A High Boot at Temple Height: Van Bommel, Veerman and Dutch Football's Crooked Ruler

Minute 32. The ball left Matej Kovár's boot in a long, looping arc — the kind of goal-kick the Dutch simply call “playing it long”. On the grass, two bodies read the same trajectory. One read it with his forehead. The other read it with his studs. The distance between those two readings, in football, is sometimes a hundredth of a second — and it is also the distance between an ordinary clearance and an injury that can end a career.

Sam Kersten lowered his head. Ruben van Bommel extended his leg. The ball passed between them. Van Bommel's studs travelled above and made contact with the area of Kersten's face. Referee Joey Kooij blew his whistle. A free-kick. No yellow. No red. Nothing that suggested the match had just crossed a line.

Then the screens began to burn.

I have sat through many evenings in front of clips like this, rewinding and rewinding, not to find someone's fault but to find the exact instant when a human being becomes an event. In my profession we are taught to look at the scoreline first. The scoreline says PSV won. The scoreline says the match passed by uneventfully. But some matches carry their scoreline on one layer and their real story on another. PSV against Heerenveen was one of those matches.

I began writing in the middle of a World Cup forest, where my voice was only a leaf. That leaf learned something over the years: to know the direction of the wind across the whole forest, sometimes you have to look where nobody wants to look — a temple grazed by a stud, a whistle that never came, a technical area that looked away. These details do not appear in the data, but they are where football reveals its own skeleton.

What kept me sitting longer than usual over this incident was not the collision itself. Collisions belong to the grass, and grass has always been cruel. What kept me sitting was the feeling that I had seen this incident before. Not in this match. Not even in this season. I had seen it somewhere else, with another name, and in that place the ruler had pointed to a completely different number.

That is why this piece does not begin with the question of whether Van Bommel deserved to be sent off. The answer to that question sits in the Laws of the Game, and it is fairly clear to anyone who has held the book. The harder, more painful question is this: how can the same book of laws, the same league, the same season produce two such different outcomes for two nearly identical acts? Dutch football owes an answer to that question, and it cannot answer with a press release.

The empty stadium of 2026 still whispers: football died, but people never left. I remember that feeling whenever a match leaves behind a silence larger than any roar. The silence at minute 32 was not the silence of the stands. It was the silence of a system hesitating.

Context: a league shrinking around two names

To understand why an incident in the 32nd minute carries such weight, you have to understand where the Eredivisie stands. Structurally, in terms of power and media gravity, this is a league that contracts around a handful of names. PSV and Ajax remain the two axes of the whole competition. When Dutch media call a fixture between them a “top-of-the-table clash”, they are not merely describing the standings — they are describing the entire commercial and narrative weight of the league. The football ecosystem of a nation that reached four World Cup finals is funnelled into two names.

Against that backdrop, PSV won 1-3 away at Ajax. It is a result with weight: it confirms PSV's status as title contenders and places the Heerenveen match in a very specific psychological position — a game a strong side is expected to win, a game where the pressure of result is far lower than the pressure of reputation. Matches like that are often where small things get overlooked, because nobody wants to spoil a smooth evening.

Heerenveen, the club from Friesland, sit in the middle tier of the league. They are the kind of club Dutch football produces in abundance: well organised, modestly funded, sustained by developing and selling players. In this match, the representative of that tier was Sam Kersten — a defender doing exactly what a defender does: reading the long ball, lowering his head, attacking it. He did it right. And he took a stud to the face.

On the other side was Ruben van Bommel. He is the son of Mark van Bommel — one of the most distinctive midfielders Dutch football has ever produced, a man who wore PSV, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AC Milan, and who embodied a type of player the Dutch call a “midfield warrior”. A surname like that comes with a genetic file on playing style: intensity, duels, no retreat. In football, family legacy is both a springboard and a shadow. People always compare son to father, and in this case the comparison is anything but gentle.

What matters is that Van Bommel is young. He is still in the phase football calls “formation” — the phase in which a player learns to tell courage from recklessness, contest from assault. This is not an excuse. It is a way of placing the focus correctly: an incident by a young player still learning his trade, in a match his team was strongly favoured to win.

