VAR in the V.League: When a Screen Cannot Replace a Referee's Eye

On the night of 10 July 2026, in Saint Petersburg, I sat in the commentary booth of a Berlin radio station, my hand resting on a notepad already ruled into minutes. In the 51st minute, Samuel Umtiti rose to head the ball past Thibaut Courtois — the only goal that sent France into the World Cup final. The television replay ran one angle. My eyes stopped on another: Blaise Matuidi had driven his shoulder into Courtois' chest just before the ball arrived, enough to stop the Belgian keeper from springing up on time. Referee Néstor Pitana did not blow. The VAR team refused to intervene, on the grounds that the incident was not sufficiently “clear and obvious”. I said it straight on air: “This is a misreading of the situation, not a technical error.” Seven days later, a former FIFA referee from Germany called me and confirmed it. But the lesson I carried back to Berlin was not about who was right or wrong. It was this: the most expensive tool in the history of football was present, and it still could not save a night when humans read the game wrongly. I thought about the V.League. VAR — the Video Assistant Referee — was born with a very specific promise: to correct “clear and obvious errors”, or serious incidents that were missed. The IFAB protocol limits it to four categories: goals, penalty kicks, direct red cards and mistaken identity. Outside those four, the VAR team is not allowed to speak, no matter how wrong the on-field referee is. It is the phrase “clear and obvious” that is where everything begins to crack. It is a qualitative threshold, not a number. No one can measure “clear” in metres or in percentages. So when the VAR team says “not clear enough”, they are not offering a fact — they are offering a judgement. And judgement shifts with whoever is sitting in front of the screen. In Germany, VAR went through a trial phase, a phase of scepticism and even a phase of a crisis of confidence. There were matchdays when the stands chanted “VAR out”. Then people learned to live with it, learned to train VAR officials as a profession of its own: with classes, exams and periodic assessment. The V.League comes later. That is not bad. What is bad is coming later while believing that buying the equipment is the whole job. I once sat timing every review in a single matchday. Each took between a minute and a half and more than three minutes, depending on the incident. With three or four interventions in one game, plus added time, viewers lost nearly a quarter of a half just watching a referee press a headset to his ear. The rhythm of the match was torn into pieces. A player riding a wave of momentum had to stand and wait. A crowd mid-roar had to sit down. And emotion, football's most precious asset, was cooled down by a screen. I still remember the feeling when a goal was chalked off after two minutes of waiting. Those two minutes were enough for joy to turn into confusion, then into anger. By the time the referee finally pointed to the centre circle, no one remembered what the beautiful move had even looked like. People only remembered the screen. That is the price few calculate in advance when they talk about VAR: the price of waiting. But time is only the outer shell of the problem. The deeper layer is consistency. The same incident is a penalty this week and nothing next week. The same kind of arm in the box is whistled in one match and ignored in another. For fans, that is proof that the law means nothing. For me, it is proof that the law is being applied by inspiration rather than by process. Football is a sport in which fairness rests on two identical situations receiving two identical rulings. When consistency collapses, trust collapses with it. VAR was created to reinforce consistency. But if the people operating VAR are not trained to the same standard, the technology merely doubles the inconsistency: once on the pitch, once in a closed room. This is where I have to speak plainly about the V.League. In a league where referees still work a second job, where income is not enough to live on, and where the number of properly trained matches per year is still small, introducing VAR cannot be a matter of pressing a button. It is a systemic overhaul. Without it, VAR is just an expensive screen hung in the middle of the stadium, waiting for someone to press a button. I have seen the same thing in a smaller league: they bought enough cameras and enough machines, but no one was taught how to read a legal shoulder charge. The result was that every time VAR stepped in, the controversy grew rather than shrank. Equipment does not produce judgement. People produce judgement, and equipment only amplifies it. I learned this on the night I faced VAR. I learned that the technology is not at fault. The people operating it are. A VAR team misreading an incident is no different from an assistant referee raising a flag wrongly — except that this time the mistake is replayed in slow motion, examined from five angles, and still read wrongly. Technology exposes people more clearly; it does not fix them. There is another point rarely mentioned: cost. To run VAR to standard, a league needs high-speed camera systems, stable transmission lines, a control room and a team of dedicated officials. In many places, that cost is larger than the budgets of several clubs combined. When domestic clubs are still struggling to pay wages, investing in high technology is anything but a simple equation. This is where the story turns to the transfer market, which I still follow every day. Football runs on money, and money is always scarcest where it is needed most. A club that owes its players wages cannot be a reliable partner in building a VAR system. A federation balancing youth football, the national team and the domestic championship will have to choose where to put its money first. When Article 17 lay on the deliberation table, I remembered the way Neymar stepped over the law without needing to look down at his feet. The 222-million-euro transfer of 2026 did not only teach me about a player's value. It taught me that a law only carries weight when there are people with enough resources to enforce it. The same goes for VAR. A beautiful rule on paper means nothing without operators who are good enough and paid enough to get it right. I have