The V-League and the Slide Tackle Taught in Under-11 Training

The V-League and the Slide Tackle Taught in Under-11 Training

Rain on the pitch, and a sound nobody wants to hear

Studs grinding across wet grass sound like a blade. I was sitting in stand B, eleventh row — the row Vietnamese fans still call the row where you can see the legs — and just below me, a young player seven minutes into his appearance threw himself at an opponent with both feet, his body almost horizontal in the air. The referee blew. The stand rose. The tackled player stayed down on the grass, both hands wrapped around his right ankle, not screaming, not rolling, just lying still. That silence was the frightening part.

I wrote a short line in my notebook — the notebook I have carried since 2026, since the night in Luzhniki when I mispronounced Modrić's name three times on live television: Minute 53. Rain. Wet grass. Nobody apologised. Then I looked at the pitch, at the puddles reflecting the floodlights, and asked myself a question I had never asked in fifteen years of doing this job: where is this tackle taught?

People usually talk about on-field violence as an impulse. A moment of lost control. A hot-headed player, a lenient referee, a slippery night. But the tackle I had just watched had a shape. It had an angle. It had a timing. The slide tackle is a technique, and like every other technique in football, someone teaches it.

Luzhniki taught me that every move begins with a bad touch. My bad touch at Luzhniki was saying a player's name wrong in front of millions. But the lesson is identical: errors do not generate themselves. They are cultivated, through repetition, in an environment that permits them to exist. In the V-League, that environment has existed long enough to become a style.

Context: a season that opened with tackles nobody wants to rewatch

According to Dân trí's compilation, the early part of the most recent season produced a run of incidents that pushed on-field violence back onto front pages: a national-team player suspended for four matches after a dangerous challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân; two challenges by Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn that appeared deliberate, both aimed at the same young forward, Đình Bắc; and assorted collisions scattered across the opening rounds.

I rewatched those clips many times — normal speed, then slow, then frozen on the frame where the defender begins to extend his leg. One thing stood out. Most of the controversial challenges did not happen in tense title-deciding matches. They happened in far less glamorous moments: mid-first half, teams not yet in rhythm, players fighting for starting places.

This is what the European expert in the Dân trí interview calls an early-season trigger: when every position has two or three candidates, the intensity of the contest rises not only in the legs but in the head. Players stop challenging to win the ball. They challenge to prove they deserve to be there. Those two motives produce two very different tackles.

I once spoke with a former strength coach in England who had worked in three different academy systems. He told me: When you teach a ten-year-old to tackle, you are not teaching him how to win the ball. You are teaching him how not to hurt someone. I kept that line in pencil, underlined twice.

Core: the tackle is a taught skill, not an explosive instinct

At professional level, people distinguish two kinds of challenge: the tactical tackle and the destructive one. The first is a structured skill — bent standing leg, extended tackling leg that is not aimed at the opponent's leg, eyes on the ball rather than the man, and most importantly, contact with the ball occurring before contact with the body. The second has no technical structure. It has an intentional one.

The expert in the Dân trí piece pushes the question to a deeper layer: he talks about teaching tackle technique, teaching how to enter duels, teaching respect for opponents, and teaching the habit of using force to intimidate. Those are four items in the same training session — and he argues Vietnamese football is missing all four.

I do not entirely agree with his phrasing, but I agree with the core diagnosis. What the V-League lacks is not courage, but a curriculum. A player who tackles badly at twenty does not do so because he loves violence. He tackles badly because nobody ever taught him a good tackle.

Picture an under-11 session at a modern academy. Four players, two cones, and a coach teaching children to approach from a two o'clock angle rather than twelve o'clock. Teaching them that a tackle from behind is a foul — not because the referee will whistle, but because it is the only way not to break someone's leg. Teaching them that the body must turn sideways, that the arm must be a support point, that if the ball does not arrive, you get up and return to your position.

In many places in Vietnam, that session does not exist. Not because anyone is lazy, but because the teacher was never taught it.

The rhythm of a match is only audible when you put your ear to the grass. And when I put my ear to V-League grass, I hear an uneven rhythm: one held together by instinct rather than by technical template.

Habits form early, and freeze fast

One of the most important points in the whole conversation is this: if a child is encouraged to play hard, if taking an opponent down is treated as a way of asserting yourself in the training environment, then by the time he is twenty-eight and playing in the V-League, changing him is nearly hopeless.

I cannot verify that with data — and I say plainly that no Vietnamese body publishes a longitudinal tracking of a behavioural pattern from under-11 to the V-League. But what I have observed across fifteen years in different Asian and European leagues gives me a very stable pattern: on-field behaviour is learned quickly and forgotten slowly.