And then comes the single most important detail of the whole story, the one that makes every subsequent analysis meaningless if ignored. Media record that this was already the second time this season Van Bommel escaped a red card. The earlier one was a challenge on Bouwman — also involving the head, and also stopping at a yellow. The word “again” in the headlines is not accidental. It is a statement.

So we have a context of five layers: a league contracting around two big names; a strong side that had just beaten its traditional rival; a young player carrying a heavy legacy; a mid-tier defender doing his duty; and a precedent already written into the season's record. Those five layers stack on top of each other at minute 32. Football rarely lays out its evidence this neatly.

Law 12, and the gap between words and grass

Here I have to be blunt, because my trade obliges me to read the law before reading the emotion. The IFAB Laws of the Game, in Law 12, are explicit about conduct called “serious foul play”. One of its core criteria is a challenge using excessive force or brutality against an opponent, and one of the named acts is a challenge with the studs directed at an opponent's body in a dangerous position. Studs making contact with the face, on any honest reading, falls within the zone the law calls “endangering the safety of an opponent”.

This is the point to carve into the board: when a player raises his studs to the height of an opponent's head while that opponent is bending down, the question is no longer whether it is a foul, but what kind of foul it is. And the kind of foul the law describes here has only one name: a red card.

Van Bommel received nothing. No yellow, no red. Only a free-kick. In the language of lawmakers, this is a specific type of error: a misapplication of the law — not an error of situational judgement, but an error of categorisation. In other words, the referee may have seen everything and still chosen a framework that does not match the framework the law prescribes.

I want to be careful here, because I know how brutal the referee's job is. A referee in the middle, at real speed, does not have the angle of a slow-motion camera. He sees a leg extend, a head lower, a ball pass between them. In that instant, a human brain must classify an event into one of several boxes: legitimate duel, ordinary foul, serious foul. This is a near-impossible cognitive task under ideal conditions, and entirely impossible when both players have committed their full body weight to a single point.

But that is precisely why VAR exists. And this is where I touch on a professional view I have held for years: the space for subjective judgement inside VAR is far larger than the phrase “clear and obvious error” suggests. That phrase sounds like an objective standard, a door that only opens when the truth hits you in the eye. In reality it is a vague clause, and every vague clause is filled in by human beings — by expectation, by habit, by whether a VAR official that day is holding the same threshold as a colleague in another room, another matchweek.

In this incident, the Goal.com report does not mention any VAR intervention. There is only a free-kick and a whistle. That is a large gap, and a meaningful one. If VAR reviewed it and decided not to intervene, we are talking about a judgement that the incident was not a “clear and obvious error” — a judgement that, to anyone who has watched the clip back, is hard to swallow. If VAR did not review it, we are talking about a process that missed one of the situations it was created to catch. Both possibilities lead to the same conclusion: there is a hole somewhere, and that hole is not in the eyes of the spectators.

One more detail needs placing. Media mention a new regulation: a player must leave the touchline for one minute after receiving treatment for a head collision. In this match, Kersten did leave for exactly that minute. It is a player-welfare and anti-time-wasting measure, and it was applied correctly. But it is not a disciplinary sanction. A player being treated under the correct medical protocol does not substitute for the act that caused the injury being correctly categorised under the law. These are two different layers, and their frequent merging in online debate is a sign that viewers are trying to rewrite the law for a situation the law already answers.

I have spent years reading referee reports and disciplinary records. What I learned is this: most refereeing controversies are not controversies about the law. They are controversies about consistency. Fans can forgive a referee for being wrong. They find it very hard to forgive a referee for being wrong in a way they cannot predict. And that is exactly what minute 32 pushed onto the table.

The Veerman precedent: when two identical acts meet two different fates

To understand why this incident cannot be read as an isolated event, it must be placed beside another incident from the same season. Joey Veerman — then at PSV — challenged and caught Mexx Meerdink, an AZ player, in the head with his studs. The result: Veerman was sent off. A red card. No argument.

