique to thirty children exactly the way it should be taught, who will be the first to notice? I hope the answer is a journalist. But I am also ready to accept that it will be a defender who knows how to hold his position without needing to fall.