Players learn smart movement in about three months. Players learn to tackle correctly in about three weeks if taught properly from the start. But a player shedding a bad tackling habit needs — and this is a figure I hear from strength coaches, not from a document — roughly eighteen months of continuous practice under real match pressure. Eighteen months at twenty-three. At twenty-eight, that number is no longer a number. It is a door that has closed.

What does that mean in practice? Every disciplinary campaign we run in the V-League — bans, fines, warnings, internal sanctions — acts on a group of people who are already too late to change through the criminalisation of behaviour. Punishment can stop a player reoffending for three rounds. Punishment rarely changes a reflex.

A missed shot is the answer; the question lies in how we stand up together. The reckless challenge is the answer — a very clear answer to a question nobody wants to ask: what did we teach this child in the first ten years of his career?

Environment: rain, pitch, and the pressure of results

The expert does not blame players entirely. He lists three contributing factors: rain, poor pitch quality, and the pressure to achieve results.

I want to spend this section making one thing clear that many Vietnamese commentaries get wrong: those three factors are catalysts, not root causes. A bad pitch does not turn a player who tackles well into one who destroys opponents. It simply makes poor technique worse, in less time, with more serious consequences.

In England, where I live and work, coaches have a saying: the pitch never lies. A wet, bumpy, badly drained pitch will return to you exactly the technical quality you invested in it. If you teach children correct tackle technique on a bad pitch, most of them will still enter challenges more safely, because the body has been programmed correctly. If you teach nothing, the bad pitch becomes a legitimate excuse for everything.

I have seen the opposite. In 2026, when the Premier League and Championship paused for nearly three months, I was following Brentford, and Griffin Park fell silent. I organised an online forum for more than four hundred Brentford supporters, helped a group of older fans who had never used Zoom record their experiences on their phones, and edited it into a ninety-minute feature. Those voices later persuaded the club's leadership to postpone a season-ticket price rise and retain twelve ground-maintenance staff.

Ground maintenance. It sounds far from on-field violence. But I tell that story for one reason: in England, the pitch is treated as safety infrastructure, on a par with the netting behind the goal. In Vietnam, the pitch is often treated as a playing condition. Those two views lead to two very different spending decisions.

The loudest applause does not come from the stands, but from the empty seats. The empty seats at Griffin Park in 2026 taught me that football is a conversation with the community around it, not a monologue by the people on the pitch. And in that conversation, the pitch is the first sentence.

The coaching pipeline: the largest gap nobody discusses

This is the section I want to give the most space to, because I believe it is the most underrated part of the entire V-League violence story.

The European expert is blunt: too many youth coaches in Vietnam rely mainly on their own playing experience or street-football experience rather than on a structured coach-education programme. He stresses the need for licensed coaches who are well trained and continuously updated.

This is not a personal criticism. It is a structural fact, and it has historical roots. Vietnamese football grew up in an era when most coaches entered the profession from the player pathway. They played, retired, and moved into management because they understood football better than anyone else around. That was a rational route given the circumstances of the 1990s and 2000s. But it produced a long-term consequence: knowledge transmitted by imitation rather than systematisation.

When you teach children by imitation, you pass on exactly what you did. If you tackled crudely, your students tackle crudely. Crude does not mean malicious. Crude means unrefined. And in football, unrefined at modern speed means dangerous.

A friend of mine works at a youth academy in the Netherlands. He told me about the AFC licensing curriculum Asian coaches must go through — the C, B, A and Pro pyramid. C for grassroots and young children. B for semi-professional. A for professional. Pro for the top level. Each level is not merely an exam; it is a course lasting several weeks, with practical work, assessment, and a defence before a panel.

The question worth asking — and I ask it of myself, not of anyone else — is: how many coaches currently leading under-11, under-13 and under-15 teams in Vietnam hold a C licence or higher? I have no official figures and I will not guess. But if that share is low, we have a system in which the most important layer — the layer that permanently shapes behaviour — is run by the least trained people.

That is a real paradox, and it exists in many developing football nations, not only Vietnam. It can only be fixed one way: invest in the teachers, not the players.

The mirror effect: the top layer shapes the bottom

The expert makes an observation I consider the intellectual highlight of the whole conversation: young players always look up to their seniors as role models. If excessive contact is accepted at professional level, it becomes normal at amateur and youth level.

I call this the mirror effect, and I have seen it operate in both directions.

