Vietnam's Combat Sports Are Missing a VAR Room

That night in Ho Chi Minh City, after three judges announced their scorecards, the arena broke into jeers. A fighter who had lost on a razor-thin margin stood in the middle of the ring, both arms still raised, unable to understand where he had lost the fight. The promoter had no big screen for replays, no strike statistics, no round-by-round record. The argument spilled onto social media for days and then faded, and nobody — not even the referee — could prove they were right. That night I sat down and recorded everything I had observed, and what I recorded most of all were empty boxes.

After years of watching combat sports, I have noticed a paradox. Vietnamese football is now used to VAR, to semi-automated offside, to data transmitted second by second. Yet the boxing, Muay, MMA and sanda rings at home still run on pen and paper. Scorecards are handwritten, stacked on top of one another, and almost never published to the public or stored in any searchable database. A referee who forgets the details of round three has nothing to cross-check against. A fighter who wants to appeal has no evidence to put on the table.

This looks small, but it changes the nature of the debate. Without data, everything becomes a matter of belief. Fans believe their own feelings, referees believe their own memory, and the two sides never meet in the middle.

Look at the region. Thailand has had the Lumpinee and Rajadamnern stadium systems running for centuries, with records kept for every bout. Japan has K-1 and Rizin with public data. At home, combat sports have grown extremely fast over the past decade — professional boxing, Muay, MMA, sanda, vovinam — but the recording infrastructure has barely moved. The number of fighters has risen, the number of bouts has risen, while the ability to retrieve information about those very bouts is close to zero.

It starts with classification. Martial arts are several sports stacked under a single name. Taolu, the choreographed routine form, is scored on movement difficulty and performance quality. Sanda is scored on clean contact and throws. MMA follows the unified rules with the ten-point must system. Boxing also uses the ten-point must system, but its criteria for effective striking and ring control are entirely different. Applying one sport's logic to another produces a false conclusion at the root, before the bout has even begun.

Here, the boundary between categories matters more than the label itself. A taolu athlete and a sanda fighter may wear the same federation colours and appear at the same SEA Games, yet their judging criteria share nothing in common. Confusing the two is not just a matter of terminology. It leads people to use a win-loss record to assess someone who has never stepped onto a combat platform.

Watching domestic events, I see audiences routinely merge three groups into one: professional combat, performance routines, and semi-professional competition. They watch a routine form and ask why there was no knockout. They watch a sanda bout and compare it to Muay. Those comparisons are meaningless technically, and equally meaningless from a refereeing standpoint, because three rule sets cannot be measured with one ruler.

What I want to say most forcefully lies elsewhere: weight cutting is the most serious risk in the entire system, and also the most concealed. A fighter who drops 5-7 kg in 48 hours through dehydration is not merely weakened — they are placing their kidneys, heart and life on the scale. Without competition weight data, without a weight-cut history, without post-weigh-in testing, every conversation about conditioning or mental toughness is empty talk.

Then comes time. A referee's decision in combat sports loses value faster than in any other sport. A knockout, a grappling infraction, a stoppage — if it is not recorded within seconds, it vanishes from collective memory. In combat sports we tend to handle this by talking louder, rather than by recording better.

Based on my experience following these bouts, I keep asking why combat sports have moved more slowly than football in standardising data. In 2026, the International Olympic Committee suspended the recognition of AIBA, the world amateur boxing federation, after repeated judging and governance controversies, then ran the boxing competition at Tokyo 2026 directly. That shock showed that even at world level, boxing's weakest link sits in the scoring, not in the fighters.

Here I must argue against myself. The easiest thing to do in front of an empty data sheet is to invent a story. I have read analyses whose authors had no figures at all, yet wrote fluently about form, character and fighting spirit, as though they had counted every punch. This trade carries a powerful temptation: readers cannot verify, so the appeal of the prose substitutes for the truth.

Once I was asked to write a piece about a fighter's power. I requested the data. They handed me a ten-minute video, with no scorecard, no strike count, no weight. I declined, because anything written from that could only be embellishment. Many called me difficult. But if I issue a conclusion I cannot verify myself, I have betrayed the profession I chose forty years ago.

Nor should everything be blamed on referees. I never say a referee was wrong. I only say their angle did not have enough light. A person holding the whistle in the ring has a thousandth of a second to decide, with their view blocked by fighters' bodies and the roar of the crowd hammering their ears. I sit outside, watch ten replays and carry no pressure at all. That difference is not talent — it is working conditions. When working conditions are neglected, errors appear steadily, and the individual who errs is simply standing at the end of a process.

A table of refereeing errors is not a starting point; it is a mirror of an entire system. I imagine three scenarios. If domestic combat sports events publish scorecards immediately after each bout, disputes will fall by half within two seasons. If they also archive weight history, weight-cut risk will drop markedly within five to seven years. But if records continue to be kept from memory, every fight night will remain an occasion for mutual suspicion. Every slow-motion replay is an operation: cut correctly, cut wrongly, but never cut in haste.