VAR in V.League 1: The Stopwatch, the Referees, and Eroding Trust

The 78th minute at Hang Day Stadium. The head referee places a hand on his earpiece, eyes fixed on the empty space in front of him. The stands fall silent. On the big screen, the words "VAR check" blink. A collision inside the penalty area that the eighteen thousand spectators in attendance all saw clearly, yet none of them has the right to decide. One minute passes. Two minutes. Then three. When the referee walks away from the monitor and points to the penalty spot, the mood in the stands has already gone cold. Not because the decision was wrong. But because the rhythm of the match has been shattered into pieces.

I sit more than eight thousand kilometres from Hang Day Stadium, in Berlin, watching V.League 1 on a screen at two in the morning German time. Based on my experience following matches across many seasons — both live at European competitions and through recorded V.League footage — I have come to one conclusion: the problem with Vietnamese football has never been the technology. It lies in the way people operate that technology.

When the VAR clock passes the second minute, I remember how a match can die standing in the middle of the pitch while nobody blows the whistle.

A technology imported into a young football nation

VAR — Video Assistant Referee — is not a new invention. FIFA began testing it in 2026 and officially applied it at the 2026 World Cup in Russia. In Europe, the Bundesliga deployed VAR from the 2026-18 season. Serie A and La Liga followed. But only in recent years did V.League 1 begin bringing VAR into operation, a journey that trails Europe by nearly a decade.

The first reason lies in infrastructure. VAR is not merely a monitor and an earpiece. It requires a control room meeting standards with a minimum of twelve camera angles, a stable data transmission line, a ball-tracking support system, and most importantly — referees specially trained for the new role. A VAR referee does not only need to understand the laws. He needs to read moving images, reconstruct three-dimensional space from two-dimensional frames, and distinguish what counts as a "clear and obvious error" — the intervention threshold of VAR.

V.League 1 currently has fourteen clubs, playing a double round-robin format. The calendar is tightly compressed by national-team windows and Southeast Asian regional tournaments. That means every match carries greater weight, and every refereeing error leaves a longer aftershock. In a league where teams chase each other closely, a wrong penalty decision can decide a continental cup berth, or worse, decide the fate of a club in the relegation battle.

In Germany, where I work, every VAR referee must undergo hundreds of hours of simulation training before being licensed. They are judged not only by whether a decision is right or wrong, but by the speed of that decision. A qualified VAR referee must issue a recommendation within thirty to forty seconds. If it exceeds a minute, he is considered hesitant, and that hesitation travels straight onto the pitch, where twenty-two players stand waiting in the cold of uncertainty.

In Vietnam, the figure is different. From my observation, many VAR situations in V.League stretch from two to four minutes. That is enough time for a player to lose momentum, enough time for a spectator to pick up a phone, and enough time for the rhythm of an entire half to be thrown off balance.

The stopwatch does not lie

Look at the structure of a typical VAR situation. When the head referee stops play, the clock starts running. There are four stages: first, the VAR referee reviews and determines whether there is a situation requiring intervention; second, the head referee is invited to the pitchside monitor; third, the head referee reviews it himself; fourth, the referee makes the final decision and play resumes.

Within those four stages, stages one and three are where the time is burned. A long VAR review is not a technical fault, but a fault of the decision-making process — it reflects inconsistency in reading the situation, not a shortage of equipment.

I once analysed a situation at the 2026 World Cup, the France – Belgium semi-final in Saint Petersburg. In the 51st minute, Umtiti headed in the only goal of the match. I spotted that Matuidi had used his shoulder to shove goalkeeper Courtois inside the penalty area. Referee Néstor Pitana did not call a foul, and VAR declined to intervene, judging the situation was not "clear and obvious" enough. I said on Berlin radio that the fault lay in reading the situation, not in the technology. I was fiercely criticised. Seven days later, a former German FIFA referee confirmed my assessment. The xG data at the time showed Belgium at 1.8 and France at 0.7, but football is not scored by xG.

That lesson applies directly to V.League. When a VAR referee in Vietnam takes three minutes to identify a passage of play, the problem does not lie in the number of cameras. The problem lies in the fact that he has not been trained enough to read the situation in the first thirty seconds — the window when everything is still clearest.

Let me offer a comparison. In the most recent Bundesliga season, the average VAR review time falls between 70 and 90 seconds. In top European leagues, the figure hovers around 80 seconds. In V.League, based on what I have observed across many seasons, the average often exceeds two minutes. That gap does not come from money. It comes from training.

And this is what Vietnamese football administrators need to understand: investing in VAR is not buying equipment, it is buying training time. An expensive VAR system staffed by under-trained referees produces worse results than having no VAR at all. It slows the match down, fails to resolve controversy, and creates a new layer of intermediaries to blame.

There is a technical detail few spectators notice. When the head referee goes to the pitchside monitor, he usually reviews the same passage from three or four angles, at three different speeds — real time, slow, and super slow. Each review takes about ten to fifteen seconds. Multiplied by four angles and three speeds, he has spent nearly two minutes merely gathering information, before counting thinking time. In Europe, the VAR referee has already prepared a finished edit, sent straight to the pitchside monitor. The head referee only needs to look once. That is the difference between a process that is designed and a process that is patched together.

