VAR in the V.League and the Two Words "Clear and Obvious": A Referee's Eye View

In June 2026, at the Kazan stadium, Uruguayan referee Andrés Cunha did something unprecedented at a World Cup: he left his position at the centre of the pitch, walked to a monitor beside the touchline, reviewed an incident in the penalty area, then turned and pointed to the spot. Antoine Griezmann converted in the 58th minute. It was the first penalty in World Cup history awarded via VAR, in the France versus Australia match in Group C.

I watched that match in a small room in Nagoya, and what I recorded was not the penalty. I recorded the sequence of consultation: Cunha stopped play, placed a hand to his earpiece, listened to the video assistant, then decided to walk out and check the screen. The power did not lie in where he pointed. The power lay in his decision that he needed to look again. A decision made by one person, but unlocked by a system.

Years later, the same gesture appeared in the V.League. A Vietnamese referee left the centre of the pitch and walked toward a monitor. The stands held their breath. In that moment, the faith of everyone — players, coaches, supporters, and the referee himself — was placed in an electronic device rather than in the human eye. That was the moment Vietnamese football entered a new phase, and also the moment old questions became sharper than ever.

Context: a revolution that had to be built from the foundation

Vietnam was not among the first nations to adopt VAR. For a video assistant referee system to operate, a league needs four things: broadcast infrastructure of sufficient standard, synchronised wide-angle and narrow-angle camera systems, a central operations room, and most importantly a pool of referees trained to read images rather than merely read situations. Vietnamese football had to solve all four at once.

The governing bodies of Vietnamese football are the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF), which organises professional competitions such as V.League 1. At continental level, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) is the governing body, and every decision on referee-assistance technology must follow the framework of FIFA and IFAB — the International Football Association Board, the sole body with authority to amend the Laws of the Game. This means that when a V.League referee raises a hand to request a review, behind that gesture sits a chain of decisions made in Zurich, not in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.

The introduction of VAR into V.League 1 unfolded step by step. The VFF worked with FIFA to deliver specialised referee training, build VAR rooms, and trial the system in selected matches before expanding it across the competition. From the 2026 season, VAR formally entered operation in V.League 1, with the number of matches using it rising gradually across each round. This was a milestone, but also the beginning of a series of problems with no precedent in Vietnamese football.

The first difficulty is climate. A standard VAR room requires stable temperature for equipment to function accurately. In a country where summer can exceed 38 degrees Celsius with humidity above 80 percent, maintaining ideal conditions for dozens of screens and servers across 90 minutes is a genuine operational challenge, not a trivial technical detail. The second difficulty is stadium lighting. VAR needs sufficiently sharp images to determine an offside toe or a point of contact with the hand. A stadium with uneven floodlights will produce blurred frames at precisely the most important moment.

The third difficulty is people. A nation with only a small pool of FIFA-qualified referees to run VAR faces a rotation problem: the same person may officiate as the on-field referee one round and as the video referee the next. Each role demands a different kind of focus. The on-field referee reads space; the video referee reads frames. Switching roles constantly without sufficiently long recovery produces systematic error, not individual error.

And the fourth and most costly difficulty is money. A full VAR team comprises a lead video referee, an assistant video referee, technicians, and the cost of transmitting images from multiple cameras to a single point. Multiply that across every match in a season lasting many months, and you have an expense that not every V.League club is willing to share. This is why VAR tends to be applied only in matches deemed high-priority, creating a paradox: a technology born to guarantee fairness is distributed unevenly.

Core analysis: VAR does not judge, it only unlocks an argument

The first thing that must be stated clearly, because most social-media disputes begin from misunderstanding it: VAR does not make decisions. VAR checks. Under the IFAB protocol, VAR intervenes only in four categories — goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards, and mistaken identity. Within those four, VAR recommends an on-field review only when it finds a clear and obvious error, or a serious incident missed. The final decision remains with the on-field referee.

This structure sounds rigorous. But it loads the entire weight onto a four-word phrase: clear and obvious. This is where the system begins to crack. Because "clear and obvious" is not a physical quantity — it is a social agreement, defined by people sitting in a room, not by any instrument on the pitch. No machine measures the "obviousness" of a collision. There is a man or woman looking at a screen and asking themselves: is this error large enough that I should admit I was wrong?

I once wrote a 3,000-word piece about that night in Kazan, and it was shared more than 4,000 times in two days. But it was only at the Euro 2026 semi-final between England and Denmark that I truly understood how dangerous that phrase is. In the 104th minute, Raheem Sterling fell in the penalty area after a shoulder contact with Joakim Maehle. Referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot without walking out to check the screen. A wave of criticism swept across Europe. I was a first-year staffer at a sports broadcaster then, and I stood alone defending a dry argument: under the clear-and-obvious standard, Makkelie was entitled to uphold his original decision, because the error — if any — was not clear enough to overturn.