This is the point where the whole story shifts from “a bad challenge” to “a systemic problem”. Two acts of the same nature — studs contacting an opponent's head — received two opposite outcomes. One was a red card, the other was nothing at all. One can debate the relative severity of each, whether Veerman was more deliberate, whether Meerdink lowered his head. But the basic framework of the law does not change: conduct endangering an opponent's head with studs falls into the serious category. If that ruler measured Veerman as a red card, it must measure Van Bommel in the same unit.

Inconsistency in sanctioning is a more dangerous kind of error than a single wrong decision, because it does not merely affect one match — it corrodes the thing every referee needs to do the job: the belief that the law is applied the same way to everyone.

There is another layer here, and I want to put it on the table honestly. The same Veerman, after being sent off in that incident, has now moved to Borussia Dortmund. This does not directly relate to Van Bommel's challenge, but it relates to how we read the story. It reminds us that PSV is a club whose players mature and then leave. It reminds us that the Veerman precedent is not only a disciplinary memory — it is a trace of a system that develops and sells players, where names change shirts constantly, and where collective memory of the rules is often eroded by that very circulation.

This is why I always keep an emotional diary of every match I follow. Based on my experience of watching Eredivisie matches across several seasons, I have noticed that disciplinary precedents in this league have one characteristic: they live very briefly in public memory but very long in the disciplinary committee's file. Fans forget after two matchweeks. The committee does not. That is why incidents like minute 32 never truly close when the final whistle blows.

The silence that never made the record

I want to return to what I consider the most important and most overlooked detail in the entire story: the absence of VAR from every description of the incident.

In any top league, a situation where studs contact the face is one VAR must examine — because it may be a missed red card. This procedure is not optional. It is part of the system's design. Yet in the report of this match we have only a free-kick. Not a line about the VAR team checking the situation. Not a line about referee Kooij being invited to the pitchside monitor. Not a line about an exchange over the headset.

That silence can be read two ways, and both are troubling. First reading: VAR checked and decided this was not a clear and obvious error. If so, we are facing an intervention threshold pushed so high that studs to the face still do not clear it. Second reading: VAR did not check, or checked in a way that left no trace. If so, we are facing a procedural problem, a problem of accountability, of spectators having no way of knowing what the system did in the most important instant.

A refereeing system cannot both demand trust and conceal what it decided. Transparency is not a concession to the audience — it is the condition for the law being believed to be law.

I know some will say I am making too much of one incident. But I once stood in an empty stadium in May 2026, recording zero goals and zero cheers, and I learned that absences often speak louder than presences. What is missing from the record is usually the real story. Here, what is missing has a name: VAR.

And there is another absence. There is no explanation from referee Kooij about why he made his decision. No statement about what he saw, what he thought, what he weighed. This is another gap, and no less important. Because if we want to debate whether a decision was right, we need to know what it was based on. Without that basis, every debate is just two sides throwing emotion at each other.

I once wrote that people call them players, while I call them sleepwalkers in studded boots, chasing dreams within the limits of a pitch. But the man with the whistle is also a sleepwalker in his own way — someone who must stay awake inside someone else's dream. And when that keeper of wakefulness is not given an account of himself, the whole system loses something.

A young player, an asset, and the price of not being sent off

Here I have to turn in another direction, because this story has a layer Dutch media has not fully mined: the financial layer.

Ruben van Bommel is a young player. He is an appreciating asset — or a depreciating one, depending on how he navigates this season. In modern football, a young player is judged not only on goals and assists. He is judged on a file: minutes played, progression metrics, age, resale potential and — the least discussed part — disciplinary history.

A young player who gets sent off repeatedly is a discounted asset. Not because he is less talented, but because he is more expensive to use: the club must account for suspension matches, for risk in big games, for the possibility that he leaves his team a man short at the decisive moment of a season.

