V-League and the Root Question: Where Is On-Field Violence Taught?

3:12 a.m., Manchester time. I reopened the clip on a flickering stream, the image breaking into squares. In it, Đình Bắc fell for the first time. Then he fell a second time in the same half. The first time, he was pulled down from behind by Tấn Sinh, in a phase where the ball had already gone well beyond reach. The second time, Văn Sơn placed a hand on his shoulder and pulled, exactly the way someone reminds a young player where his place is on the pitch. Two phases. One purpose. And no free kick heavy enough to name it. I rewound it three times. 1,500 empty stadium nights taught me to hear a match through my bloodstream — but what I heard this time did not come from the stands. It came from another kind of emptiness, somewhere between the touchline and the coaching cabin. A few days later, a European expert spoke to Dân trí. He did not call it a problem of individual discipline. He called it a problem of education. To understand why that answer matters, it needs to be placed inside a season that is opening with suspensions. In the most recent related match, Văn Hậu received a four-match ban after a challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. That is a heavy sanction, enough for the organizers to send a signal. But immediately before and after it, Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn each brought Đình Bắc down. Three incidents, three different names, but the same shape: a player choosing force over thought. In the interview, this expert — who has repeatedly stressed the same position in past answers to Dân trí — made three consistent arguments. First, tackling technique, duels and respect for opponents are all teachable skills. Second, the habit of using excessive force is formed early, and once it hardens it is very hard to fix at professional level. Third, environment — rain, poor pitches, pressure to produce results — only compounds the problem; it is not the root cause. That is why he placed his emphasis on coach education, not on raising fines. In modern football, tackling is a skill with a curriculum. At proper UEFA or AFC academies, twelve-year-olds are taught where to plant the standing foot, how to lower their center of gravity, from which angle to approach so they do not go into an opponent's knee. It is a sequence broken into parts, repeated hundreds of times, until it becomes reflex. In a football culture where youth coaches mostly come out of playing experience or street football, that sequence is often skipped. The expert in the interview said it plainly: too many coaches rely mainly on their own playing experience, rather than on a properly trained license. What stands out is that poor defensive technique is rarely punished until it causes injury. A player who arrives half a beat late will be whistled. But the same player, in another phase, is called fierce, praised as someone unafraid of contact. That applause is part of learning the wrong thing. In other words, no player becomes violent by nature. He is taught — by coaching, by example, by the way everyone around him calls him a warrior when he takes an opponent out. I think of my own story. The stumble at the 2026 World Cup did not knock me down; it taught me to stand on the feet of an observer. I mispronounced Maguire's name three times on air, drew 15,000 mockeries, then spent a full month listening back to every recording to fix it. The lesson: what forms early and is never corrected follows you all the way to professional level. Nobody can teach you to pronounce a name correctly in one afternoon before going live. That leads to the expert's second argument. Once the habit of using excessive force has hardened, changing it at V-League level is a low-yield intervention. Not because players cannot learn, but because they already carry a different reflex system built over the previous ten years. This is the point I find most valuable in the whole interview. People usually treat on-pitch violence as a moral issue. But with a skill, the treatment is entirely different: you do not punish so the player repents, you teach again so he plants his foot correctly. The third argument concerns the reverse cascade. Young players always look to seniors as role models. If at professional level pulling an opponent down without serious consequence is treated as normal, it becomes the standard at lower levels. The expert put it very clearly: when excessive contact is accepted at the top, it becomes normal below. This turns V-League discipline into a youth-development intervention. Every suspension imposed at a stadium in the north or south has a ripple effect down to the training pitches of fifteen-year-olds. And in some training environments, according to the expert, coaches actively encourage young players to play rough, even to intimidate opponents. That is an indictment of method, not of individual players. And it explains why simply raising penalties never touches the root. Now comes the test of the system's effectiveness. The expert talks about disciplinary measures in a very professional way. If dangerous incidents keep recurring despite sanctions, then the effectiveness of those sanctions must be questioned. He defines the purpose of punishment as two parts: punishing past conduct and preventing future conduct. That sounds simple, but it is a very concrete evaluation criterion: recurrence rate, not just the severity of the ban. A system can hand down very heavy sanctions and still fail, if similar incidents keep appearing. And the expert stressed one word I think many readers skim past: consistency. He proposes that sanctions should be both stricter and more consistent. Emphasizing consistency hints at one thing: the current system is perceived as lacking a clear reference, when the same behavior draws different levels of treatment. This is a story about rule application, not about rule design. On responsibility, the expert does not place the issue on a single organization. He says both VFF and VPF must be held responsible. It is a shrewd way of speaking: when two organizations share responsibility, the greatest risk is that both wait for the other to act. In the interview, pressure to achieve results is also mentioned as a factor. Early in the season, as players compete for starting places, the drive to prove themselves rises. But that is also when the line between fierce and brutal becomes blurriest. This is where I want to pause. Based on my experience following V-League matches for years, every season has a cluster of dangerous incidents concentrated early on. Pitches after the rainy season, fitness not yet at peak, and pressure that forbids mistakes. Those three factors combine to create an environment where a half-beat-late reaction easily becomes a challenge with the whole body. But — and this is what the expert states clearly — rain and pitch quality are not the root cause. They are multipliers. A well-coached player chooses a different solution on a slippery pitch. A badly coached player uses the rain as an excuse to justify himself. There is a blind spot in this very framework, and I want to say it plainly. If the problem were purely education, why was Đình Bắc targeted twice in the same match by two different players? Bad technique is random. A player who mistimes a challenge usually does not pick the exact same victim to charge at twice. This cluster of incidents carries the signature of deliberate intimidation aimed at one individual, rather than a plain technical error. The expert reads it as an educational failure. I read it as having two layers: one layer is generic educational failure, the other is a culture of intimidation in certain dressing rooms, where teaching a young player his place is part of the internal order. The education framework cannot cover that second layer. And if only education is fixed, we may miss a mechanism operating independently. The second thing I want to flag is the risk in how the media reports it. Three specific names are being called out. Meanwhile the problem is systemic. Once the story becomes personalized, it can turn into a witch hunt, and people start believing that suspending a few names will solve everything. 73 million pounds is the club's money, but Sancho belongs to the whispers in the stands — and here too, the story of these players belongs to the stands, not to a disciplinary verdict. When the media turns a cultural problem into the story of three individuals, it inadvertently strips away the ability to see the mechanism operating behind them. Third: the expert in the piece is an anonymous source. That does not make his argument wrong, but it does mean the argument's authority depends on how the outlet frames it, not on a verifiable credential. An anonymous source can be right and still cannot be used as evidence. That is why I treat this interview as a direction of analysis, not a verified conclusion. And there is another gap. Coach-education reform has a horizon of years. But public opinion demands change within weeks. A beat keeper understands that every football reform also has a heart, and it beats with the seasons — a coach's season is long, the public's season is short, and the two rarely align. So which signal should be tracked in the coming rounds? Not the heaviest bans. But their consistency. If two similar pull-downs in two different matches draw two different sanctions, then the problem lies in rule application, and every other reform will be hollowed out from within. The most expensive thing in football is the moment a fan realizes the team needs them. At this moment in the V-League, what the stands need is not another longer ban. It is a generation of young coaches who know how to teach their players to challenge without having to apologize afterwards. And if that does not begin on training pitches at 5 p.m., where no camera is watching, it will never begin at all.