VAR in V.League 1: Review Time, the Clear-and-Obvious Threshold, and the Limits of a Replay Room

The referee leaves the penalty area and walks toward the monitor at the touchline. Twenty thousand people stand up, then sit back down. The drums fade into scattered beats. On the pitch, the players drift into small clusters; a few sit down on the grass, a few drink water, the goalkeeper stands with folded arms in front of his goal. The electronic clock keeps running. That silence has become a familiar part of Vietnamese football over the past few seasons, ever since VAR was put into operation in V.League 1.

What matters is not whether the referee was right or wrong. Based on my experience following matches in V.League 1 across the seasons in which VAR has been active, most controversial incidents end in a correct decision — but take far too long to reach it. Spectators leave the stadium with a vague sense that something was taken from the match, even though nobody can point to a specific mistake.

VAR is not wrong. What is wrong is the belief that it can replace a night when a referee gets it wrong.

Context: a mechanism with rules, a league with a budget

VAR — Video Assistant Referee — is a system in which a team of officials sits in a technical room, watches the match through multiple camera angles, and may only intervene in four categories of incident: a goal or an incident leading directly to a goal, a penalty decision, a direct red card, and cases of mistaken identity. Those four categories are set by IFAB — the body that writes the Laws of the Game, composed of representatives of the four British associations plus FIFA. They cannot be expanded at will, and any league wishing to use VAR must be approved by FIFA on both infrastructure and personnel.

The intervention threshold is a “clear and obvious error” or a “serious missed incident.” Put plainly: VAR does not hunt for mistakes. It only corrects errors that any referee, on seeing the replay, would have to acknowledge. Attached to that threshold is the principle of the “referee’s call”: if an incident remains debatable, the on-field decision stands, even when someone watching on television thinks otherwise. That principle exists for a practical reason — football cannot function if every whistle can be overturned by someone sitting a few hundred metres from the pitch.

Vietnam brought VAR into operation in V.League 1 from the 2026 season, following cooperation between the Vietnam Football Federation, the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company and FIFA. VPF organises the league and is responsible for deploying the system. A match with VAR requires multiple cameras covering the touchlines and penalty areas, a stable fibre transmission line, a replay room, a dedicated communications system between officials, and an operating crew of video technicians and assistant video referees. If any link in that chain is missing, the system is not permitted to run.

V.League 1 has 14 clubs, which means 26 rounds and 182 matches per season. Not every match has VAR. VPF allocates it round by round, based on the profile of the fixture, the level of risk and available resources. That is a major difference from Europe’s top leagues, where VAR is present at every match, and also from regional leagues such as Thai League or J1 League, where broadcast infrastructure and operating budgets sit at a higher level. The difference is not one of ambition, but of resources split across too many demands at once.

Two concepts that are often merged need separating: the check and the review. A check is when the VAR team examines footage silently, with no need for the referee to leave the field, and it can finish in a few dozen seconds. A review is when the on-field referee is invited to the monitor at the touchline. Only the second creates a long pause in front of the crowd. FIFA reported after the 2026 World Cup that the average on-monitor review at that tournament was around 80 seconds, while most checks lasted only a few dozen seconds. That is the benchmark for comparison, and the standard every league wants to move toward.

Analysis: three categories of incident, three ways of burning time

The first category is handball inside the penalty area. Law 12 of the Laws of the Game defines an offence when a player handles the ball deliberately, or when the arm is in a position that makes the body unnaturally bigger. The line between an “unnatural position” and a “position consistent with the movement of the body” is where the most seconds are spent, because the referee must watch again and again at several speeds: slow to locate the point of contact, very slow to measure the angle of the elbow, and at real speed to judge whether the player had time to react. Every change of speed adds to the clock. With leading attackers such as Nguyen Tien Linh or Nguyen Quang Hai, who are regularly inside the box at exactly the moment the ball arrives, the number of checks rises with the number of times they touch the ball in the area.

The second category is offside and incidents leading to goals. When a goal is reviewed, the VAR team must trace the entire move backwards: the last touch, the defender’s deliberate play, the attacking team’s phase of possession. In many European leagues, semi-automated offside technology has cut this step to a few dozen seconds by tracking body-joint points with dedicated cameras. V.League does not have that system, so referees must draw the offside line by hand on a flat image — manual work that is error-prone and time-consuming. The irony is that the most time-consuming step produces the least accurate conclusion.

The third category is direct red cards and serious fouls. These occur less often, but when they do they usually trigger two or three consecutive reviews: one to establish the offence, one to establish its severity, and sometimes one more to check whether the referee has punished the wrong player. Added together, a challenge in the 85th minute can consume more time than an entire first half of an ordinary match.

If a single review is broken into its stages, the bottleneck becomes visible. The process runs: receive the signal from the VAR team, select the right camera angle, scroll to the moment, locate the point of contact, test it against the clear-and-obvious threshold, and decide. The first two stages are technical. The next four are human. Time spent on the technical stages is usually stable; time spent on the human stages is not, and that is the variable deciding whether a review lasts 70 seconds or three minutes.

