Losing a Civil Suit Doesn't Mean You Lied — Vietnamese Football Keeps Two Ledgers Too

On September 23, in a courtroom of the Seventh Civil Court of Mexico City, Kalimba Kadjaly Marichal Ibar sat and listened to the ruling on a lawsuit he himself had filed. He had sued Melissa Galindo for moral damages, what Mexican civil law calls daño moral, after she publicly accused him of sexual abuse. The judge dismissed the claim: the plaintiff had failed to prove the necessary elements of his action, so the compensation he sought simply vanished from the table.

Then the court added a sentence few editors bother to bold: this ruling has effect only within that civil case, and it does not determine whether the alleged acts occurred.

I read that line three times. I have followed Vietnamese football long enough to know that here, every season, we issue dozens of rulings of the same kind, except we never bother to write that exemption clause. A player suspended for three matches, a coach fined, a club docked points: the public reads all of it as a verdict on the truth. None of those rulings is a verdict on the truth.

The Mexican story has a tidy timeline. In March 2026, Melissa Galindo publicly accused Kalimba of sexual abuse. Kalimba publicly denied it, then chose his own path: he filed a civil suit seeking moral damages. In April 2026, he was formally linked to a criminal process on a charge of aggravated sexual abuse with violence. In Mexican criminal procedure this step is called auto de vinculación a proceso: the suspect formally becomes the subject of the proceedings. It is not a conviction. It is not an indictment finding guilt. It is only a door opening.

On September 23, the civil court closed the door the plaintiff had opened himself. The record shows the judge concluded Kalimba had not proven the required elements of the claim. The facts come from the judicial file and from reporting by journalist Luis Cárdenas; the source material does not state the year of the ruling, a gap worth noting for anyone who wants to cite it.

Two tracks, two standards of proof. The civil track was started by Kalimba himself, the burden of proof sat on his shoulders, and he lost there. The criminal track is run by the state, with a far higher standard of proof, and it remains open. The civil court also made clear its ruling does not resolve the substance of the accusation. Which means that after all of this, the biggest question still has no answer from the judiciary.

This is where I stop and look at the V.League.

Vietnamese football does not have one court. It has at least five judging mechanisms running in parallel, each using a different yardstick, and none of them publishing that yardstick. The referee judges in a fraction of a second, on what the eye sees. The disciplinary committee of the federation and the league management company judges on administrative evidence, with a standard of "clear violation". A civil court judges contract and image-rights disputes, where the burden of proof lies with the party bringing the claim. A criminal court judges match-fixing, betting and assault, with the highest standard of proof the law possesses. And the fifth mechanism, the strongest one, has no procedure, no judge and no right of appeal: public opinion.

Every ruling in Vietnamese football is misread, and the cause is not that the public lacks information, but that each judging mechanism uses a different standard of proof and nobody bothers to tell the public so.

The 2026 match-fixing scandal is the cleanest example. A group of players was banned by the disciplinary committee, with the two most frequently named being Pham Van Quyen and Le Quoc Vuong, while also becoming entangled in a criminal process. Two files, two standards of proof. The disciplinary committee needed only administrative evidence. The criminal court needed proof beyond reasonable doubt.

The result, nearly two decades later, is that the public remembers one word. Nobody remembers there were two independent judgments, that the two could diverge, that a sporting verdict is not a criminal verdict and vice versa. Once the two verdicts are compressed into one, there is nothing left to appeal. What was taken away was not a right to liberty, but the right to be read correctly.

This is where the Mexican story touches Vietnamese football harder than any transfer story of the season.

In the Kalimba case, the civil court did the hardest part of the job correctly: it stated the limits of its own ruling. Vietnamese football has never done that. When the disciplinary committee suspends a player, the document it issues usually contains only the article and the sanction, with no explanation of why the chain of evidence led to that conclusion. Fans are given no tool to distinguish "insufficient evidence" from "it never happened". When those two concepts are blended in the minds of millions, the player pays the bill.

The law has a principle that public opinion does not: the party making an accusation carries the burden of proof. On social media that principle is completely inverted. The accused must prove innocence, and the price of proving it is the entire time, energy and image of a career. Kalimba chose the legal route and placed the burden of proof on his own shoulders. He lost there. But in the fifth mechanism, he was convicted back in March 2026.

I did not rebel because of Nguyen Van Quyet, I rebelled because of how we look at a contract.

In 2026, when the entire press corps was praising Ha Noi FC and its academy, I wrote against the current: sell Nguyen Van Quyet to rebuild the academy. Quyet was 26 then, the captain, with 12 goals and 7 assists for the runners-up. I pointed out a detail nobody wanted to see: of 11 academy graduates, only one was a regular starter. Hundreds of fans attacked me. A year later, that same generation carried Vietnam's U23s to the Asian final.

What I learned was not that I was right. What I learned is that in Vietnamese football a contract does not exist on paper, it exists in how society sees a person. Quyet was not merely a player, he was an agenda. His contract was a contract about collective memory, about which club is permitted to symbolize what. A contract is only a promise put in a frame, and the truth always sits outside the frame.

