The VAR Room in Hanoi and the Semi-Professional Referee Trade of the V.League

The VAR Room in Hanoi and the Semi-Professional Referee Trade of the V.League

An April night, a stand holding more than twenty thousand people, and the referee places a hand on his earpiece before drawing a rectangle in the air with both arms — a signal anyone who has ever watched football understands instantly. He jogs to the monitor set up beside the touchline, stands there for nearly a minute, then turns and points to the penalty spot. The stand erupts. But the thing worth discussing is not the final decision. The thing worth discussing is that the man who made the call was not in the stadium. He was sitting in a room in Hanoi, several hundred kilometres away, watching a screen, and speaking a sentence into a headset that the crowd never heard.

I have sat on both sides of that line. In December 2026, at Anfield, I was in the trial VAR room for Liverpool against Everton. In the 73rd minute, Dominic Calvert-Lewin was pulled back by Virgil van Dijk inside the box, and the referee waved it away. I recorded the entire chain of signals, measured the assistant's angle of movement, and calculated that the man with the whistle had 0.4 seconds to read the incident. Four tenths of a second. That number is why I abandoned emotional commentary and began writing from the match record. Every eye has a blind spot; the only question is whether we dare look into it.

Context: three years, one room, and a very short list

The V.League 1 brought VAR into operation from the 2026 season, after a long preparation period with technical support from the world governing body FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation. The model chosen by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) is centralised: the entire VAR team sits in one operations room in Hanoi, while stadiums across the country are connected to it by fibre-optic cable. Technically, this is not an eccentric choice. The English Premier League also runs VAR centrally from Stockley Park on the outskirts of London, and has done since the 2026/20 season. The difference lies elsewhere.

When the Premier League opened Stockley Park, it already had a full-time professional referee corps. England moved to professional officiating in 2026, when the Professional Game Match Officials Limited was founded, turning the whistle from a part-time job for teachers, civil servants and former players into a contracted profession with a salary and a promotion pathway. By the time VAR arrived, the only task was to teach one more skill to people who were already working the job full time.

Vietnam has followed the reverse order. The machine arrived first; the people arrived later.

According to what VPF has published at its training camps, the number of referees certified to operate VAR in the early phase was very limited — enough to cover only a handful of matches per round, with the rest still decided by the on-field referee's naked eye. In later seasons the list was gradually expanded, but it remains a small group relative to the needs of a league with fourteen clubs and more than twenty rounds. That is the starting point of every controversy.

The machine arrived first; the people arrived later

A standard VAR team needs at least four people: the video assistant referee, an assistant VAR, a replay operator and a connectivity technician. Of those, only the first requires an international certification. But to earn that certification, a referee must pass assessments on the laws, on communication protocol, on how to read an incident on a screen — and on the ability to speak briefly, accurately, and in standardised phrasing.

This is the hardest part, and the least discussed. VAR is not a machine that replays an incident. VAR is a communication process. The person in the room must explain to the person on the pitch, within seconds: what the incident is, where it happened, how many camera angles exist, which angle is decisive, and under which article of the Laws of the Game. If the speaker hesitates, the listener will hesitate. If the listener hesitates, the crowd will see the hesitation before they see the decision.

I witnessed such an argument in Moscow in 2026, when FIFA invited me to join its media advisory group before the France–Belgium semi-final. Former referee Pierluigi Collina argued that the handball by Samuel Umtiti in the 51st minute was not deliberate. I disagreed, citing Law 12: the arm was raised above the shoulder and blocked the ball's path. I won that argument not because I was more famous, but because I had fourteen qualifying matches as evidence. Legends tell stories with their reputation; I tell stories with the match record. And inside a VAR room, the win also belongs to whoever has the clearest record, not the loudest voice.

Refereeing in the V.League remains, for the most part, a second job. Many officials are physical education teachers, sector officials, youth coaches; some still hold administrative posts alongside the whistle. That does not make them inferior. It simply means the time available to learn the trade is fragmented. A Premier League referee can devote four days a week to reviewing footage, analysing, fitness training and team meetings. A V.League referee usually has to squeeze that into the evening after class.

The skills gap is not born of talent. It is born of hours.

Semi-professional against professional

This is where I want to linger, because it is the root of nearly every controversy Vietnamese audiences have heard over the past three years.

When a league introduces VAR, it does not merely buy equipment. It signs an implicit contract with the public: that from now on, clear errors visible on a screen will be corrected. That contract can only be honoured if the other end of the line has enough trained people to read the screen to the same standard. In Vietnam, that standard is taught in a few short training courses, while in Europe it is taught inside a professional system with a ten-year pathway.

The result is an easily observed paradox: VAR increased the number of decisions dissected in public, but did not increase proportionally the number of decisions corrected correctly. Audiences see more images, hear more debate, and conclude that referees are getting worse. The reality is different. Referees are not getting worse. What is getting worse is the gap between the expectation created by technology and the capability created by the training system.

There is one technical detail few notice. Under the VAR protocol, the on-field referee remains the final decision-maker. VAR may intervene only for a clear and obvious error, or for a missed serious incident. This is called the high threshold for intervention. It means the majority of decisions still belong to the man in the middle, with a view blocked by players, by his running angle, by the sheer speed of the move.

