Who Decides in the V.League: The Gap Between the VFF and the VPF

On the night of January 5, 2026, on the grass of Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Nguyen Xuan Son stayed down with a broken leg. Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 in the second leg and won the ASEAN Cup for the third time, after 2026 and 2026. The stands almost burst. But in the press area, the first question was not about formations. It was: a player contracted to Thep Xanh Nam Dinh was injured on national duty. Who pays, who decides when he returns, and who is accountable if the recovery drags on? I watched that match from Nha Trang, through a screen, with a notebook beside me. And I recognised a familiar reflex in Vietnamese football: whenever a dispute appears, the default answer is that the regulations are already clear. The louder the stands, the easier the truth hides. Authority in Vietnamese professional football is split across three layers. The Vietnam Football Federation holds the technical and regulatory side: national teams, the Referee Committee, the Disciplinary Committee, the club licensing system. The Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company holds the operational side: running V.League 1 and V.League 2, setting fixtures, managing match operations, exploiting commercial rights. Above them sit the Asian Football Confederation and the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, where every appeal finally stops. Read that map closely and one detail is easy to miss. The body that runs the league does not appoint referees. The body that appoints referees does not issue disciplinary rulings. The body that issues disciplinary rulings does not audit club finances. Four tasks, four names, and nobody owns the whole chain of accountability. The 2026-2026 season exposed that gap more than usual. The calendar had to bend around FIFA international windows and around the ASEAN Cup, with the league pausing while the national team gathered from late 2026. During that period, clubs lost internationals such as Nguyen Hoang Duc and Nguyen Quang Hai, yet the employment contracts, the wages and the performance targets stayed exactly where they were. Who benefits and who carries the risk is a question no domestic document has ever answered in full. Referees: appointed by one committee, working in a company's competition VAR arrived in the V.League in the 2026 season and expanded in the seasons that followed. Its operating rules come from the International Football Association Board, and those rules are narrow: the technology may intervene only in four categories, namely a goal or no goal, a penalty, a direct red card, and mistaken identity. The final decision still belongs to the on-field referee. That means the ultimate responsibility sits neither with the competition organiser nor with the technology. It sits with an individual appointed by the Referee Committee. When that individual errs, the process follows a path few people ever see. The Referee Committee meets, conducts an internal assessment, grades the severity of the error, and sends an official letter to the affected club. The footage of the exchange between referee and VAR is not published. The audio of the conversation is not published. And because nothing is published, every argument ends in belief or in suspicion rather than in evidence. A benchmark already exists and can be verified. Since 2026, the Premier League has broadcast audio of referee and VAR exchanges for contentious incidents. The International Football Association Board has also approved trials in which referees announce their decision on the pitch after a review. In Germany, where I was born and grew up with the game, refereeing controversy is no rarer than in the V.League. But there is a public complaints channel and a federation tribunal able to summon, question and publish conclusions. What the V.League lacks is not expertise. What it lacks is a rule that compels publication. The distance between those two things is the distance between a league that sells belief and a league that sells certainty. Based on my experience of watching these matches, most Vietnamese supporters do not demand that a referee be right one hundred per cent of the time. They want to know why he thought what he thought. That is a far cheaper request than buying more cameras. Personnel: the contract belongs to the club, the obligation belongs to the federation Back to the question in Bangkok. A player injured on national duty falls inside a legal framework written by FIFA, not by Vietnamese football. FIFA's regulations on the status and transfer of players oblige clubs to release players during international windows. In exchange, FIFA operates a club protection programme: when a player is unable to play because of an injury sustained on national duty and the absence exceeds 28 days, the club is compensated on a daily basis, subject to an annual cap. That 28-day threshold is the most important number in this story, because it shows the system was designed to replace wages, not sporting loss. Thep Xanh Nam Dinh received compensation for the weeks it lost its player. The club was not compensated for losing its leading striker at the decisive stage of a season, for matches already sold to spectators who came to see one name, for league positions surrendered because of an injury sustained more than a thousand kilometres away. Insurance pays money. It does not pay points. Behind that sits a second question that is asked far less often: who has the authority to decide when the player returns? In this case there were two medical teams, two employers across two different periods, and one player. The club bears the long-term cost but does not control the workload at international level. The federation controls the workload but does not bear the long-term cost. This is the kind of conflict no national regulation can settle, because it originates in an international text. Discipline and licensing: where the first instance becomes the last For disciplinary offences, authority rests with the Disciplinary Committee of the Vietnam Football Federation. An appeals mechanism exists on paper: a club can petition higher levels within the federation, then the Asian Football Confederation, and finally the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. But paper and practice are different stories. A case in Lausanne means costs in Swiss francs, international lawyers, interpreters, travel and months of waiting. Most V.League clubs hold no reserve for that kind of expense and have no permanent legal department to pursue a file across several seasons. The result is a familiar paradox: the first instance becomes the final instance, not because it is more correct, but because it is cheaper. The club licensing system contains a similar paradox, one layer deeper. Club finances, infrastructure standards and staffing standards are audited under the licensing regulations of the Asian Football Confederation. Meanwhile, the body that runs the competition needs clubs to survive so that the league has enough teams, a fixture list and sponsorship contracts. A single body both inspects its own subjects and needs those subjects to stay alive. This is a structural conflict of interest, not a story about bad individuals. It also explains why licensing decisions across the region tend to arrive late, close to kick-off, at a point when removing a club from the competition has become operationally impossible. My way of reading signals like this was formed in 2026, when stadiums closed during the pandemic and I no longer had a crowd to lean on. I turned to recording numbers from old matches. One example I still keep in my notebook: across 20 matches between 2026 and 2026, Nguyen Tuan Anh's distance covered at Hoang Anh Gia Lai fell 17 per cent, while his accurate passes rose 23 per cent. When the noise disappears, the data emerges. When the stands are empty, the match starts speaking its real voice. Applied to the question of authority, what matters is not the number of mistakes but the number of documents published. Vietnamese football produces a great many decisions and publishes very few reasons. I do not trust my eyes. I trust what my eyes cannot see. Where I could be wrong The substitute sees most clearly who is acting. But a writer in the stands, which is what I am, only sees what leaks out. So I have to argue against myself. First, the two-body model is not necessarily a design flaw. Separating commercial operations from the administrative apparatus, more than a decade ago, gave the V.League television rights, sponsorship contracts and a more stable calendar than the period before it. If a single organisation managed, sold and punished at the same time, the risk of concentrated power would be greater than the risk of separation. Second, transparency has a price, and the price is not abstract. Publishing referee and VAR audio has pushed European referees into online attacks that reached their families. In a market where stands exert heavy pressure, shielding referees is a defensible choice rather than simply a bad habit. Third, the European yardstick does not transplant directly. The German Football Association has millions of members and decades of accumulated case law; the Vietnam Football Federation operates with far fewer resources. The question is not whether Vietnamese football behaves wrongly, but how far this system can go with its current finances, staff and culture. If I am wrong, I am wrong in treating opacity as a cause, when it may only be a consequence of scarcity. What I still hold to is one judgement: when an institution has to say repeatedly that authority is clearly defined, it is usually because in practice it is not. That phrasing is a signal, not a conclusion. Forward thought Within 24 months, I expect at least one V.League club to publicly escalate a disciplinary or refereeing dispute to Asian level, and at least one trial of published VAR audio in a match round. Those are two verifiable predictions. If neither happens, I will be the first to record that I misread it. The greatest asset of a league is not its sponsorship contracts but the predictability of its rulings. For a football economy selling tickets every week, that asset is cheaper than a stadium and harder to build than a stadium.