From Văn Hậu to Đình Bắc: When the V-League Needs Football Education, Not Another Disciplinary Verdict

A rainy afternoon at Hàng Đẫy. I sat in the stands of section A, an old notebook in my weathered hands, and watched a tackle come in from behind. The opponent collapsed onto the wet turf. The referee produced a card. The stadium fell silent for a few seconds, then the cheering returned as if nothing had happened. None of them – including me – knew that the player who had just fallen would leave the pitch with a lingering injury. And in another corner of the stands, a twelve-year-old boy was quietly learning: this is how adults play football. I still remember that feeling. Not because of the beautiful play, but because of the ugly one. Over four decades of writing about football, I have learned that the worst moments on a pitch often tell us the most about a footballing culture – about what people teach each other, and what they forget to teach. The V-League season had barely begun before a troubling sequence of incidents unfolded. Đoàn Văn Hậu received a four-match suspension after a dangerous challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Not long before, Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn had each committed deliberate fouls on Đình Bắc – the same player, within a short span of time. Three separate incidents, all pointing to one thing: young players are becoming targets on their own pitch. In an interview with Dân trí, a European expert – a recurring commentator on Vietnamese football – offered a different reading. He did not call it a matter of individual discipline. He called it a matter of education. If it were only a disciplinary issue, we could solve it with cards. But if it is an educational issue, we need time – and time is precisely what Vietnamese football is wasting. I think of a trip. In 2026, while filming a short documentary about Hanoi FC, I accidentally captured goalkeeper Văn Công saving a penalty against Becamex Bình Dương with a counter-intuitive reflex – moving to his right while his eyes glanced left. I went on sports radio and explained that a goalkeeper is the poet of the penalty area. But there was one thing I could not say on air that day: that goalkeeper had been taught how to read an opponent's shooting direction since he was very young. That is education, not instinct. The difference between a beautiful tackle and a horrifying one lies in whether the player was taught. And in the V-League, far too many players have not been taught. The European expert said that many young coaches in Vietnam rely mainly on their own playing experience or street football experience, rather than formal, licensed training. He stressed: if young players are taught how to tackle correctly, how to control the tempo of a match, and how to respect opponents from adolescence, then serious fouls at the professional level will become rarer. I sit and recall a shoot in Russia in 2026. The France – Belgium semi-final, Eden Hazard shut down by three defensive layers. I wrote a three-thousand-word piece about the loneliness of Hazard on the right flank – not because I adore him, but because I saw something profoundly footballing there. An artist suffocated by a system. In Vietnam, the story runs the opposite way. The artist – if we may call Đình Bắc that – is struck down by colleagues who were never taught to play within the rules. In 2026, when the domestic league was suspended by the pandemic, I spent nine months rewatching all fourteen National Cup finals from 2026 to 2026. I found a pattern: in matches decided by stoppage-time goals, the warrior-style celebration of Vietnamese players always repeated the same three movements. But I also found a pattern less often discussed: the most brutal challenges in those finals did not come from young players, but from men who had been professionals for over a decade. They were no longer young enough to relearn. They had been forged in an environment where playing rough is viewed as a survival skill. That was when I understood: the problem is not a player. The problem is a pipeline. Football is a game of bodily memory. A player tackles the way he was coached at twelve. If someone taught him that tackling from behind is the only way to win the ball, he will carry that skill through his career. By the time he is thirty, retraining becomes extraordinarily difficult. In Vietnam, the problem is compounded by another factor: pitch quality and weather. Heavy rain, slick surfaces, a ball that is hard to control – all of these push players into riskier challenges. But these are not the root cause. They are factors that aggravate a problem which already existed. The expert calls it culture. And football culture, in his view, has to be planted at youth level. Young coaches must be properly trained, licensed, and continuously updated. If the person teaching a child football relies only on his own playing experience, then that child inherits both the good habits and the bad ones. I ask myself: how many young coaches in Vietnam are teaching players how to tackle without causing injury? How many of them have ever sat down after a session to tell a student why an opponent is also a human being? No one is counting. But the rate, I suspect, is not high. One point the expert stressed that I consider the most important: current penalties must be sufficiently deterrent, and must be applied consistently. He said that if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite sanctions, one must question the effectiveness of the disciplinary system currently in operation. In the United States, I once spoke with a youth football coach. He told me: in the first session of every season, he set aside a full thirty minutes just to teach the children how to apologise to an opponent after a collision. Not because he is a kind man. But because he believes that if a child learns to apologise on a football pitch, he will learn to respect in life. In Vietnam, how many sessions like that exist? How many people who teach football to children care about teaching them to respect opponents before teaching them to shoot? I do not know. But I do know that if we keep ignoring this, we will keep seeing Đình Bắc struck down on the pitch, and Văn Hậu receiving bans after having injured a colleague. One thing the expert said stayed with me for a long time: young players always look at their seniors as role models. If rough play is accepted at the professional level, it becomes normal at amateur and youth levels. This is a downward cultural transmission mechanism. And that is why discipline at the V-League level can itself be viewed as an intervention in youth football development. But there is a nuance I want to voice. Not every young coach teaches his students to play rough. Some teach with their whole heart. Some spend their own money on footballs for their students. Some wake at four in the morning to drive the children to practice. The problem is not the morality of the teacher, but the system that trains the teacher. If a youth coach wants to teach better but has nowhere to learn, the fault is not his. The fault belongs to a system that has failed to create enough learning opportunities for him. This is the point I consider the core: we are talking about a systemic problem, not an individual one. And the way to solve a systemic problem is not to increase penalties, but to rebuild the foundation. Here I must say something that may offend many. When we blame the player, we are blaming the final product of a pipeline that was broken from the start. Văn Hậu is a product of Vietnamese football. So are Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn. Their challenges, however condemnable, are the result of years of learning in an environment where committing a serious foul was never treated as particularly grave. That is why current penalties are problematic. Not because they are light – but because they are not applied consistently. The expert says that if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite sanctions, one must question the effectiveness of the disciplinary system in operation. I agree. But there is one detail I believe is forgotten in this story: the victims. Đình Bắc was targeted twice in a short span. Doãn Ngọc Tân had to leave the pitch after a dangerous challenge. No one asked them whether the verdict was sufficiently deterrent. All they could do was keep playing – or be unable to keep playing – after those moments. And there is something else I consider important: when we speak of football culture, we often forget that culture is not only what is taught, but also what is tolerated. A football culture that tolerates brutality teaches the next generation that brutality is normal. A football culture that punishes brutality consistently teaches the next generation that respect is mandatory. Vietnamese football stands before a choice. Either keep patching things up with increasingly heavy bans, or begin rebuilding from the ground up – from the very first football lessons. I still believe that one day, poetry will return to Vietnamese pitches. Not the poetry of dribbles, but the poetry of children learning to play football without hurting one another. And on that day, when the stadiums are empty, I will clearly hear the applause of the years gone by.