No VAR in Combat Sports: Three Sealed Scorecards at the SEA Games and the Verdict Gap in Vietnamese Sport

No VAR in Combat Sports: Three Sealed Scorecards at the SEA Games and the Verdict Gap in Vietnamese Sport

It was two in the morning on 8 July 2026, Saigon time. I was sitting in front of a screen watching the Euro semi-final between England and Denmark at Wembley. In the 104th minute, Raheem Sterling went down inside the box. Referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot. Harry Kane missed, Kasper Schmeichel saved, and Kane buried the rebound. A whole night of argument began in that instant, and for me it only ended when I rewound the tape, went frame by frame, and wrote a long analysis of whether the contact was strong enough.

There, I had a screen. I had slow motion. I had VAR.

On a fighting mat, nobody has that.

That paradox has followed me through nine years of watching this industry. Football, the most scrutinised sport on the planet, brought video assistance into the World Cup in 2026, after the foul on Antoine Griezmann in France's match against Australia on 16 June 2026 - the first penalty ever confirmed by VAR in World Cup history, in the 58th minute. Meanwhile boxing, Muay Thai, Vovinam, wushu, taekwondo and pencak silat - sports where a single wrong call can erase four years of a person's training - are still largely judged by the naked eye, by a pen, and by three folded slips of paper.

The largest gap in Vietnamese combat sports is not the number of cameras. It is the absence of any mechanism through which a wrong decision can be challenged, recorded, and corrected.

A sport without a court of appeal

In May 2026, the 32nd SEA Games took place in Phnom Penh. Host nation Cambodia added Kun Khmer to the programme and removed Muay Thai from the list. That decision caused months of argument before the opening ceremony, but what interested me was not who kept which sport. What interested me was how a martial art can be shifted by an administrative document while no technical dossier is ever published for comparison.

The Vietnamese delegation finished those Games at the top of the medal table. Combat sports and martial arts contributed a significant share. Yet the paradox sits here: the more medals come from combat disciplines, the heavier the pressure on every referee decision - while the institutional capacity to defend those decisions barely grows.

Look at the structure of the rules. An amateur boxing bout uses the ten-point must system, three judges seated on three different sides, and nobody knows the score after each round. A professional MMA bout also uses three judges, but the applicable rules differ by state, by country, by promotion. A sanda bout is scored on the number of legal strikes and the effectiveness of throws. A wushu taolu routine is split into an A score for difficulty, a B score for performance quality, and a C score for technical accuracy - meaning three separate panels, three separate scoring logics, stacked inside a single performance.

One arena, one evening of competition, five different systems of truth. The question is not which system is right. The question is that in Vietnam, no public document explains to spectators which system they are watching.

At the 2026 World Cup, when Ao Tanaka's goal in Japan's match against Spain on 1 December 2026 was disputed because the ball appeared to have crossed the line, I sat measuring frames at three in the morning. Six hours later my piece had twelve thousand interactions. Not because I was better than anyone, but because FIFA had published the ball-tracking technology and fans could check it themselves. Transparency creates participation. Vietnamese combat sports do not yet have that transparency.

Three kinds of decision, and only one fixable by video

Across five years holding a whistle and nine years analysing, I sort refereeing decisions into three groups.

The first is the factual decision: did the ball cross the line, did the foot touch the marker, did the strike land on a legal target or on the hip. This is the only group technology resolves completely. High-speed cameras, sensors, virtual lines - all of them answer the question of whether.

The second is the procedural decision: whether a collision was an intentional foul, whether a hold is a dangerous position, whether a fighter is lucid enough to continue. Here technology helps with half of it, and the rest belongs to reading the moment.

The third is the evaluative decision: which fighter controlled the round, who inflicted more damage, which movement deserves a higher quality score. This group dominates boxing, MMA, demonstration Vovinam and taolu. And this is the group video can never resolve, because video proves events, and aesthetics cannot be proven.

In that Euro semi-final, I initially concluded there was insufficient evidence for a penalty. Twenty minutes later, hundreds of objections poured in, and I revised it to "it could be a penalty". When UEFA confirmed the referee's decision was correct, I was mocked: "Thought you had a VAR eye, turns out you have a follow-the-crowd eye". I learned something from that shock. My error was not in the conclusion. It was in changing the conclusion without new evidence.

That semi-final night, I betrayed my own conviction to embrace the heart.

But that story taught me a second lesson, and this one matters more. The argument could only exist because there was footage to review, forty-five seconds to confirm, and a body that stood up and explained. Fans do not need referees to be right. They need to know why the referee decided as they did.

On a fighting mat, they are told nothing at all.

Places that did it, and how far they got

Taekwondo is the clearest example of technology changing a discipline. Since electronic body protectors entered international competition, points are registered automatically when force and location meet the threshold, sharply reducing disputes in the factual group. But it did not erase the evaluative group: referees still decide whether a kick was a foul, whether a fighter is evading excessively. The paradox is that once the factual half is handled by machines, referees get fewer opportunities to practise judgement on the half that remains.