Positive direction: in England, when Bukayo Saka stepped up to take a penalty in the Euro 2026 final and missed, a generation of children in Hackney saw how he came back afterwards. They did not learn how to take penalties. They learned how to get up.

Negative direction: when a national-team player lunges in with both feet and receives only a four-match ban, a fourteen-year-old at a grassroots club sees a very clear message. That message is not don't do that. It is you can still play after doing that.

In 2026, after Saka endured a wave of racist abuse online, I wrote A ball does not define a man. Through the Brentford supporters' network I reached a childhood friend of Saka's in Hackney and gathered twenty-three stories from the Arsenal community. The piece was shared more than fifty thousand times. But what I remember most is not the number. It is a mother who told me on the phone that her son at school had started tackling with his shoulder instead of his leg, because the big-team players do it.

Children always look up. That is not a new observation. But its policy consequence has not yet entered the discussion about discipline in the V-League.

More concretely: every sanction in the V-League is not merely an administrative punishment. It is an educational lesson broadcast live to thousands of children. If that lesson is delivered consistently and clearly, it has more power than any life-skills class at school. If it is delivered arbitrarily, it teaches exactly one thing: that rules are only a suggestion.

Penalties and the question of deterrence

The expert sets out a sharp evaluation criterion: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite disciplinary measures, one must question the effectiveness of current penalties. He defines the purpose of punishment as two-part: to punish and to prevent. And he emphasises that penalties need to be stricter and more consistent.

The word consistent is the key.

In any disciplinary system, consistency matters more than severity. A very heavy sanction applied inconsistently teaches people to gamble on chance, not to comply with rules. A moderate sanction applied evenly, predictably, with no exceptions for a star or a particular club, will change behaviour faster than any other deterrent.

I wonder, and I think many V-League fans wonder: in recent seasons, how many similar challenges have received very different sanctions? I have no statistical table, and I do not want to construct an accusation I cannot prove. But I know that a disciplinary system perceived as arbitrary loses all its educational force — and here, educational force is precisely what we need most.

A professional experience taught me this from a different angle. On transfer deadline day, my job sometimes involves blocking calls, checking three sources, and deciding within twenty minutes whether to publish. What I learned was not how to break news fast. What I learned was: if you let inconsistency into your system once, it takes over the whole system within a year.

Discipline in football works exactly the same way.

VFF and VPF: shared responsibility, and the blame-shift trap

The expert places responsibility on both the Vietnam Football Federation and the league organiser. Shared responsibility sounds good on paper. In governance practice, however, shared responsibility usually becomes a division nobody wants to own. When two organisations are jointly responsible for a problem and neither is designated as lead, the most common outcome is a series of meetings, a few guidance documents, and no meaningful behavioural change.

I have seen this model in many places, not only in football. The technical escape is simple, though politically difficult: assign one lead for disciplinary standards and another for coach education. Those two tasks need different people, because they need different expertise, and merging them is the fastest route to stalling both.

There is a secondary benefit rarely mentioned. Separating responsibility enables measurement. With a disciplinary lead, you can track recurrence rates. With a coach-education lead, you can track licensing rates. Those numbers are not glamorous. But they are the only way to know whether we are progressing or merely talking.

The economics of discipline, from an angle few look at

A club pays a player's wages on the assumption he will be available. Every suspended match is a match in which the club pays for an asset that generates nothing. For a squad with eighteen or twenty high-quality players, a few bans are not a major problem. For a thin squad, three matches of a key player can be the difference between an Asian competition place and mid-table.

This creates what I call the incentive paradox: clubs have an incentive to protect players from suspension, but not always to change their behaviour. Protection is a short-term measure — talking to the player, lobbying referees, playing him in positions with fewer duels. Behaviour change is a long-term investment, costing training time and potentially reducing short-term performance while reflexes are rebuilt.

No club wants a player to lose his bite. So most clubs choose to edit the edges of the problem without touching the core. This is, I believe, why top-down disciplinary campaigns often fail to produce durable behavioural change. They act on players. But players are not the long-term decision-makers. Clubs are. And club incentives need restructuring so that behaviour training becomes part of the value, not a trade-off.

Contrarian: four misunderstandings from outside

Let me address what most discussions of V-League violence get wrong. I call them misunderstandings from outside — not because they come from abroad, but because they come from a viewpoint standing off the pitch.

First: that the problem is player character. When a destructive challenge appears, the public reflex is to assign a personality. Hot-headed. Irresponsible. Thoughtless. That labelling helps nothing, and worse, it easily turns a systemic problem into an individual trial. I saw this with Saka. A nineteen-year-old missed a penalty and was treated as though he owed a nation. Saka did not need forgiveness; he needed someone standing beside him, not judging. V-League players who get labelled need the same. They need a system that teaches them a correct tackle, not one that teaches them to feel guilty.

