VAR, Xuan Son and the thing Vietnamese football cannot import

On January 5, 2026, at Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok, Nguyen Xuan Son lay on a stretcher. The second leg of the AFF Cup final was barely into its second quarter of an hour. In Chicago, I sat in front of two screens: one streaming the match, the other holding a statistics sheet. My time zone runs twelve hours behind Bangkok, so the game unfolded exactly when I usually spend the morning rereading the previous night's dispatches.

What I remember is not the 3-2 scoreline, nor the third AFF Cup title after 2026 and 2026. What I remember is the silence after that striker left the pitch. A national team had just closed the most successful tournament in seven years in precisely the posture that had carried it through the whole competition: dependent on a man who was not born in Vietnam.

During the same stretch of time, Vietnamese football imported something else. Not a player. A room. The VAR room.

Two imported goods, two payments made, and one gap nobody has measured.

I make a living offering predictions, so I know I am stepping onto slippery ground. Chicago Fire taught me this: football always knows how to trample the script. The team with the lowest passing accuracy in the league, scoring the most counter-attacking goals in the league, and nobody wanted to believe that was a tactical manifesto rather than crudeness. That lesson has followed me for a decade. Writing about Vietnamese football from half a world away, I try to keep enough distance that I do not hear the crowd before I see the data.

And the data here tells a fairly cold story.

Context: seven years from one generation to one technical room

In January 2026, Vietnam's under-23 side reached the final of the AFC U-23 Championship in Changzhou. That same year, the senior team won the AFF Cup after a ten-year wait, under Park Hang-seo. In 2026 and 2026, Vietnam took SEA Games gold. An entire decade of Vietnamese football was sustained by a single generation: most of them graduates of the HAGL-Arsenal JMG Academy, founded in 2026, whose first cohort debuted in 2026, plus a handful of players from other youth setups.

It was a beautiful story. And like every beautiful story in sport, its ending was postponed.

In January 2026, Park Hang-seo left. Philippe Troussier took over with a long-term project, and that project collapsed faster than the most pessimistic observer predicted. On March 26, 2026, at My Dinh Stadium, Vietnam lost 0-3 to Indonesia. Troussier's contract was terminated immediately after that match. In May 2026, Kim Sang-sik was appointed. In the second round of AFC qualifying for the 2026 World Cup, Vietnam finished behind Iraq and Indonesia and failed to advance, while Indonesia reached the third and then the fourth round.

Then came the AFF Cup 2026. Vietnam won it. Nguyen Xuan Son, a naturalised striker born in Brazil, scored seven goals and took both the golden boot and the tournament MVP award. He broke his tibia and fibula in the second leg of the final, and the team still won 3-2, taking the tie 5-3 on aggregate.

Running parallel to that curve is another curve, discussed far less. The V-League began introducing VAR in the 2026 season, with technical support from FIFA. Since then, a handful of matches each round are run with a VAR room, and every time it happens, viewers get to watch something they had never seen in the domestic league: decisions dissected frame by frame.

I do not think these are two separate stories. I think they are two expressions of the same habit.

Core one: VAR does not remove judgement, it relocates it

There is a widespread misunderstanding about technology in football, and it comes from the way broadcasters describe VAR. People say VAR corrects mistakes. It sounds as though error has been removed from the equation.

The reality is different. VAR does not eliminate human judgement. It moves judgement from a referee on the pitch to a referee in front of a monitor and, more importantly, it moves judgement from the instant to the frame. The assistant referee must decide in half a second while the ball is travelling. The VAR official has thirty seconds, five camera angles and a line to draw.

That difference is not small. It changes the kind of decision being made. No longer does anyone ask whether a player is in a position to gain an advantage. They ask whether the tip of a boot has passed the perpendicular line projected from a defender's shoulder.

On November 22, 2026, at the World Cup in Qatar, Argentina played Saudi Arabia. In the first half, Argentina had three goals disallowed for offside. Three goals, in one half, in a match the same team ultimately lost 1-2. Semi-automated offside technology was used by FIFA at a World Cup for the first time at that very tournament.

