Three Seasons of VAR in V.League 1: The Refereeing Numbers Nobody Has Published

I was sitting in the third row of the press tribune, notebook open, pencil ruling two columns. Minute 76, a collision inside the penalty area. The referee stood still, hand on his earpiece, then left his position, ran beyond the 16.5-metre line, and stopped in front of the monitor by the touchline. The stands held their breath. I counted. Ninety-six seconds. When he turned, his arm pointed straight at the penalty spot, and the murmur split into two opposing currents: half the stadium applauded, the other half cursed.

In those ninety-six seconds I wrote not a single word about right or wrong. I only recorded the number. After seven years covering disciplinary files in La Liga and three seasons of VAR in V.League 1, I have developed a professional habit: people argue about verdicts, while I measure duration and consistency. Slow-motion replay can answer whether the ball touched a hand. It cannot answer the bigger question: is this league applying the same standard to every team, from the first matchday to the last?

That question haunted me for three seasons. And the answer, after cross-checking thousands of incidents, does not lie in the machinery.

VAR first appeared in V.League 1 in the 2026 season, after years of delay caused by infrastructure and cost. In the early phase, the technology was deployed only in a handful of matches and at venues able to install cameras, transmission lines and an operations room. The Vietnam Football Federation and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company had to invest in equipment, train referees, and invite FIFA specialists for workshops. That was no small outlay for a league whose operating budget remains tight.

From the 2026-24 season, the league shifted to a format crossing two calendar years in order to align with the Asian calendar. This was a major change: 14 clubs, 26 rounds, denser scheduling, shorter breaks. For a referee, that means more matches officiated per month and less recovery time between them. I spent most of that season recording something few people notice: the refereeing appointment schedule.

Because when people talk about VAR, they usually talk about machines. But machines do not press buttons by themselves. There is a human being sitting in a closed room, watching a screen, deciding whether to intervene. The crux of every VAR controversy in V.League lies not in the technology but in the intervention threshold — the degree of clear error a VAR referee considers sufficient to call a colleague to the monitor.

And that threshold, across three seasons, has not been consistent. This is what I want to demonstrate with data, not with feeling.

I began by counting cards. In my spreadsheet, I logged every yellow and red card in V.League 1 across seasons, along with the minute of the offence, the score at the time, and whether the decision involved VAR intervention. Something interesting emerged: once VAR was widely applied, the average number of yellow cards per match did not fall as many predicted. It rose slightly, then levelled off.

The reason is not that players foul more. The reason is that referees dare to whistle more. When there is a system behind them to confirm, the on-field referee hesitates less over challenges on the edge of the box — where a wrong call can change the entire match. I saw this in La Liga during its early VAR years, and it repeats in Vietnam with a different flavour: in Spain, players protest by surrounding the referee; in Vietnam, they react by standing still and looking up at the screen, waiting.

But card counts are only the surface. What matters more are penalties.

I compared the number of spot kicks awarded across the three VAR seasons with the two seasons immediately before. The increase was pronounced. Part of it came from collisions in the box that had previously been missed now being reviewed. But another part — and this is my point — came from a shift in how referees understand the handball law.

The handball law has been amended several times. Each amendment redefines the threshold of "unnatural". In a league where referees must simultaneously absorb new laws, adapt to VAR, and withstand public pressure, application cannot be perfectly uniform. I reviewed 47 similar incidents across three seasons and counted at least nine cases in which two nearly identical challenges produced two opposite conclusions.

Nine out of forty-seven. Nearly twenty percent. That is a figure luck cannot explain.

This is where I must be clear about how I work. Numbers do not lie, but the person recording them can. If I only counted penalties without logging the camera angle, the timing and the score, I would produce a meaningless statistic. A penalty in the 90th minute when the home side trails 0-2 has a completely different analytical value from a penalty in the 12th minute at 0-0. It is the same number, but the context is not.

So I record in three layers. The first layer is fact: minute, player, type of offence. The second is context: score, game state, pressure. The third is process: whether VAR called, how long it took, and the final outcome. That third layer is what costs me the most time — and it is precisely what the league organisers have never published.

People watch players run; I watch when they stop. The same applies to referees: I care about the moment they decide not to intervene, not only the moment they do. A good VAR referee is not the one who calls his colleague to the monitor most often, but the one who knows when not to call — when the error is not clear enough to overturn the on-field decision. FIFA's protocol calls this "clear and obvious error", but the phrase does not measure itself. It depends on who reads it.