I hold a fairly clear professional view on the transfer market, and it applies directly here: the bubble in young-player valuations is bursting, and enormous sums poured into players who have proven nothing at the top level are a naked gamble. In such a market, a disciplinary record becomes a variable with real weight. It does not appear in the papers, but it appears in the meeting rooms of transfer people. And a player who has escaped two red cards in a single season is writing a line into that file that nobody wants to read.

PSV's structure also matters here. This is a selling club. Veerman's move to Borussia Dortmund is concrete evidence of that model — one that the Eredivisie's leading clubs have pursued for years: develop, improve, let players perform domestically, then sell to bigger leagues. It is how a Dutch club sustains competitiveness without broadcast revenue comparable to Europe's top leagues.

In that model, every young player is an investment, and every decision about him is a financial one. Van Bommel not being sent off directly benefits PSV competitively: he remains eligible for the coming matchweeks. This is a fact, not an accusation. But it is a fact worth looking at squarely, because it reveals something interesting about football's incentive structure: sometimes what is good for one club in one match is not good for the whole league's rulebook.

I want to tell a personal story here, because I think it is relevant. In 2026, I wrote my first piece on South Korea's 2-0 win over Germany in Kazan, not about pressing or Neuer's error, but about the look in Mesut Özil's eyes as he watched his German teammates collapse. A lecturer called it unobjective, too literary. But the piece received a comment I still remember: “Thank you for showing me a match different from the scoreline.” I learned from that moment that some stories can only be seen when you refuse to look at the number. A young player's disciplinary file is one of those stories. It never appears on the scoreboard, but it exists in every meeting room.

The transfer window is an unfinished love song: those leaving never said goodbye, those arriving already feel they belong. In the Netherlands, that song is sung all year round. And every time a young player adds another mark to his disciplinary file, an off-key note slips quietly into the music.

The contrarian angle: the word “again” is doing most of the persuading

At this point I must do what my trade obliges me to do, even if it loses me part of my readership: I must doubt the very story I have just told.

Because there is one thing all of us who write about football know and rarely admit: headlines do a lot of the work. The word “again” in “Van Bommel should have been sent off again” carries enormous weight, and it is not neutral. It assumes that the minute-32 incident and the Bouwman incident are the same type of event. It assumes that escaping a red card twice is a pattern rather than two separate accidents. And most importantly, it assumes that the correct answer is known before any disciplinary body has spoken.

“Again” is a verdict delivered before the trial opens. And in football, as in life, verdicts delivered in advance are usually right emotionally and wrong procedurally.

I am not saying the public's anger is groundless. Quite the opposite. I have watched the clip back many times, and I believe that under the law, a red card was the correct outcome. But there is a distance between “correct under the law” and “a pattern of moral guilt”, and sports media tends to erase that distance with a single word.

Look at the nature of the two incidents. The Bouwman challenge: contact with the head, stopping at a yellow. The Kersten incident: a high stud to the face, nothing at all. These are two events with clear common ground — the head, the studs, a duelling act. But they also have differences worth recording: the speed of approach, the direction of movement, when the opponent lowered his head, and whether the referee in each match saw it.

In other words, we have a sample of two events — a small sample, insufficient to declare a behavioural pattern. And this is where I want to put a hard question to both sides. To those who are furious: if these two events are proof of a pattern, what is that pattern inferred from — the conduct, or the feeling that a young player, carrying a famous surname, at a strong club, is being treated more leniently than he deserves? To those defending the referee: if these are just two separate accidents, why did one lead to a red card and the other to nothing?

This is why I believe the focus of this story is misplaced. It does not lie in Van Bommel's character. It lies in the ruler. A young player can be clumsy, can be reckless, can be learning to tell courage from danger. That is normal in football, and it is why coaches exist. But a refereeing system is not permitted to be clumsy in the same way. It is not permitted to let two identical acts receive two opposite outcomes without explanation.

I was once accused of “painting failure pink” when I wrote about Son Heung-min's tears in Qatar. I doubted myself for a week afterwards. But what I learned from that experience is this: empathy and criticism do not exclude each other. I can empathise with a referee doing an impossible job at real speed, and at the same time criticise bluntly a system that lets inconsistency accumulate. I can understand that Van Bommel is learning his trade, and at the same time say he needs to learn faster. Empathy is not a shield for vagueness.