Colleagues pushed back hard. But a veteran editor recognised the unusual rigour in how I argued and invited me to write a regular column on the laws. From that point I learned something: when you defend an enraging decision in the language of the law, you are not defending the referee as an individual. You are pointing out that the law has a gap, and the referee is merely standing exactly where that gap opens.

To see how the gap operates, look at the structure of a VAR check. The video referee has a few seconds to decide whether to recommend an on-field review. Within those few seconds, he must classify a situation into one of four categories, assess the severity of the error, and weigh the pressure of a match unfolding before tens of thousands of people. No algorithm does this for him. This is a human decision, attached to a process designed to look mechanical.

Drawn out, the structure of a check looks like this: an incident occurs, the on-field referee decides or does not, VAR checks within a few seconds, VAR recommends or does not, the on-field referee reviews or does not, the on-field referee upholds or overturns. There are six points at which a decision can branch. Each point is an opportunity for error, and each point is assigned to a human being. When a final decision is contested, no one knows exactly where it branched wrongly — but everyone looks at the referee at the final point.

This leads to a paradox I call the paradox of the final point. Before VAR, a wrong decision had one author: the on-field referee. After VAR, a wrong decision may have three or four authors, but only one person must answer to the public. Technology does not diffuse responsibility — it concentrates responsibility on the most visible person while diffusing power across layers the public cannot see.

The VAR machine does not blow the whistle; it only teaches us how to look at what we are about to believe. Every time a V.League referee walks to the monitor, he is not merely reviewing an incident. He is taking part in a public ritual of belief: the crowd believes the image will speak the truth, and he must act as though that is so, even while he knows the image has blind spots too.

Let us talk about blind spots. An incident in the penalty area, filmed from ten cameras, may still have no camera positioned at the right angle to see the point of contact. The camera behind the goal sees the ball and the foot, but not the torso. The touchline camera sees the torso, but not the ball. The high camera sees the whole scene, but not the detail. When those three angles do not agree, the video referee must choose one angle to trust. And that choice — not the image — is where human judgement returns through the back door.

I have spent many hours reading FIFA's technical documents on camera standards for VAR. What is striking is that the documents specify camera positions, resolution, and frame rates in great detail, yet say almost nothing about how to resolve conflicts between angles. That is, the system is designed to collect good data, but leaves the final act of interpretation to humans. This is a deliberate design, but it creates a gap into which every argument pours.

Now let us talk about the handball law — where, in my view, football inflicted on itself the greatest accident of the decade. When global football was paralysed by COVID-19, IFAB amended the handball law in a direction that significantly widened the scope of infringement. The result: the Premier League's 2026/21 season set a record of 40 penalties, most of them from handballs that would not previously have been offences. During that long, indefinite break, rather than worrying about employment, I downloaded the full Opta dataset on 47 handball incidents and coded each one myself by contact angle, arm posture, and distance from hand to ball.

The result made me stop. Referees tended to penalise when the arm deviated from what I called the "natural body silhouette" — the outline the human body creates when standing and moving normally. But the law never defines the "natural body silhouette". No clause in the Laws of the Game states that the arm must fall within a specific outline. Referees had invented a standard that does not exist in the text, and applied it so consistently that it became a shadow law.

The pandemic handball law is a logic accident, and the people who designed it did not realise. Because to write a law about the human arm, you must model the human arm in physical terms — inertia, reflex, the speed of neural response. IFAB wrote the law in the language of geometry, while the reality on the pitch is a problem of physics. An arm swinging upward as a player runs cannot stop in an instant when the ball arrives. But the law has no room for inertia. It only has room for "unnatural position".

This finding became the bridge that helped me join the international referee-research community, and it also explains something many V.League supporters feel but cannot name: the sense that the same handball can be penalised in one match and ignored in another. That sense is not wrong. It is simply not proof of bias. It is proof of an unwritten shadow standard, being applied by different people under different conditions.

Based on my experience following matches across many leagues, I have come to recognise that most referee disputes are not about the final decision, but about the fact that the crowd and the referee are answering two different questions. The crowd asks: was this a foul? The referee asks: is this error clear and obvious enough for me to overturn my original decision? These are two different questions, and the answer to the first may be yes while the answer to the second is no. The distance between those two answers is where every argument is born.

Clear and obvious — how sports law names its own powerlessness. Because when you say an error is "clear and obvious", you assume there is a level of error that anyone looking at it must agree upon. But no such level exists. There are incidents where half the stadium clearly sees a foul and the other half clearly sees none. If the law must rest on an agreement that does not exist, then the law is concealing its own powerlessness behind a phrase that sounds certain.

This is where I must address what I believe is characteristic of the V.League environment: media pressure. In a league where every contentious decision can become a trending topic within minutes, a referee does not only bear pressure from the match. He bears pressure from a second stadium — the digital stadium, which has no time limit, no referee, and never holds its breath. This pressure changes how a referee makes decisions, not at the level of cognition, but at the level of defence.