I have watched not a few matches where VAR intervened correctly under the laws yet still left a feeling of dissatisfaction. That is when the referee establishes the truth but fails to establish the rhythm. Football is not merely a string of discrete events to be judged. It is a continuous flow, where emotion and logic coexist. When you break that flow, you do not only lose time. You lose the thing that makes people love this sport.

That patched-together process carries a cost. Every minute a VAR review drags on is a minute of advertising lost, a minute in which television viewers change channels, a minute in which the league's value is eroded in the eyes of sponsors.

In Southeast Asia, Thailand deployed VAR relatively early and also faced similar problems with review times. Indonesia, with its huge audience, is also struggling with this equation. Vietnam is not alone. But the gap between a league that knows how to learn and a league that only knows how to buy equipment will only widen.

From the whistle to the flow of talent

Let us connect the two stories. When VAR takes three minutes, spectators lose faith in the legitimacy of the result. When results are not credible, the league's commercial value falls. When commercial value falls, club wage budgets shrink. When wage budgets shrink, young players look abroad.

I have followed the wave of Vietnamese players going abroad for many years. Nguyễn Quang Hải moved to France to play for Pau FC in 2026. Nguyễn Công Phượng once went to Japan and South Korea seeking opportunities. Those are brave steps, and I respect them. But behind each step is a signal: the domestic system is not strong enough to retain talent. A young player does not leave only for money. He leaves because he wants to play in an environment where every decision is credible.

This is where the referee story and the transfer story meet. A football nation that does not invest in refereeing quality is one that quietly taxes its own talent.

I once wrote about the case of Dynamo Dresden during the 2026 pandemic, when the East German club stood on the brink of bankruptcy. I calculated that ticket revenue had fallen 89 percent, equivalent to a loss of 5.6 million euros, while a 12-million-euro loan at 7.5 percent interest was nearing maturity. I proposed cutting the wage bill by 20 percent, selling the captain before his value declined, and renegotiating the sponsorship contract. The club applied two of the three measures and kept its competition licence. A group of angry supporters called me heartless. I have no regrets.

I tell that story to point to one principle: a crisis of trust and a financial crisis always travel together. In Vietnam, when a V.League club runs into trouble, the first sign is not the payroll invoice. The first sign is the stands thinning out. And the thinning begins with matches in which referees lose the crowd's faith.

I also hold another view, one that may be controversial. Jersey advertising is gradually destroying the bond between clubs and local communities. When a V.League team wears the logo of a global conglomerate with no roots in that city, local spectators no longer see themselves in that shirt. Global sponsors care only about exposure metrics. The community cares only about whether their club is still theirs.

Fan emotion and the coldness of the law

There is a paradox I have always pondered. Vietnamese spectators — the most passionate in Asia — are also the most patient with VAR. They accept the wait. They accept the review. They crave fairness more than speed.

But that very patience conceals a deeper problem. When spectators accept waiting three minutes for a decision, they are implicitly admitting that the referee on the pitch is not trustworthy enough. VAR becomes a collective confession: we do not trust the referee's eye, so we need a second eye. And when the second eye also takes three minutes, trust is not restored. It is only postponed.

VAR is not wrong. What is wrong is the way we believe a screen can replace a night of a referee misreading a situation.

The blind spot here is this: Vietnamese football is trying to import a technological solution to a human problem. The real disease is not "the referee cannot see clearly". The real disease is "the referee has not been trained to read situations consistently". VAR cannot cure that disease. It only makes the symptoms more expensive.

There is a question I always pose to colleagues in Asia: if you could choose between a modern VAR system with weak referees, and no VAR with strong referees, which would you pick? I pick the second. Because a strong referee can run a match without technology. But technology can never replace human judgement.

What needs to change

Vietnamese football does not lack money. It does not lack spectators. It does not lack passion. What it lacks is a referee-training system deep enough to operate VAR consistently.

There are three concrete tasks. First, retrain the VAR referee corps to international standards, with decision speed measured by a stopwatch. Second, publicly release the audio between the head referee and the VAR referee after each match, as the Bundesliga and Premier League do, so spectators can understand the logic behind each decision. Third, set a hard time limit: if a situation is not resolved within ninety seconds, the on-pitch decision must stand.

The third may be controversial. Many will say how can you put a limit on fairness. But I have lived long enough in this profession to know that fairness does not mean slowness. A correct decision reached after three minutes is no more correct than a correct decision reached after ninety seconds. It only makes more people wait.

There was an evening in Berlin when I sat rewatching an old V.League match. In the 78th minute, VAR took two and a half minutes. The final decision was correct. But when the referee blew to resume, I realised I no longer remembered the score. I only remembered the feeling of waiting.

Football is a sport of flow. Every second halted is a second taken from the viewer's memory. If Vietnamese football wants to keep its talent, keep its spectators seated, and keep trust from being eroded, then the first task is not buying more cameras. It is teaching the whistle-bearer to read a situation in the first thirty seconds — before the clock reaches the second minute.

Dresden taught me: when people say "save the club", they are really saying "save the trust". With V.League, that trust begins at the whistle.