The core finding: the problem with VAR in V.League 1 is not the number of wrong calls, but the time taken to reach a decision — and that time is determined by the quality of referee training, not by the quality of the equipment.

To see this clearly, look at the cost of operation. A VAR system at regional-league level involves dedicated capture equipment, transmission systems, a control room, editing software, radio communications and operating staff. The cost for one season can be equivalent to several percent of the total budget of a mid-sized V.League club. Most of that is carried by VPF, because clubs struggle to fund it themselves. In other words, VAR in Vietnam is a collective investment rather than one club’s investment, and it therefore faces efficiency pressure from every party at once.

Alongside that sits the manpower problem. The number of Vietnamese referees listed by FIFA in the main category can always be counted on the fingers of one hand. That small group must cover V.League 1, V.League 2, the National Cup and youth tournaments — plus periodic training camps and fitness tests. FIFA caps the age for international referees at 45, and the fitness test consists of short sprint repetitions and a longer intermittent endurance run. Those conditions are not relaxed for anyone, whether or not the league uses VAR. A referee who meets international standards is the product of years of accumulation, not of a three-week course.

VAR increases the number of positions requiring specialist skill. Each match needs an assistant video referee, some matches need a second assistant, plus a video technician. These roles demand skills different from those of an on-field referee: reading images quickly, selecting the right angle, and above all maintaining consistency with oneself from round to round. A referee who penalises one way in round 5 and another way in round 15 destroys trust faster than any single error.

One further variable is rarely noticed: the transfer market. In V.League, most deals are free transfers or loans, and very few large fees are ever paid. When Article 17 of FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players sits on the bench — the provision allowing a player to terminate a contract unilaterally after a certain period of service — I remember the way Neymar stepped over the law without looking down at his feet.

The consequence of a player leaving for free in V.League is not the money forgone but the foreign-player slot lost with nothing in return, forcing the club to patch the gap with another short-term contract. A dense sequence of short-term contracts makes squads unstable mid-season. Duels inside the penalty area become encounters between strangers — a defender and a striker who have not had time to learn how the other moves, who steps in first, who covers behind. The number of unnecessary collisions rises, and with it the number of incidents the VAR room must handle. That is the causal chain few people notice: a volatile transfer market creates extra work for the technical room.

The counterintuitive angle: more cameras will not make VAR faster

The night I faced VAR head-on, I learned that technology is not at fault. The people operating it are.

The counterintuitive point is this: to make VAR faster, the instinctive response is to buy more cameras, more screens, more software. But cameras do not decide. A VAR team with fifteen angles at its disposal can still take three minutes if the assistant video referee has not identified what he is looking for. A VAR team with only five angles, trained on clear scenarios, can settle an incident in forty seconds. The investment that pays back fastest is not equipment but hours of scenario training.

The demand for absolute accuracy also slows the process down. Fans want VAR never to be wrong. Referees know this, so they review longer, choose angles more carefully, and sometimes summon the on-field referee to the monitor for an incident that only required a silent check. Every such occasion costs the crowd another minute, yet nobody sees that their own demand created that wait. Demanding absolute accuracy and demanding speed are two goals pulling in opposite directions, and a league must consciously choose its balance.

Another direction worth considering is transparency of communication. In leagues that have published the audio between the on-field referee and the VAR team — live or after the match, with footage — the level of argument in stadiums and online dropped noticeably in the first weeks. The reason is simple: when spectators hear the reasoning, they stop guessing at motives. A difficult decision that is explained costs less trust than a correct decision made in silence.

There is one further counterintuitive point, and it matters most. VAR is not the biggest problem in Vietnamese football. The bigger problem is the number of properly trained referees. A league that wants fast, consistent VAR needs a pool of officials deep enough to rotate, experienced enough to handle borderline situations, and young enough to have years ahead of them. Right now, that pool is thin. Dresden taught me: when people say “it cannot be saved,” they are really saying “we are not willing to pay the price.”

Money put into cameras shows results within months, and produces images for publicity. Money put into referee development takes years, and nobody can photograph an opening ceremony for the news. But it is the second that will decide the quality of officiating in this league over the next decade.

Conclusion: a time cap, a right to know, and a long-term fund

If I were to put one proposal on the table, I would start with a hard time cap on every review: a maximum limit, after which the referee must stand by the on-field decision. This would not make VAR more accurate, but it would force people to prepare in advance — and preparation is what generates speed. Such a limit would also be transparent to spectators: they would know how long they are waiting, instead of waiting indefinitely.

Next comes the right to know. Publishing the dialogue between the referee and the VAR room after each round, as text or short video, is achievable immediately with existing resources. Trust in the whistle is not built by reassurance, but by letting people hear it for themselves.

And finally, a referee development fund, separated from the league’s operating budget, so that training is not cut when the season runs into financial difficulty. A league can live with one wrong decision on one evening. It struggles to live with the sense that nobody is accountable for the time the spectators have given up. Will there come a point when people measure the quality of a football league by the number of seconds it does not take from those watching?