VAR in V.League 1: How Long Reviews Are Wearing Down Match Rhythm

I was sitting in stand B, a stopwatch in my left hand and a notebook in my right. Minute 86, the ball hit the net. The referee put a hand to his earpiece and raised one finger: wait. The players who had scored took a few steps toward the corner flag and stopped. The stand went quiet. I started the clock the moment the referee gave the signal. When the ball was placed back on the centre spot, my stopwatch read 2 minutes 14 seconds. Nothing happened in between: no shot, no water break, no substitution. Just one man standing in the middle of the circle, looking up at a screen, waiting.

I have kept this habit across 30 V.League 1 matches, from the opening round of the 2026 season to the most recent rounds of the current one. I do not time referees to catch them out. I time them to answer a simpler question: every time the technology intervenes, how much real football time disappears.

VAR arrived in V.League 1 in the 2026 season, after years of work between the VFF, the VPF and FIFA. At first only a handful of matches were selected, then the scope widened. Fewer than 25 Vietnamese referees currently hold a FIFA VAR certification. That is enough to run a single matchday, but not enough to rotate comfortably when a referee is suspended or unavailable.

Infrastructure is the part nobody talks about. FIFA recommends a minimum of four camera angles for VAR, plus cameras on the touchline and behind the goal to reconstruct offside situations. At many V.League grounds the real number sits at that minimum or below it. A missing angle does not make VAR wrong, but it makes VAR slow, because the team in the video room does not have enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion. Some European leagues publish an average check time under 70 seconds per incident. The difference is not expensive hardware; it is the number of angles and a protocol that lets the VAR team decide without summoning the referee to the pitchside monitor.

On operating costs I have to be blunt: I have heard several different figures for equipment rental and staffing per match, and not one document confirms any of them. I got it wrong at the 2026 World Cup, so I no longer publish a version of anything I have not verified. A number in a financial report is worth more than a confident sentence on the training ground. What I do have is my own stopwatch log, and that is all I am presenting here.

Across the 30 matches I recorded 47 VAR interventions, including quick checks that were returned unchanged. The average time from the referee's signal to the ball being kicked off again was 128 seconds. The fastest was 41 seconds, a clear offside that the VAR team handled inside the video room. The slowest was 4 minutes 02 seconds, and I still have the sheet with every timestamp from that one.

The distribution matters too. Twenty-eight of the 47 interventions came in the second half, and 11 came in the final 10 minutes. That is when legs tire, when the number of duels inside the box increases, and when a goal is worth the most to both teams. VAR intervenes most heavily in exactly the stretch where every waiting second costs the most.

How those interventions break down is the real story. Of the 47, 31 required the on-field referee to leave his position and walk to the pitchside monitor, and those took an average of 161 seconds. The remaining 16 were settled entirely in the video room, averaging 62 seconds. The bottleneck for VAR in V.League is not the technology; it is the walk from where the referee stands to the pitchside monitor.

That walk is roughly twenty metres each way and eats close to a minute. What it costs more of is match state. Across the 30 matches I tracked one more metric: the number of attempts in the 10 minutes after a review that lasted longer than 90 seconds. That group averaged about 30 percent fewer attempts than the 10 minutes immediately before. The cause is not fitness. Both teams have lost momentum, and momentum does not come back in two possessions. For strikers such as Nguyen Tien Linh (Becamex Binh Duong) or Nguyen Quang Hai (Cong An Ha Noi), contract value and negotiating position are tied directly to the number of goals that are allowed to stand, so every wait has a price attached.

Added time shows it. Matches with three or more reviews typically produced five to six added minutes in the first half and nine to eleven in the second. A television viewer sees a 90-minute match stretch to nearly 105. A fan in the stadium sees an evening chopped into disconnected pieces.

The standard story after every matchday blames the on-field referee for being slow. That story is convenient for everyone involved, and because it is convenient it is usually wrong.

A referee walks to the monitor when the VAR team tells him the situation is not clear enough. It is not clear enough because an angle is missing, or because the available angles are not frame-synchronised. The man being criticised is the last link in the chain, not the source of the problem. A referee with twelve years of experience still has to walk to the screen if all he has in his earpiece is two blurry images.

There is a second motive that rarely gets mentioned. On-field referees in V.League are under pressure to be seen deciding. Walking to the monitor is a visible act; sitting still and accepting the video room's call is an invisible one. When public criticism arrives, the visible act feels safer. That is my inference from the timing data, not a quote from anyone in the referees' committee, and I am labelling it as such so readers can weigh it themselves.

The Grealish case taught me that the biggest secret in any deal is who wants it to be heard. The same applies here: after every long VAR review, the loudest voices belong to those who benefit from the story being about referees. Nobody asks how many camera angles that stadium has. Between 2026 and 2026 I did not change my method, I only changed where I put my trust: from people to data.

Over the next two seasons, if VAR is extended to every match while the camera infrastructure and the number of certified referees stay where they are, added time will regularly reach 12 to 14 minutes per game. Broadcast windows will break, and the league will have spent money teaching its own fans to distrust the tool it just bought.

The test is simple enough for anyone to run: time it from the referee's signal until the ball rolls again. If the average is still above 120 seconds at the end of next season, the referees were never the problem.