Second: that harsher bans will solve it. I do not oppose heavier sanctions in specific cases. I oppose the belief that severity is the decisive variable. In every legal system I have studied — inside football and outside it — the certainty of detection and processing changes behaviour far more powerfully than the severity of punishment. This is a basic finding of deterrence theory, and it applies to the V-League exactly as it applies anywhere else. A player who believes there is a forty per cent chance of a three-match ban will be more careful than one who believes there is a five per cent chance of a ten-match ban.

Third: that bad pitches are the cause. The pitch is a factor, a catalyst. Improving pitches matters for many reasons — match quality, player careers, supporter experience. But it is not the solution to a behavioural problem. If every Vietnamese pitch were upgraded to international standard tomorrow, dangerous challenges would fall, but they would not disappear. Because this behaviour is taught, not seeded by grass.

Fourth — and this is the most important: that this problem belongs to the V-League. Every football nation has passed through this stage. English football in the 1970s and 1980s featured challenges that, placed beside today's V-League, would make viewers close their eyes. Italian, Argentine and Korean football during their industrialisation all travelled the same road. The difference is not whether a football nation has a violence problem. The difference is whether it builds a coach-education system strong enough to solve it at the root.

That is why I believe the expert's diagnosis points the right way. He is not saying the V-League is a bad league. He is saying the V-League is at a stage of development that requires a kind of investment it has not yet made.

One professional point must be said: the expert in the Dân trí interview is an anonymous source. He is called a European expert, with no name, no title, no affiliation. That does not make his argument wrong. But it makes it unverifiable independently, and in my profession an unverifiable argument should be used as guidance, not as evidence. I say this not to diminish the article, but because Vietnamese fans deserve discussions built on traceable data — and because Vietnamese experts, who understand Vietnamese football better than anyone, deserve far more of a voice in debates about their own system.

Another rainy night

I want to close the analysis with a professional memory I have never told publicly. After the 2026 World Cup in Russia, I returned to England with a notebook full of notes about sound. I decided from then on that my writing would begin with sound rather than scorelines. I developed a habit: at every match I attend, I write down three sounds. Studs on the corridor floor. A sigh after the final whistle. The stands falling silent at one particular moment.

The third is the one I care about. It always happens in the same type of situation: when someone goes down and does not get up immediately.

In England, that silence usually lasts about four seconds. Then applause. Then people calling the injured player's name. The stands rise, including the home end, and applaud the opposing player as he is carried off. That is a ritual. It is not the national character of the English. It is something taught, passed from generation to generation, from the first time children are taken to a ground by their parents.

I wonder whether we are teaching that ritual in Vietnam. Not the ritual of applauding opponents, but the ritual of recognising that the person lying down there is also someone trying to do his job, just like you.

That is part of football culture. And football culture — as the expert told Dân trí — must be trained from youth level. Not because children are more malleable than adults, but because children are the only ones who have not finished learning.

What to track next

If I keep following this story — and I will, because I have followed Vietnamese football for fifteen years from a flat in London — I will watch five specific signals.

First, recurrence rates. Not the number of sanctions, but the share of players previously banned for dangerous challenges who are banned again for the same reason. If that falls, the system works. If it stays flat or rises, we are paying for a ritual.

Second, consistency of sanctions. I will log each sanction for comparable challenges and compare. Large variation without a clear technical reason signals a disciplinary system losing credibility.

Third, coach-education announcements. Any new mandatory licensing requirement for youth coaches will be the single most important signal in this story, because it acts on the root layer.

Fourth, media pressure intensity. The volume of coverage over the next six months will indicate whether this is a news cycle or a long campaign.

Fifth, and perhaps the signal I care about most: how young players respond. There will be a moment — perhaps in an under-15 match, perhaps in a grassroots tournament — when a young player enters a challenge correctly in a situation where three years ago he would have entered it wrongly. That moment will not make the news. Nobody will film it. Nobody will applaud. But it will be the only evidence that genuinely matters that a system is changing.

A closed season taught me that football is a conversation, not a monologue. The conversation about on-field violence in the V-League has been started many times. It has never been continued long enough to reach an answer. Perhaps this time will be different. Perhaps not. But one thing I know for certain: until a ten-year-old in Vietnam is taught how to tackle without hurting someone, we will keep sitting in the stands, listening to studs grind across wet grass, waiting for a sound none of us wants to hear.