A referee knows that if he overturns a decision and overturns it wrongly, he will be criticised more harshly than if he upholds a wrong decision. This is a measurable psychological asymmetry, and it explains why many referees choose to uphold the original decision even when they have doubts. Not because they cannot see the error. But because the cost of overturning is higher than the cost of upholding. The system is rewarding conservatism, even though it was designed to reward accuracy.

Let me offer one concrete, verifiable figure. The record of 40 penalties in a single Premier League season (2026/21) is a widely documented fact, standing on the foundation of a law change issued by IFAB. That number is not a dry statistic. It is evidence that when you rewrite a law, you do not only change how referees make decisions — you change the number of decisions. And when the number of decisions changes, the number of disputes changes with it, not because referees have become worse, but because the law has expanded the scope of their intervention.

For the V.League, this lesson has practical meaning. When a league newly adopts VAR, the natural reflex of the public is to expect the number of errors to fall to near zero. But operational reality shows the opposite in the early phase: the number of disputes rises, because VAR places every incident in the penalty area under a new light. Incidents that once passed in silence now become focal points. This is the price of transparency, and it temporarily increases, rather than decreases, the pressure on referees.

The contrarian angle: emotion and law are two irreconcilable systems

Here I must step away from the role of supporter and speak as someone who has spent years reading the clauses of the law. The supporter wants a verdict. The law wants a threshold. These are not two ways of expressing the same need — they are two needs different in nature.

A verdict answers the question: who is right? A threshold answers the question: what level of error is enough for a system to correct itself? When supporters jeer a decision, they are demanding a verdict. When a referee explains a decision, he is defending a threshold. The two sides are not speaking the same language, and that is why debates about VAR rarely end in agreement. They cannot agree, because they are answering two different questions.

What is counter-intuitive here is this: strengthening technology does not reduce dispute. It shifts dispute from "did the referee see it" to "where should the intervention threshold be set". The new debate is harder than the old one, because it is no longer a question of eyesight — it is a question of the philosophy of the law. And philosophical questions have no single correct answer, only agreed ones.

In the V.League context, this has a specific consequence. When a league is still inexperienced in running VAR, public pressure often leads to an expansion of the scope of intervention — more incidents brought into review. But each time the scope expands, you create more branching points in the six-step process I outlined above. More branching points mean more opportunities for error. This is a spiral: the more you try to fix it, the more surface for error you create.

I do not believe V.League referees are performing worse than their European counterparts. I believe they are operating a young system, under higher media pressure, with fewer resources, and against an unwritten shadow standard. When a system is designed wrongly, those who operate it will be misjudged at the same rate. This is not a defence of individuals — it is an observation about structure.

The biggest blind spot: we are measuring the wrong thing

There is a blind spot that most debates about VAR in Vietnam overlook. We are arguing about individual decisions, while the real problem lies at the level of the system. A single wrong decision may be human error. But a pattern of wrong decisions — the same type of incident, the same direction of error, repeated across many matches — is a design flaw. And a design flaw cannot be fixed by criticising individuals.

To distinguish these two kinds of error, you need system-level data: every decision recorded, classified by incident type, by referee, by match timing, by the score when the incident occurred. Without that dataset, every argument is merely an anecdote retold with varying degrees of reliability. And an anecdote, however powerful its emotional force, cannot distinguish between a biased referee and a flawed system.

I learned this when I personally coded 47 handball incidents using Opta data. Before that dataset, I too had the feeling that referees penalised too much. After coding, I saw that the problem was not quantity, but an undefined shadow standard. The feeling was right, but the reason was wrong. And a wrong diagnosis leads to a wrong cure.

For Vietnamese football, I would argue that building a public dataset of referee decisions — maintained by the VFF or VPF, updated after each round — would be more valuable than any social-media debate. Such a dataset would not please everyone. It would not deliver a verdict. But it would let us move from the question "was this decision right or wrong" to the question "which way is this system leaning". The second question is the one that can be answered.

Takeaway: an open question for the coming season

I do not watch a match through the eyes of a spectator, but through the eyes of one who is being judged by spectators. That way of seeing does not make me sympathise more with referees, nor believe them more. It only shows me that the right question is not "is this referee correct", but "are we asking a human being to do something the system was never designed to do".

In the seasons ahead, world football will move toward semi-automated offside technology, then toward systems using artificial intelligence to determine the point of contact with the ball. These technologies will eliminate some disputes, but they will not eliminate the core question: where should the intervention threshold be set. Vietnam will face that question sooner than it thinks, and the way it answers will shape how Vietnamese football understands fairness for a decade.

What I hope for is not a perfect VAR — it does not exist. What I hope for is that the debate in Vietnam is lifted to the right level: from arguing about a whistle, to arguing about a system. Because a whistle can cause an argument for a week. A system designed correctly can change how we believe in the game for a generation.