That frame is the most expensive thing on the Vietnamese transfer market. The big clubs do not buy strikers, they buy brand weapons. The genuinely valuable contracts sit at small clubs, where someone signs a 19-year-old because they believe in his development curve, not because they believe in shirt sales.

The way the market prices things shows the same mechanism. A goalkeeper praised for his distribution, for playing out like a midfielder, will earn far more than a goalkeeper with much better reflexes. Goalkeeper distribution has been sanctified over the past decade, while basic reflexes, the only thing that genuinely saves goals, decline quietly with age. The market pays for the story, not for the ability.

That mechanism is identical to how reputation is priced in a lawsuit. Brands do not wait for a verdict. They read public opinion, and they withdraw in silence. A player accused on social media can lose an image-rights deal within two days. When he is cleared six months later, the deal does not come back automatically, because the risk has been repriced and nobody wants to buy back an asset that once carried a bad name.

That is exactly what the Kalimba case exposes. The civil ruling is a technical failure of proof, not a moral declaration. In the market it will be sold as a moral declaration, and both sides have an incentive to sell it that way. One side will say: he lost, so the accusation was false. The other will say: the court only said he could not prove it, and the criminal process is still open. Both sentences are quotable, and both fail to answer the only question that matters.

Vietnamese football has an identical version of this game, differing only in severity. A player cleared by the disciplinary committee for lack of grounds walks onto the pitch as "innocent" in the stands' eyes. A player suspended for three matches walks onto the pitch as "guilty" for the rest of his career. Neither case comes with a document saying: we make no finding on the substance, only on the evidence available to us.

In Europe, a club hit with a transfer ban can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and receive a written, reasoned decision. Even in defeat, it still possesses what Vietnamese football does not: a document to read, to cite, to argue against. The difference between a mature football industry and a growing one is not the amount of money, it is the number of published pages of reasoning.

The case of Nguyen Xuan Son on the night of January 5, 2026 at Rajamangala exposes another gap of the same kind. Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2 in the second leg, 5-3 on aggregate, winning their first AFF Cup title since 2026. Son scored, was named the tournament's best player, then broke his leg and left the pitch on a stretcher. Based on my experience watching matches, I wrote a single line in my notebook after that night: nobody has written the bill for this final yet.

An asset broken in a national-team shirt is an asset paid for by a club. When Son returned, his club carried the entire cost of treatment, the entire absence, the entire erosion of transfer value. Nobody had to prove anything in that story, because no court opened a session. But nobody wrote a line limiting liability either. A standard contract clause on national-team injury still does not exist, and it is the cheapest contract Vietnamese football could sign today.

In Mexico, a singer lost a compensation payment because he could not prove what he wanted to prove. In Vietnam, a club lost an asset because nobody proved anything at all. Both are consequences of missing written standards.

I may be wrong here, and I want to be clear about where I may be wrong.

There is a way to read the whole argument in reverse: Vietnamese football does not lack standards, it has too many mechanisms. More courts, more clauses, more appeals procedures only make everything slower, more expensive and further from the stands. Fans do not need a 40-page judgment on whether player X can play football. They need to know Sunday's lineup.

I accept that counterargument, but only partly. Transparency is not the same as litigation. A disciplinary committee publishing three paragraphs of reasoning for a suspension does not delay the season by a single second, and it strips public opinion of its most dangerous weapon: ambiguity. I am not asking for another court. I am asking for another sentence.

There is another point that leaves me uneasy with myself: the separation between the two legal tracks does not exist in real life. Even when the civil court states clearly that its ruling does not decide the substance, the mere existence of a criminal process plants an unerasable doubt in the public mind. An open criminal process is not a conviction, but it is a moral debt compounding with interest. Saying the two tracks are separate describes the law. The public lives somewhere else.

I also have to address a lens I only dare raise as a hypothesis, not as established fact: that an accused person using a civil suit to answer an accuser can be read as a pressure tactic, what international legal scholarship calls a suit to silence. I have no evidence of motive, and I will not convict anyone on a hypothesis. I raise it because if that lens holds, the consequences do not stop in Mexico. It teaches others that speaking up can be expensive.

For football, those consequences are very concrete. If a young player believes that reporting wrongdoing will get him sued, suspended, frozen out of his contract, he will stay silent. I have watched too many silent dressing rooms not to know what that silence costs.

I also remind myself of one thing before concluding too fast: I am a foreigner writing about a football culture that is not my own. The moral frame of Vietnamese football is not the frame I grew up in. In Argentina, people distrust courts by instinct. In Vietnam, people trust face-saving and collective stability more than a published ruling. Importing a Latin legal framework here without translating it into cultural Vietnamese would be an arrogant mistake.

I write a long piece to say something short: football is never what you think it is.

I will not predict whether Kalimba wins or loses the criminal process, because nobody knows, including him. I will predict something checkable: within 18 months, at least one V.League club will publish a standard contract clause set covering injury insurance for players on national-team duty, plus a separate clause on image rights during an investigation. The club that does it first will buy the cheapest thing on the Vietnamese football market: peace of mind.

If nobody does it, every season we will keep watching unwritten verdicts, unjudged accusations, and careers ended by a status update. At 59, I am not wiser, I am only less afraid of headlines.