sat analysing V.League matches on screen, noting every contested challenge, every decision, every VAR intervention. What I found was not that Vietnamese referees are poor. They are not. They are working in a system that has not given them enough tools to become good. That is a structural problem, not a human one. In the Bundesliga, I once watched a VAR team take nearly four minutes to confirm an offside goal by a few centimetres. Four minutes. The whole stadium fell silent, then erupted in jeers when the decision was announced. People were not angry at the law. They were angry at the time. And that is a league with money, with people, with the best technology. If even the Bundesliga stumbles, the V.League needs to prepare for larger stumbles. Semi-automated offside technology was created precisely to shorten that window. It uses multiple cameras and algorithms to build a three-dimensional model of the players, rather than having a human draw lines by hand. At the 2026 World Cup, it cut offside determination to a few dozen seconds. But its cost is not small, and it solves exactly one type of incident: offside. Debates about contact, about handball, about the severity of fouls remain exactly where they were, waiting for a human to judge. This is why I do not believe technology can be the complete answer. Football is a game of constant contact, of moments that cannot be rebuilt into a model. A hard tackle, a shoulder charge, a step across to block — those have no formula. They demand an eye, and the eye must be trained. The handball law has changed at least twice in the past decade. In 2026, IFAB tightened the definition: any goal or goalscoring opportunity touched by hand, even accidentally, was to be disallowed. By 2026, IFAB itself had to loosen it again, because the old rule produced absurd decisions. Every time the law changes, referees must relearn, and every relearning is a new period of inconsistency. That is the nature of a sport trying to legislate things that belong to feeling. I remember that France–Belgium semi-final every time someone says VAR will wipe out controversy. The xG data for that match gave Belgium 1.8 and France 0.7. If football were scored by xG, Belgium would have gone to the final. But football is not scored by xG. It is scored by goals, and that goal came from an incident the technology did not bother to intervene on. Numbers cannot replace a referee's eye. That is what I have carried throughout my career. So what should be done? A hard time limit for each review is the first thing needed. If the VAR team cannot find clear evidence within a set period, the on-field decision must stand. That is already the principle of VAR: only correct when it is clearly wrong. Yet in practice, people keep dragging out the scrutiny, turning a clear principle into an open investigation. Training VAR officials as an independent profession also cannot be delayed. In Germany, there are people who only sit in the VAR room and never hold a whistle on the pitch. They are paid for that exact specialism. Forcing the on-field referee to both officiate and act as VAR, or rotating people arbitrarily, is the fastest way to produce inconsistency. One person cannot both keep the rhythm of the match and maintain the standard of review, if they have not been trained enough. And the exchanges between the on-field referee and the VAR team need to be made public, as some leagues have done. When fans can hear the reasoning behind a decision, they may disagree, but they understand. Transparency does not make controversy disappear, but it shifts the argument from “the referee was bought” to “the referee read the situation this way”. That is progress in football culture. But I want to say one counterintuitive thing, and I say it as someone who has stood between two waves: the emotion of the crowd and the coldness of the law. We are demanding of VAR something football has never had, and perhaps should never have: absolute perfection. We want every mistake to vanish. But mistakes are part of this game, from the time it was still a street game. What we actually need is not a perfect VAR. What we need is an honest VAR — one willing to admit when it is not clear enough, willing to let the decision stand when there is no evidence, and willing to tell fans that error is a human matter. The France–Belgium night taught me that VAR is not wrong. What is wrong is the way we believe it can replace a night on which a referee makes a mistake. For the V.League, I do not expect a revolution. I expect a roadmap. It starts with paying referees a living wage, training them into genuine professionals, and only then talking about expanding VAR across the league. Doing it the other way around — buying equipment first and thinking about people later — is the surest way to turn a good tool into an excuse for argument. Vietnamese football is at an interesting crossroads. The national team has produced feats that made all of Asia look again, and the domestic championship is gradually professionalising. But professionalisation is not just sponsorship contracts or ticket prices. It is also the quality of the decisions on the pitch. A league truly matures only when fans believe the result is decided by football, not by calls into a closed room. If VAR is built the right way, it can become part of that trust. If not, it will become a new excuse for old anger. The difference is not in the number of cameras, but in whether we dare to invest in people before investing in machines. That is the question every football nation, large or small, must answer for itself. I write these lines from Berlin, not far from the stadium where I once stood. I still replay that semi-final whenever I want to remind myself that technology can never replace instinct. A good referee is someone who, after all the screens and all the angles, still dares to trust their own eye. And a mature football nation is one that can teach that to the person holding the whistle. When people tell me VAR will make Vietnamese football transparent, I ask one thing back: transparent to whom, and transparent for what? Transparency is not seeing everything. Transparency is understanding why a decision was made, even when we disagree with it. That is something an expensive screen does not automatically deliver, while a football nation willing to learn can.