V.League Round 16: I Rewatched Six Matches and Realized VAR Is Teaching Vietnamese Strikers to Be Afraid

I rewatched the six most recent V.League matches. In four of them, goals were disallowed by VAR for "millimeter" offside calls - things the naked eye cannot see, and spectators in the stands had to look up at the big screen to understand what had just happened. Then they went silent. No shouting, no protest. Just silence. That was the moment I realized: referees in the V.League no longer control the match. VAR controls them. When the Vietnam Football Federation introduced VAR to the V.League from the 2026 season, the atmosphere in the stands felt liberated. After years of persistent refereeing controversies in national cup matches and international qualifiers, fans believed technology would restore justice. The clubs nodded. The coaches nodded - and those who had lost points to refereeing mistakes nodded hardest of all. Three seasons later, what do we have? Stadiums are emptier in the final minutes. Strikers raise their hands in apology to the crowd every time they celebrate - reflexively, before even looking at the flag. Defenders no longer learn how to mark; they learn how to hold an offside line. And coaches, instead of teaching their players to move intelligently, are teaching them to hold an imaginary straight line. I am not against technology. I am against the way we use it. I took out my notebook and kept records across four consecutive rounds. The average number of VAR interventions per match: 3.4 in Round 12; 4.1 in Round 14; five in Round 16. Average stoppage time rose from five minutes to nine. But the most striking detail of all: the share of goals scored in the second half has dropped noticeably compared with the early part of the season. I asked myself why. The answer came from a small detail the television cameras never capture. At a match I watched live in the stadium, I noticed a young striker. He made three runs in behind during the first half. On the first, he sprinted at full speed - and was flagged offside. On the second, he ran half a step slower, his eyes flicking constantly toward the assistant referee. On the third, he did not run at all. He stood still and waited for the ball to come to his feet. That was the moment I understood the problem. VAR does not just cancel goals. It cancels instinct. Vietnamese football has always lived on lightning counter-attacks, on through-balls where a single well-timed run is enough. Strikers like Nguyễn Tiến Linh and Nguyễn Văn Quyết built their reputations on reading situations and accelerating at the right moment. But when every run is measured with a ruler, instinct becomes a risk. And risk, in professional football, is something to be eliminated. The problem is not the technology. The problem is the margin of error. In theory, VAR only intervenes for "clear and obvious errors." In practice, an offside gap of a few centimeters is treated as a self-evident mistake. No one can explain to the crowd why a beautiful goal was disallowed because a striker's toe poked out half a centimeter. And when fans do not understand, they lose faith - not in the referee, but in the match itself. The irony: we brought VAR in to protect football's most beautiful moments. Instead it is erasing them, bit by bit, with invisible lines. And there is a consequence few have noticed: longer matches mean players run more and recover less. When stoppage time rises from five minutes to nine, physical workload rises with it. Muscle injuries appear in the 85th, the 90th minute - moments when the match used to be over. VAR is unwittingly pushing players into a danger zone nobody accounted for. The double-decker bus lost its brakes, but the steering had already been off long before. I could be wrong. And I will argue against myself before anyone else does. The opposing case is strong: without VAR, we return to an era when a single refereeing mistake could decide a championship. I have witnessed that. Matches where one wrong whistle changed an entire season, and no one could correct it. Fans outraged, players helpless, faith in football shrinking. That is why VAR was born, and why it must exist. I prefer the feeling of fairness to the feeling of perfection. But VAR today delivers the opposite - technically perfect, yet stripped of humanity. What I propose is not to scrap VAR. It is to change the intervention threshold. Raise the offside threshold - no longer measured in centimeters, but by a distance the human eye can perceive. Cap the number of VAR interventions per match. And most importantly: make every decision public, with enlarged images and explanations for the crowd inside the stadium. Because a correct decision nobody understands is no different from a wrong one. I fear football stopping, but it turns out I fear it more when no one is left to argue. VAR in the V.League is not a story about technology. It is a story about what we want football to become. A game of unexpected moments, or a sport measured by algorithms? Next round, I will sit in front of the screen again, notebook in hand. And I will count. Not the goals - but the number of times a striker hesitates before accelerating. That is the number worth worrying about. — Trần Long