I watched that match in a cafe on Chicago's north side, surrounded by Latin American Americans shouting in Spanish. None of them understood why the goals had vanished. On the screen a line appeared, thin as thread, and a goal was erased. The waiter, a man of about sixty, looked at me and said in broken English: is football mathematics now?

I could not answer him. But I have never forgotten the question.

The problem is not whether the technology is right or wrong. The problem is that the technology has redefined what a goal is, and the new definition strips part of the attacking instinct out of the sport.

Look at the tactical consequences. When the offside line becomes thread-thin, defenders are handed a free gift: simply stand correctly, and every sprint by a striker becomes meaningless. The art of beating the offside trap, once the mark of an intelligent forward, of a Thomas Muller or a Filippo Inzaghi, has been replaced by the skill of timing a run to within a few centimetres. Strikers no longer need to read the rhythm of a defensive line. They need to read the rhythm of a clock.

Coaches at the biggest clubs spotted this long ago. High defensive lines no longer fear punishment by a clever run. They fear punishment by a long ball over the top, and a long ball over the top is far easier to defend, because it depends on a single moment rather than a chain of combination play.

Interestingly, FIFA has recognised the problem itself. Arsene Wenger, FIFA's chief of global football development, has proposed changing the offside law so that a player is only penalised when their entire body is beyond the last defender, a proposal the press has called the daylight rule, and the idea has been discussed and trialled at certain levels. The fact that FIFA must consider rewriting the law to protect attacking instinct is an admission that the current version of offside has gone too far.

But Vietnam's story sits on a different floor.

In the V-League, VAR was not introduced to solve a millimetre-offside crisis. It was introduced to solve a confidence crisis. When contentious decisions pile up across seasons, and each time the organisers can offer only an explanatory press release, buying a VAR system becomes the most attractive option: fast, tangible, photographable, publishable, proof to the public that something was done.

And this is where I want to put the emphasis.

VAR demands a foundation Vietnam has not finished building. To run a compliant VAR room you need dedicated VAR officials, replay technicians, synchronised camera systems, redundant connections and, most importantly, a full-time referee workforce that can be assessed and ranked transparently. When those conditions are not yet met, technology does not fill the gap. It magnifies it.

I once watched a V-League match where a VAR check for an offside situation lasted several minutes, a review that would take under thirty seconds in any top league. Not because Vietnamese referees are poor. Because the protocol has not been standardised to the last step, and because the people in that room have not accumulated enough hours for reflex to become professional reflex.

What Vietnamese football needs is not more VAR rooms but more full-time professional referees, and that is an investment nobody wants to photograph.

Core two: star-branded academies and the trap of glamour

Here I have to return to a subject I have pursued for a long time, and I know it will irritate people.

The academy model attached to the name of a former star or a famous businessman is the most common model in Southeast Asian football, and it is usually sold as a systemic solution. It is not a systemic solution. It is a personal project with a budget.

The HAGL-Arsenal JMG Academy is the most beautiful example and also the most misunderstood. Founded in 2026, scouting children from across the country, training according to a curriculum built by Arsenal and JMG, and launching its first cohort in 2026. It was a serious, expensive project, tightly bound to the finances of one private conglomerate. The outcome is well known: around ten players who entered the history of Vietnamese football.

But ask the harder question. After nearly two decades, how many similar models have been replicated? How many V-League clubs run scouting and development systems deep enough to reliably produce senior internationals, rather than merely meeting the licensing criteria of the continental confederation?

The answer, in general terms and without needing a specific figure, is very few.

And here I want to push the argument one step further. The problem is not the academy. The problem is the person teaching at the very bottom.

Vietnamese football is desperately short of properly trained grassroots coaches, the people teaching ten and eleven year olds how to receive a ball with the inside of the foot, how to turn when receiving, how to keep balance. That is the base layer that determines everything above it, and it is the least funded layer of all.

