A Weekend of Controversy, Squires' Cartoon, and the Refereeing Lesson for V.League

In the 78th minute, the referee waved towards the monitor by the touchline. At Hàng Đẫy, fifteen thousand people stood up at once, and for the next three minutes nobody said a word to anybody. The only sound left was the public-address system reading out shirt numbers. I was sitting in the press area, pen still in hand, eyes on the phone that had just lit up. A friend in London had sent me David Squires' latest cartoon in The Guardian, drawn about a weekend of controversy in the Premier League. At that same moment the referee turned back, swept his arm, and the stand split in two: one half cheering, one half cursing. Those three minutes in Hà Nội and those three minutes in England were frighteningly alike.

The content of that cartoon, summed up in the paper's own words, says the English top flight is “leading the way for debatable decisions and performative sadness.” This is a cartoon, not a data analysis. It names no specific match, no specific decision, no minute, no player. Attached to the strip is an offer for readers to buy a print, and the book titled Chaos in the Box that Squires and the paper are selling. The illustration credit reads plainly: David Squires/The Guardian. This needs stating at once to avoid confusion — it is a cultural and media product with a commercial function, not a report on the Laws of the Game or on refereeing.

What deserves discussion is the system behind the cartoon. Since VAR arrived, English football has operated across three layers: IFAB, the body that governs the Laws of the Game worldwide; PGMOL, the organisation responsible for refereeing in English professional football; and the Premier League administration. VAR may intervene in only four categories: goals, penalties, red cards, and mistaken identity. Four categories, which sounds tidy. But every time the VAR team picks up the headset, three minutes of the match hang in the air, and those three minutes belong to no player, no manager, no supporter. They belong to a closed room where nobody sees anybody's face. Semi-automated offside technology was introduced to shorten those suspended minutes. Announcing decisions over the stadium PA is also under consideration. Every one of those technical reforms aims at the same target: the downtime of trust.

The dressing room does not lie — every whisper becomes an echo. I learned that in the 2026 season, when I lived with Hà Nội FC for ten months at the age of forty. Thirty-seven times I sat in the dressing room after the final whistle. One of those times followed a 1-2 defeat to Bình Dương, when head coach Chu Đình Nghiêm pointed at each position on the tactics board and spoke very slowly. Nobody in the room mentioned the referee. A foreign player sat silent in the corner, towel over his head. Văn Quyết said one sentence, Quang Hải nodded. Then the whole room stood up. What I carried out of that room was not a verdict on a refereeing error but an observation about need: players want a listener more than a judge. My work changed direction from there. I began writing from the small details — a pat on the shoulder, a whisper — before writing about the score.

I once mispronounced a man's name, and realised I had quietly erased his identity. At the 2026 World Cup in Russia, during the opening match between Russia and Saudi Arabia, I went live and mispronounced midfielder Salem Al-Dawsari's name three times in the first half. Two hundred and fourteen critical comments poured in overnight. I spent two weeks re-watching footage of twenty-two matches and practising the names of players from all thirty-two teams, then made my own pronunciation notebook. But the bigger lesson sat elsewhere: the community is the final validator, not me. And thinking about referees, I notice something strange. We argue about them every week, we write hundreds of thousands of words about them each season, yet very few of us know the full name of any referee. He is “the referee.” She is “the VAR.” A profession addressed by job title, never by name. When someone is not named, it is easier to throw stones.

What David Squires draws, and what deserves more than a laugh, is a chain of interlocking interests. Refereeing controversy has stopped being an incident inside a match; it has become a media product with a stable production cycle. A contentious decision produces a reaction. The reaction produces engagement. Engagement creates standing for the commentator. The commentator creates the story. That story is then sold as prints and books. Chaos in the Box sits at the end of that chain, and it makes no secret of it. The model's strength lies in self-replication: more controversy, more content; more content, more pressure on referees; more pressure, more mistakes that open the next controversy. This loop has no stop button in the middle, only an accelerator.

That chain does not stop at the English border, and this is the part that concerns us directly. VAR arrived in V.League from the 2026 season, initially in a limited number of matches, then gradually expanding. Every time the technology switches on at a Vietnamese stadium, the crowd's reaction looks uncannily like the reaction in England: trust the screen, then turn and suspect the person sitting behind it. What we import from the Premier League is not the technology — anyone can buy technology — it is the emotional template: a weekend with controversy, a week of demands for explanation, an apology, then everything settles and repeats. Sitting in a Vietnamese stand, I realised I could already hear the rhythm of the argument before it happened.

The common misunderstanding from outside is to think the problem is refereeing quality, and the fix is better training or more accurate technology. That reading misses one detail: when Squires writes “performative sadness,” he places both the referees and the aggrieved inside the same frame. People are not outraged because they need a correct outcome. They are outraged because outrage is a communal ritual with its own interests. That is why technical reforms, however advanced, never satisfy everyone: a ritual has no finishing line. The authenticity of the cartoon itself also needs stating clearly. The line that the English top flight is “leading the way” in debatable decisions is a satirical opinion, not a measured comparison. No other league is cited for reference, there are no figures, no time frame. If anyone ever quotes that line as a fact, they have misread the genre. And a final paradox: the cartoon laughs at the controversy loop, yet the cartoon itself lives off that loop.

I keep time for the team, but they are the ones who taught me that the heartbeat never stops. A few signals to watch from here: whether semi-automated offside technology can shorten those three minutes of suspended trust; whether announcing decisions over the stadium PA becomes widespread; and, in V.League, whether we take a smaller but harder step — saying the referee's name before reading out his decision. That day I corrected my pronunciation, but I also corrected the way I looked at a human being. Vietnamese football may need a correction like that of its own.