There is one more layer I want to put on the table, though it is speculative: when a young player is branded an “escape artist”, that brand can operate on its own. Referees read the papers. They remember names. And in future borderline challenges, a branded player may face a stricter measure — or, conversely, a harsher judgement of bad intent. Both possibilities are bad. Both show that when the media builds a character, that character begins to live a life of its own, detached from what he actually does on the pitch.

This is why I am always suspicious of stories that are too neat. The story of a young player repeatedly escaping red cards is too neat. It has a villain, a victim, and heroes — the outraged spectators. The life of a football league is not that neat. And the law, with all its vagueness, is not that neat either.

Risk: from one incident to a loop of scrutiny

I want to spend the final part on what may happen next, because this is the part few pieces bother to write.

The biggest risk here is not whether Van Bommel is suspended. The biggest risk is a loop. The minute-32 incident has placed him in a state I call “being watched”. From now on, every challenge of his will be replayed more. Every refereeing decision involving him will be placed beside minute 32. Every time he escapes a card, the story will be retold. And if there is once more a similar incident, the word “again” will become a chapter, not a headline.

On the refereeing side, the risk is that inconsistency keeps accumulating. The danger of inconsistency does not lie in any single decision. It lies in the total. Over many seasons, a league accumulates a catalogue of contradictory decisions, and that catalogue becomes a collective proof that the law is not applied evenly. That is when trust wears down. Not through one big mistake, but through hundreds of small deviations nobody bothers to name.

For Van Bommel, the risk is a different kind — reputational risk. Every time he escapes a red card, he does not merely escape a punishment. He adds a line to a document he does not control: the file clubs read when they consider buying him in future. In a market I believe is overly generous to unproven players, that file is a variable of real weight.

For Kersten, the risk is physical. A stud to the face can end a season, a career, or worse. That a defender did his duty — lowered his head, cleared the ball — and was rewarded with an injury is an injustice that can be measured. In every debate about law and precedent, this is the part most easily forgotten: a real person had to leave the pitch for a minute under a medical rule, and that rule says nothing about who is responsible for him having to leave.

And the final, largest risk is the risk to collective memory. Football lives on memory. We remember goals, moments, summer nights. But we also remember injustices. Generations of Dutch fans still tell each other about fateful decisions at major tournaments past. Those stories do not die. They only wait for a new incident to come alive again. And if a young player escapes another red card, the story of a league applying its laws unevenly will gain another chapter.

Takeaway

Qatar taught me: a fall is not the end point, but a hollow where spring rises again. I think of that as I reread the report on minute 32. Dutch football stands in such a hollow. Not a hollow of defeat — PSV still win, still top the table, still sell players to the Bundesliga. This is a different hollow, less noticed: a hollow of trust.

A league can live without its biggest stars. A league can live without record transfers. But a league cannot live long without the belief that the ruler is used the same way for everyone — for the star and the substitute, for the son of a legend and an unknown defender from Friesland. When that ruler is crooked, the crookedness does not lie in one incident. It lies in the whole system that produced it.

So what question is left? Not “did Van Bommel deserve to be sent off” — the answer sits in the law book, and the law book has answered. The question left is: does Dutch football have the courage to say out loud that a stud to the face is a stud to the face, whoever delivers it, at whatever minute, in whatever shirt? And if the answer is yes, what must change — in VAR procedure, in the publication of decisions, in how leagues explain what they saw and what they ignored?

I will sit through many more evenings in front of clips like this. I will rewind and rewind, trying to find the instant when a human being becomes an event. And I will keep my emotional diary, recording the silences that never appear on the scoreboard. Because in the end, what I believe — what fourteen years of watching this industry has taught me — is that football does not die when a referee makes a mistake. Football dies when nobody has the patience to tell each other that the mistake happened. And until that happens, the ruler lies there, waiting to be picked up and straightened.