I have measured that speed. At Anfield in 2026/18, in the incident I analysed, the referee had 0.4 seconds. On a high-speed passage of play in the V.League, the figure is approximately the same. No technology can change those 0.4 seconds unless the official is already positioned correctly before the move happens. And correct positioning is the product of thousands of hours of pattern training, not of a single meeting.

That is why I always tell young referees that VAR cannot save a man who runs to the wrong place.

The geography problem and the transmission line

The centralised model in Hanoi has one obvious advantage: cost. Instead of installing and operating a VAR system in every stadium, VPF needs only one centre, one team, one storage system. On the budget of a Southeast Asian league, this is a sound accounting choice.

But it creates another problem that European leagues do not face to the same degree. The signal from a stadium in the central region or the highlands must travel to Hanoi through weather conditions, through the load on local telecommunications infrastructure, and through the small delays the human eye cannot perceive but which distort the rhythm of communication between the two ends.

In a situation requiring a decision within twenty seconds, half a second of latency already matters. A second and a half is a small crisis. The crowd only sees the referee standing and waiting. They do not see the line waiting.

An empty stadium still produces data; it is the noise that distorts judgement. And in the V.League, the noise does not come only from the stands. It comes from the transmission line, from the number of people in the room, from a referee having to listen to the VAR team while also hearing the roar behind him.

Who pays for the decision

There is a question I have never seen answered satisfactorily at any Vietnamese football press conference: what share of a season's total expenditure goes to the refereeing apparatus?

In many leagues, the answer is a very small number. Money goes to transfers, to foreign strikers, to prize money, to broadcasting. Money for decision-making — training, salaries, equipment, fitness testing, psychological support — is usually the last item considered and the first item cut.

This connects to something larger I have tracked in Asian football for years: when a club must live by its financial statements, sporting decisions are pushed into second place. The pressure to produce short-term results overrides everything else. A refereeing academy does not add points to the table. A VAR centre does not sell tickets. So it sits at the bottom of the priority list, until a match is ruined and public opinion erupts.

The familiar response is to punish a few individuals, hold a training course, and return to business as usual. That response is not wrong on discipline. It is only wrong on structure.

The record of three seasons

Based on my experience following these matches and on the reports VPF publishes after each round, three stable trends are visible across the first three VAR seasons in the V.League.

First, the number of VAR interventions is uneven across rounds. Early-season and late-season rounds tend to record more interventions, while the middle of the season records fewer. The cause may be psychological: cautious officials early on, greater pressure late.

Second, most interventions concern two categories: handball inside the penalty area, and offside positioning. These are also the two most disputed categories in every league worldwide, because both depend on a very short moment and a very specific camera angle.

Third, average review time in the V.League is longer than in the leading European leagues. This is the most important indicator, and also the least mentioned. Long review times do not merely interrupt the match. They are a signal that the VAR team has not settled on how to read the incident, or has not found the decisive angle within the permitted time.

These three trends do not prove that Vietnamese referees are weak. They prove that the system has not been running long enough to form professional reflexes.

Anger in the wrong place

After every match with VAR, public opinion splits into two camps. One believes the referees are acting deliberately. The other believes VAR is useless. Both are placing their anger in the wrong place.

The first camp is wrong to attribute individual intent to a systemic error. There is no evidence that V.League referees are trained to favour anyone. There is abundant evidence that they are placed in situations no semi-professional referee in the world could handle perfectly.

The second camp is wrong to imagine that technology by itself produces fairness. VAR is a tool, and every tool reflects the quality of the hand holding it. In leagues with professional referee corps, VAR reduces clear errors markedly. In leagues without them, VAR makes errors visible — and that is progress, however uncomfortable.

A match does not end when the clock runs out; it ends when we face our own mistakes. Vietnamese football is in the middle of that moment, and the default reaction is to look for someone to blame.

Another view, which I consider more accurate: VAR in the V.League has not failed. It has merely exposed a gap that has existed for perhaps twenty years and has never been looked at directly.

The blind spot of the stand

There is a paradox every official knows. When a referee is right, nobody remembers. When a referee is wrong, nobody forgets. A whole season contains thousands of decisions, and three wrong ones are enough to shape that person's image in the public memory.

In the V.League, social media amplifies the paradox. An incident is cut into a ten-second clip, played over and over, captioned with a claim the viewer considers self-evident. But a ten-second clip does not contain the real speed, does not contain the referee's angle, does not contain the distance from the official's eye to the point of contact.

In football, there are runs only the referee sees; everyone else sees only the outcome. That is why I never judge an incident from a viral clip alone. I need the fourth angle, the frame rate, the position of the assistant, and the interval between the ball leaving the foot and the whistle sounding.

It is also why I believe publishing the audio of the exchange between the on-field referee and the VAR team would be the single most valuable step VPF could take next season. Several leagues already do this. It does not make controversy disappear, but it shifts the argument from speculation about motive to discussion of craft.

Conclusion: one recommendation that has nothing to do with VAR

If I could offer Vietnamese football a single recommendation for the next three years, it would not concern buying more cameras or upgrading transmission lines.

It would concern turning refereeing into a full-time profession. A contract. A living wage. A pathway from junior official to FIFA referee. A dedicated unit that reviews its own footage after every round and publishes the results.

When there are thirty people officiating full time, VAR will become a natural part of the job, rather than a room in Hanoi the public only remembers when something goes wrong.

A whistle can change a club's fate, but it must never change the conscience of the person blowing it. To protect that conscience, the best move is not to hand the referee more cameras. It is to hand him the time to become good.