Wushu taolu goes the opposite way: it splits scoring authority across several panels, each responsible for one variable. Duong Thuy Vi and Hoang Thi Phuong Giang - faces associated with Vietnamese wushu at various SEA Games - all competed under that system. The split has an obvious virtue: one panel's error cannot wipe out a result. It also creates new blind spots, because the final score is an addition spectators cannot reproduce at home.

MMA has a more interesting experiment. Some US states allow referees to review footage cageside in serious situations, and at certain international events, review involves an outside supervisor. The authority is tightly limited - only events can be reviewed, never evaluations. That is the correct boundary.

Vovinam, founded by Nguyen Loc in 2026 in Hanoi, was part of the programme at the 31st SEA Games held in Vietnam in 2026. It is a discipline of high technical performance, where a judge's call sits closer to artistic scoring than to live combat. For a discipline like that, every effort to add technology only addresses the branches. What is needed is published criteria, published component scores, and a time-limited protest channel.

Boxing is harder than all of them. Nguyen Thi Thu Nhi won the WBO female minimumweight world title on 23 October 2026 in Ansan, South Korea, against Etsuko Tada. That was the milestone that opened a new chapter for professional boxing in Vietnam. Yet even at that level, the appeals mechanism remains narrow: most judges' decisions are final, and sanctioning bodies only revisit cases under vaguely defined conditions. Truong Dinh Hoang once held a WBC Asian title, and like every other fighter he stepped into the ring knowing that the scorecard behind his back carries no meaningful route of appeal.

At the level of international governance, the instability is even greater. In June 2026, the International Olympic Committee withdrew recognition from the International Boxing Association, and the boxing events at Paris 2026 were run by a unit created by the Olympic organisers. The eligibility dispute over Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at Paris 2026 showed one thing: when a governing body no longer has enough credibility to explain its own decisions, trust shatters into countless pieces, and no screen can weld it back together.

The person standing in the middle of the ring

I have stood where only one person is allowed to stand. From there you see what the stands cannot: a fighter's breathing after the second round, a hand trembling when gloves touch, the eyes of someone about to quit. You also see what cameras miss: a light collision that the main camera angle skips entirely.

I saw what nobody else saw, and I had to live with it.

In Vietnam, most combat sports referees do not make a living from officiating. They are teachers, coaches, sports officials. They step onto the mat a few times a year, in bouts where their mistakes are not recorded, not analysed, not systematically reviewed. A Vietnamese football referee who gets a penalty wrong will see his face on every forum for a week. A boxing referee who gets a round wrong goes home, and the story ends there.

Five thousand members, one old screen, and trust split into five thousand pieces.

That is what I learned when I opened the first VAR analysis group in Saigon. Every week I picked one disputed situation, posted it, and asked people to vote. After three months the group had five thousand members, and I understood the most important thing: fans do not rage because a decision was wrong. They rage because a wrong decision came with no explanation.

In professional boxing, the ten-point must system produces a deliberately opaque form. Three judges score independently, cannot confer, and the totals are published only after the fight ends. This is justified by the argument that early publication would push fighters to change tactics around the scorecard. But some sanctioning bodies have trialled publishing scores after round four and round eight, and the results showed fighters adapt far faster than the original worry suggested.

The problem for Vietnamese combat sports is not a shortage of technology. It is a shortage of the habit of explaining.

More cameras do not mean more fairness

This is where I break with the industry consensus.

When a disputed decision happens, the first reflex is always: we need more cameras. I think that reflex is wrong, or at least incomplete. Of the three decision types I laid out, video fully resolves only the first. The third - which dominates every scored combat discipline - is untouched by video, because there is no event to verify there. Only values.

Even in football, the phrase "clear and obvious error" inside the VAR protocol remains an ambiguous clause. Every application requires redefining it from scratch. In combat sports the ambiguity is many times larger, because scoring criteria are not standardised into a shared language between countries. A Thai judge, a Filipino judge and a Vietnamese judge can watch the same exchange and produce three different scores - not because anyone is wrong, but because they were taught three different value systems.

Bringing in more cameras without bringing in more criteria only produces more angles of the same argument. The evidence: after every SEA Games, the volume of footage capturing disputed exchanges rises, while the number of publicly explained decisions barely moves.

What actually needs doing is publishing criteria before the event, publishing component scores after the bout, and allowing time-limited protests before an independent panel that does not sit inside the organising committee. It sounds expensive, but measured against the cost of a four-year training cycle erased by one slip of paper, it is very cheap indeed.

What I want to see

I am not hoping that one day combat sports will have VAR. I am hoping that one day, after every bout at a national championship, the organisers publish the detailed round-by-round scorecard of each judge, with one line of explanation for rounds with wide divergence. I am hoping young referees get to review their own decisions, systematically, every season.

Referees blow the whistle, but the fans are the ones who give the final score.

And if Vietnamese sport wants its combat sports medals to be remembered for victories rather than disputes, then the work does not lie with cameras. It lies in one public document, one independent panel, and one simple habit: telling people why.