A glossy academy can produce one excellent generation if enough money and enough time are poured into it. It cannot raise the technical floor of a nation. Only thousands of trained, decently paid grassroots coaches can do that. And investing in thousands of people produces no attractive imagery for communications.

That is why I always view new academy projects with polite scepticism. I am not sceptical of people. I am sceptical of structures. A new academy, a new training centre, only means something if it comes with an expanded coaching certification programme, dignified pay for grassroots coaches, and a youth competition calendar run consistently all year.

Now connect the two halves.

The gap in refereeing and the gap in grassroots coaching are the same gap. Both are professions without glamour. Both demand long-term investment with no immediate result. Both lose the budget contest to things you can see: a striker who scores right now, a camera system installed in three months.

And that is exactly what happened.

The third half: the contrarian view, and where I might be wrong

There are matches that are not played on grass, but deep inside people. The match I am describing takes place in meeting rooms, in budget spreadsheets, and in the heads of those who must decide whether to spend a limited budget on a proven striker or on paying twenty grassroots coaches for the next ten years.

I have chosen my position. But I must be honest about where that position may be wrong, because an argument with no room for rebuttal is an argument putting itself to sleep.

First, the regional evidence cuts against me in the most uncomfortable way.

Indonesia, in the same cycle, chose a far more aggressive import route: a batch of players of Indonesian descent born in Europe, holding Dutch passports, naturalised and brought into the national team. The result was that they got through the second round of 2026 World Cup qualifying, reached the third round and then the fourth, while Vietnam stopped at the second. If the yardstick is short-term achievement, and in Southeast Asian football the yardstick is always short-term achievement, then the import route won.

I think that is true, and I must accept it rather than steer it elsewhere.

Second, naturalising Nguyen Xuan Son was a professionally sound decision. A striker with a professional record in Asia, resident in Vietnam long enough, willing to learn Vietnamese and sing the anthem. That is not an administrative trick. And his broken leg at the most important moment of the tournament says nothing about the correctness of the policy. It says only that the risk of depending on one individual is real, and it remains real even when things work out.

Third, I may have misjudged VAR. There is a possibility I must leave open: the technology, imperfect as it is, creates a training loop for referees that would not otherwise exist. When every decision is recorded and publicly dissected, the pressure to learn the craft rises. Over a decade that could produce a distinctly better generation of referees, and at that point people will say VAR was the turning point.

Fourth, and this is where I doubt myself most: I may be romanticising the idea of a foundation without strong enough evidence that Vietnam's binding constraint really sits there rather than somewhere else, in the quality of the domestic league, in the number of high-level matches a young player accumulates, or in the decision-making environment of the federation.

I do not have enough data to rule that out. And anyone whose job is independent verification has to say so.

What can be verified

If what I have written above has value, it must produce predictions capable of being proven wrong.

I offer three.

First, by the end of the 2030 World Cup cycle, if the investment structure of Vietnamese football does not change, the national team will still enter a major tournament with a small group of irreplaceable key players, and will still have to import exactly two kinds of goods: the people who score, and the people who decide. When that happens again, it will no longer be news.

Second, if the V-League expands VAR without publishing a list of full-time professional referees, the number of disputes over decisions will not fall. It will merely migrate from arguments about a whistle to arguments about a line.

Third, and this is the one I most want to be right about: in the next few years, at least one new academy or youth training centre will be announced bearing the name of a former international or a large conglomerate, and at the launch ceremony nobody will talk about the grassroots coach training programme attached to it. If I am wrong, I will be glad to be wrong.

I set out to write about football and ended up writing about myself, about the habit of importing what can be photographed and postponing what can only be counted after ten years. In Chicago, where I live, people build towers by pouring foundations in silence for months before raising the visible part. Vietnamese football is raising the visible part first.

The remaining question is not whether to import. Importing is rational, and every nation does it. The remaining question is whether, after signing the contract and installing the technical room, we still remember what we owe.