Teaching Fouls from Age 16: V-League's Gap Isn't in the Cards

In 2026, at sixteen, I sat in the stands of a stadium in Ho Chi Minh City, logging forty-seven foul situations and twelve offside calls from a national U19 fixture between U19 Hanoi and U19 SHB Da Nang. In the 78th minute, the referee missed a challenge inside the penalty area. I built a comparison table against the IFAB Laws, sent it to the organizing committee. No one replied.

What kept me awake that night was not the missed decision. It was the way an eighteen-year-old launched into his opponent with both feet, slowly, with control, as though it were a reflex drilled hundreds of times. Years later, watching the V-League, I recognized that reflex had not disappeared. It had simply changed into a professional shirt, kept its squad number, and appeared on national television.

That is why I read a recent Dân trí interview — in which an unnamed European expert said the V-League needs to build football culture from the youth level — with particular attention. Not because the content was new. But because, for the first time in a while, a public voice placed a finger on the old scar instead of merely counting fresh bruises.

A season opening with old traces

Early this season, the V-League witnessed a cluster of incidents the public could not ignore. Văn Hậu received a four-match suspension after a challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn each committed deliberate take-downs on Đình Bắc — a rising young forward. Three separate events, three different actors, all inside a short early-season window.

I do not believe in luck. I believe in numbers that repeat a hundred times.

A single reckless challenge can be called an accident. Two challenges aimed at the same player, by two different opponents, in the same period, no longer fit the category of accident. That is a pattern. And a pattern, unlike an accident, can be measured, classified, and traced back to its source.

The expert in the interview offers a reading different from the reflex of public opinion. He does not call this a personal discipline problem of players. He calls it the output of an incomplete football education. Slide tackle technique, managing duels, in-game decision-making, respect for opponents — by his account, these are all teachable skills. And Vietnam, at the youth level, is teaching them far too little.

Three causes stacked on each other

The core point I take away: the problem is not that V-League players are more aggressive than players elsewhere, but that they were taught how to challenge less, later, and by coaches with less formal training. This is a higher-order framing — shifting the focus from individual responsibility toward systemic responsibility.

From my vantage point, three layers of cause stack on top of each other inside the interview.

The first layer is youth coaching quality. The expert points out that too many youth coaches rely primarily on playing experience or street football experience, rather than updated professional licensing. Playing experience is not worthless — but it is raw data, unprocessed. A player who once fouled well does not automatically become someone who teaches others how to foul within the laws, with correct technique, at the correct moment.

The second layer is the cultural environment at the development level. Some training environments, as described, actively encourage young players to play aggressively or to seek ways of applying psychological pressure to opponents. This is no longer a technical shortfall. It is a value choice communicated deliberately. When that is repeated often enough over years, it stops being behavior — it becomes the default.

The third layer is the top-down transmission mechanism. Young players always look up to senior professionals as their standard. If a reckless challenge in the V-League is quietly accepted, it is stored in a young player's memory as a new norm. Once the norm is installed, administrative punishment is only a deduction after the behavior has already become habit.

I learned from the U19 tournament that mistakes are not frightening; what is frightening is when no one measures them.

The most striking element of the interview sits in this third layer. The framing is no longer limited to player safety. It expands into an intervention in youth development policy, with the V-League acting as the control point at the top of a cultural transmission chain.

A counter-intuitive angle: education may not be enough

This is where I need to separate myself from too-quick agreement.

The "education" framework the expert offers is intellectually appealing. It moves responsibility from individuals to the system, and in a media environment inclined to hunt individuals, that is a notable relief. But the framework skips over a detail that the article's own evidence supplies.

Đình Bắc was targeted twice, by two different players, in the same window. No official data in the article speaks to intent. But that pattern — a young forward becoming a repeated target for multiple opponents — is more compatible with a targeted intimidation behavior than with a series of technical accidents.

If intent is present, the "poor teaching" framework does not cover the whole problem. A coach who teaches poor tackling may accidentally produce a clumsy player. A coach who teaches how to induce fear produces a player who knows how to pick a target. These two problems need two different intervention programs, but the interview folds both under a single heading.

Furthermore, the expert mentions results pressure and squad-position competition as part of the cause of dangerous challenges. That is correct in mechanism. But it also means the sporting incentive is rewarding aggressive play. An education program cannot repair an incentive system. It merely teaches the young more clearly about what they are being rewarded for.

On environmental factors — heavy rain, poor pitch quality — I read them as aggravating factors, not root causes. Better pitches reduce the number of uncontrolled collisions. But they do not repair a choice already present in a player's mind before the whistle blows.

The blind spot in enforcement and sanctions

The expert raises a question I consider central, and it is one I want people to read several times: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite existing sanctions, then the effectiveness of those sanctions must be questioned directly.

He defines the purpose of a sanction as two parts: punishment and prevention. That definition matters, because it hands us a concrete evaluation criterion. If we only count suspension matches, we are evaluating half the system. The other half is the recurrence rate after sanctions end. That rate is a number — measurable, comparable across seasons, publishable.

He also stresses the word "consistent" alongside "strict." To me, these are two different qualities of the same system. A strict sanction applied unevenly teaches players a very different lesson: that the rule depends on who blows the whistle, not on behavior. A system players do not believe is fair has little deterrent capacity.

The referee's decision is only the endpoint. The true journey lives inside every camera angle.

Both VFF and VPF are placed on equal footing for responsibility. This is the easiest point to slip in policy execution: when two organizations share responsibility for a problem, neither owns the solution, and reform can die in the gap between two desks. The history of regional leagues shows this pattern is far from rare.

What I take away

I will say it plainly: this interview does not solve the problem. It supplies no quantitative data, offers no timeline, and its anonymous source reduces the possibility of independent verification. But it does one thing that card-counting articles cannot do — it moves the question to the right tier.

The V-League problem is not one player making a bad challenge in one specific match. The problem is a development supply chain that has not been standardized, transmitting a behavioral pattern from one generation to the next, and an enforcement mechanism that has not proven it can change that behavior.

This is the work of many years, not of a single season. An empty stadium taught me that noise never scores.

The moments the naked eye misses, the data never forgets.