I counted VAR interventions in one season and divided by the number of matches. The average per match sits at a low level, far lower than spectators perceive. This is a familiar paradox: one controversial decision is repeated hundreds of times on social media, while twenty correct decisions are forgotten. Public attention is not proportional to actual frequency. And when actual frequency is low while controversy is high, the problem is not the number of decisions but how they are communicated.

A match lasts 90 minutes, but discipline lasts a whole season. Refereeing discipline is the same. It is not found in a single whistle, but in maintaining the same standard across 26 rounds. I tested this simply: take ten similar challenges from rounds 1 to 5, then compare them with ten similar challenges from rounds 20 to 26. If the standard is stable, the award rate should be roughly equal. The results showed that the award rate late in the season was higher than early in the season.

There are several explanations. Players may challenge more aggressively under relegation pressure. Referees may want tighter control as matches grow in importance. But there is another explanation few want to hear: it is a sign of fatigue in judgement. When a referee works too much, they tend to whistle to protect themselves from criticism rather than let the match run.

Here I want to talk about workload.

Tracking the refereeing committee's appointment schedule, I noticed some on-field referees working at very high density during peak periods. As the league enters its run-in, matches pile up, and the pool of referees qualified to handle top fixtures is limited. This is not unique to Vietnam. Any league with few internationally graded referees faces it. But in Vietnam the pressure is greater, because the number of FIFA-recognised referees at the highest levels is not large, while the number of matches needing officiating has grown under the new format.

The consequences are concrete. A referee working four matches in twelve days has less recovery time, reduced concentration in the closing minutes, and a greater tendency to decide by habit. I have written before about fixture congestion as the primary culprit behind player injuries. For referees the issue is the same, except nobody measures the "injury" of a wrong decision.

Look at another indicator: the duration of each VAR review. In the earliest VAR matches, I recorded reviews lasting three or four minutes. By the most recent season, average duration had shortened considerably. This is a good sign, and it does not come from technology — it comes from people. Referees learned to narrow the incident faster, to know which camera angle to check first, and to coordinate with the VAR team more smoothly.

In other words, the hardest part of VAR has improved. But the most contentious part remains. A short review does not equal a correct decision. A referee can reach a wrong conclusion in thirty seconds if they have already formed it before looking at the screen.

I want to compare with a regional league. Thai League introduced VAR in 2026, about four years earlier than V.League 1. That gap matters: they had more time to train, to err, to correct, and to build a dedicated VAR referee pool. V.League 1 had to learn faster while still keeping pace with a competition changing its format. K League and J.League are further ahead still, but they also have very different resources.

None of that excuses errors. But it places errors in their proper context. And context is part of the truth.

I do not believe in luck; I believe in slow-motion replay. And slow-motion replay shows me a clear pattern across three seasons: the number of clear errors has fallen, but the number of controversies has not. Because controversy is not born from error — it is born from a lack of transparency about process. Spectators can accept a referee being wrong. They struggle to accept a system that refuses to explain itself.

Here I want to say something many will not like: VAR has not made Vietnamese football less controversial, and it has no obligation to. The expectation that a device will extinguish all debate was wrong from the outset.

What VAR can do is narrow the space for clear error. What it cannot do is explain why a similar incident in round 5 was officiated differently in round 22. That gap is not a technical problem. It is a problem of process and of people.

And here is the counter-intuitive point: if you want to reduce controversy, the most effective step is not buying more cameras but publishing data. The number of VAR interventions, the number of on-field decisions overturned, the number of times referees declined a review — all of it can be published periodically. When data is brought into the light, fans can distinguish a systemic error from an isolated accident. When data is kept hidden, every error is read as systemic.

With no crowd present, the referee still has to strain his eyes. But the crowd is present, and they have the right to know how the process operated. The organisers' silence is producing something more expensive than machinery: suspicion. And suspicion, once entrenched, cannot be erased by any camera.

I am not proposing to scrap VAR. I am proposing to make it transparent. Four things can be done immediately: publish a VAR report after every round; publicly explain at least one contentious decision each month; widen the pool of qualified referees to reduce workload density; and protect their recovery time as carefully as a player's. In football, there are victories nobody notices — a correct decision in the 90th minute is one of them. The problem is that we only remember the wrong ones.