VAR in V.League and the Consistency Problem: When Justice Needs a Referee Who Knows How to Stay Silent

In the 58th minute of the France–Australia match at the 2026 World Cup, referee Andrés Cunha stopped play, ran to the touchline, and bent down to look at the monitor. He pointed to the penalty spot. Antoine Griezmann scored from that penalty. It was the first time in World Cup history that an on-field decision was overturned by eight cameras and a technical room hundreds of kilometres away. I was in Moscow that tournament, covering refereeing decisions, and the chill I felt did not come from the weather. Football had just lost something very human, and gained something very legal. Seven years later, when VAR arrived in V.League, that feeling returned intact — with one difference: this time, none of us were prepared.

Since VAR was trialled and gradually put into operation in Vietnam's professional leagues, the biggest question is no longer whether there is VAR, but how VAR is being used. In the K League — where I have lived and worked for years — VAR has operated since 2026, a year before the Russia World Cup. The Koreans paid the price of early, controversy-filled seasons to reach today, when a VAR decision is announced publicly over the stadium loudspeaker, complete with an error code and a description of the situation in language ordinary fans can understand. V.League is nearly a decade behind, and that is not necessarily a disadvantage: we can learn from our predecessors' mistakes. But learning is one thing; applying it to a league with a dense match calendar, uneven pitches, and a thin pool of referees is another.

VAR does not correct errors. It only relocates them. A referee who misses an offside can be saved by VAR. But if the person in the VAR room also makes a systemic error, or if the intervention threshold is set wrongly, then the technology does not produce justice — it produces a new layer of controversy, harder to see and harder to criticise. In Vietnam, where football culture runs heavy on emotion and the stands are always a factor of real weight, VAR becomes a double-edged sword: it makes part of the game transparent, but it also pushes referees into having to prove themselves right with data they are sometimes not trained well enough to read.

In 2026 I spent three weeks reviewing all 38 rounds of K League 1 and logging every foul by one club. Out of 214 fouls, referees issued 9 red cards but overlooked 6 tackles with a high risk of injury, stopping at a yellow. Those numbers do not say that Korean referees are biased. They say something else, more important: the same foul behaviour draws inconsistent punishment, and that inconsistency follows a pattern. The pattern lies in the match's position, in the club's name, in the pressure of the stands, and in who is holding the whistle.

When I carry what I learned over to V.League, the picture is no different in essence, only in scale. In a league where the gap between the title-chasing group and the relegation group is not large, every penalty decision can be worth an entire season. The pressure on Vietnamese referees is no lighter than the pressure on European referees; it is simply recorded in data far less. We have feelings, we have social-media arguments, we have viral clips, but we lack an error-coding system rigorous enough to turn feelings into evidence. A football culture that cannot measure its own margin of error cannot correct that margin.

This is where the grey zone comes in. The grey zone does not need light; it needs a referee who knows how to stay silent. In football, the grey zone is where decisions are neither clearly wrong nor clearly right — a collision in the box that fifteen camera angles still cannot settle. VAR exists to handle the grey zone, but it can only do so if the operator understands that the goal is not to find absolute truth, but to reach a defensible decision. A good referee is not one who is always right, but one who is always consistent and always able to explain. Silence here is not silence before public opinion, but silence before what is not yet proven enough to speak on.

This leads me to a paradox I have observed in both football cultures. Every free kick is a precedent, and every precedent is a case law. When a referee issues a yellow for a dangerous tackle in round 3, they have set the standard for the whole season. When they overlook a similar tackle in round 20 in a match involving a title-chasing club, they do not merely make one mistake — they break the very case law they created. Consistency is not a moral virtue. It is a technical requirement. A rule system that is inconsistent is not law; it is discretion.

In Korea, I once saw a referee suspended after the referees' committee announced that he had missed a clear handball in the box. That announcement did not make fans less angry. But it did something more important: it confirmed that the system knew it was wrong, and that the system had a way to fix it. That is the difference between a mistake and an act of discretion. Mistakes can be forgiven. Discretion cannot. And notably, in many cases the announcement itself eased public opinion — not because fans accepted the error, but because they knew the error was not being hidden.

Back to V.League. I do not believe Vietnamese football lacks referees to the point of being unable to run VAR decently. I believe we are missing something far cheaper: a process. A process with three parts — error coding, public explanation, and continuous training. These three parts need no expensive technology. They need discipline and transparency. And they need someone to take responsibility, rather than a collective staying silent.

And this is where the transfer window enters. The transfer window is a trial, the fee is the verdict, the player is evidence brought out to be weighed. At the same time as the arguments on the pitch, the transfer market generates another layer of noise, where agents set the agenda and the media are the jury. In Vietnam, that noise often drowns out the real signal. A transfer rumour shared ten thousand times carries more weight than a release clause written clearly in a contract. Fans read headlines, not annexes. And when a transfer collapses, the question asked is not whether the contract is valid, but who lied.

The similarity between these two fields is no coincidence. Both referees and agents operate in the grey zone, where the law is not yet clearly written. The difference lies in this: referees are supervised by a committee, while agents are supervised only by contracts. One can be suspended. One can be fined. But both work best when a transparent system of explanation stands behind them.

But I must admit something many in the industry do not want to hear: sometimes it is the fans and the media who create the inconsistency. Referees treating big clubs and small clubs differently is not always a conspiracy theory. It is the consequence of real pressure from the stands and the media. A decision that goes against a big club generates a wave of criticism that a similar decision against a small club does not. Referees are human, and humans respond to pressure — even if they do not admit it, even if they are not aware of it.

This means that to have consistent referees, we cannot simply demand consistency from referees. We must change the environment in which they work. A football culture in which every wrong decision triggers a personal witch-hunt on social media will never produce referees willing to make hard calls. They will choose the safe option — and the safe option, in football, is often the unjust one. This is a spiral both football cultures have passed through, and the way out is not to protect referees with silence, but to protect them with transparency.

There is another, colder way to see it. In esports, the law has no referee; it has code. Code is not biased, code does not have shaky hands, code does not hear the crowd. But code also does not understand context, cannot tell a deliberate collision from one caused by momentum. Football will never become esports, and that is good. But it can learn from esports a lesson about determinism: if you want consistent outcomes, you must define the law clearly enough to leave no room for arbitrary interpretation. VAR's problem is not that it is too mechanical, but that it is not mechanical enough in the places where it needs to be.

Vietnamese football is at exactly the stage Korea once passed through: it has technology, it has the ambition for transparency, but it lacks the soft infrastructure. The question is not whether VAR is good. The question is whether we have the courage to announce our own mistakes. A mature football culture is not one without controversy, but one that can close controversy with the truth. And the truth, in football as in a court of law, only has value when it is spoken — not when it is hidden.