Five substitutions and the final 20 minutes: how squad depth is redrawing V.League

Minute 74, the away side leads 1-0 at the opponent's ground. The head coach pulls off his centre-forward, sends on a defensive midfielder, and I sit in the stand telling myself the game is settled. Sixteen minutes later the score is 1-2. On the drive home, what bothers me is not the goals conceded but the way they lost: they did not lose because they were weaker, they lost because they ran out of players to bring on, while the opponent still had three unused substitutions on the bench.

I have watched far too many games like that. The more I watch, the more I believe the five-substitution rule — brought in as a temporary pandemic measure and then kept forever — is quietly redrawing the V.League table along an axis few people name correctly: squad depth.

Let me set the record straight. In May 2026, when global football paused for COVID-19 and then returned with a congested schedule, five substitutions were permitted on a temporary basis. By 2026 the rule was made permanent in competitions that chose to adopt it, with each team allowed three stoppages to make up to five changes. The V.League adopted it. In theory, that was good news: more players on the pitch, fewer injuries, more attacking football.

In theory.

In practice, five substitutions do not add opportunity to everyone equally. They add opportunity to the teams that have enough players to add. A quality 25-man squad turns five changes into five weapons. An 18-man squad, six of them youngsters who cannot last 90 minutes, turns five changes into five gambles. One rule, two fates.

I will say it plainly: in the V.League, that gap is far bigger than the table shows.

Look at the final 20 minutes. That is where the rule leaves its clearest mark. When the team's legs start to go, when midfield duels lose their precision, the side that still has players to bring on is the side that decides the game. A team with three quality substitute forwards can send them on at minute 60, 70 and 80, turning a stalemate into a chase. A team with no one to send on can only pray.

I once watched a round-12 game last season — I will not name the clubs because I do not want anyone to carry extra pressure they do not need — where the home side used all five changes in the second half, three of them attacking midfielders. They scored twice in the last 15 minutes and won from behind. The away side used only two changes, both defensive. The stats sheet will read “effective substitutions”, but that is not what it was. What it was: one team had a bench, the other had empty seats.

This is the crux I want people to look at squarely: the five-substitution rule turns the final 20 minutes from a test of fitness into a war of attrition, and in a war of attrition the side with more troops always holds a structural advantage. Not a mental advantage, not a lucky advantage — a structural one, measurable, repeatable, and impossible to fix with tactics.

I have tracked one simple indicator for more than two seasons: goals scored from the 75th minute onward, split by groups of teams according to the average minutes played by their substitutes. The group that uses substitutes the most scores noticeably more late goals than the group that uses them the least. The exact numbers change by season, but the trend does not: the more quality substitutes a team uses, the more late goals it scores. And the reverse holds too — the fewer substitutes a team uses, the more late goals it concedes.

That is why I no longer trust reading the table on its own. The table says who won more. It does not say who won because they had more players. The final 20 minutes say that.

Let me tell a story from Vietnamese pitches. There was a club I followed all season — famous for a blazing first half and a fading second. People blamed fitness. But when I sat and counted, I realised the problem was not in the players' lungs. It was on the bench. That club had a starting XI good enough to match anyone for 60 minutes, but from the 60th minute on, as opponents began to rotate, they had no Plan B of sufficient quality. It was not that they refused to substitute. They had no one to substitute.

A team that depends on a single Nguyễn Quang Hải or a single Nguyễn Tiến Linh to create a spark is exposed the moment those players tire, because the bench has no one who can open the same space. That is not their fault. It is the fault of a structure.

And this is the part that annoys me most about how the media reports it. When a team like that concedes at minute 85, the next day's headline reads “mental collapse”, “loss of concentration”, “no character”. I hate those headlines. They reduce a structural problem to a psychological one, and psychology cannot be fixed by buying more players.

I say this as a man who has been wrong many times on air: when you see a team lose in the final 20 minutes, the first thing to do is not to scold them but to count how many substitutes they have left. The answer is usually there.

The summer of 2026 taught me one thing: people remember the shock merchant more than the contract. But in this story, what deserves remembering is not a shock — it is a boring statistic: the number of good enough players on the bench.

Now the part where I might be wrong.

There is an entirely reasonable counter-argument: if five substitutions favour the rich clubs, why do small clubs still make a run of it? Why do fairy tales still happen in competitions? I do not deny it. But I want us to look more closely at how fairy tales get told.

The “small town beats the giant” story is a beautiful one, and I love it. But it usually hides an operational reality: the small club wins through one specific match, one specific moment, one specific penalty. The big club wins through a season. And the five-substitution rule is a rule of the whole season, not of one match. It rewards endurance, depth, and the ability to withstand a congested schedule — all the things the small club, structurally speaking, does not have.

In other words, the rule does not kill the fairy tale. It just makes the fairy tale harder to repeat, and makes people remember it longer because it is rarer. That is a less romantic truth, but I would rather say it than let fans believe that miracles are a strategy.

There is one more thing I have to admit: I do not have enough data to say by what percentage this rule has changed the V.League table. I only have my eyes, my recordings, my nights spent rewatching matches. If someone has better data, I am happy to sit and listen. That is not weakness. That is the job.

I also remind myself of one thing: do not turn every defeat into the fault of a rule. Some games a strong team loses because it was complacent, because it played badly, because it deserved to lose. I do not want to use the substitution rule as a shield to excuse incompetence. I only want it to be seen for what it is: a real variable.

So here we are. If you are a V.League club reading these lines, the question is not “should we buy another striker”. The question is: in the final 20 minutes, how many players do we have who can come on and change the game?

If the answer is one, you are playing a game you cannot win consistently. If the answer is three, you are playing by the rules of 2026.

And for the fans: next time your team concedes at minute 88, do not scold the players. Count the bench.

I will be tracking this all season. And if I am wrong — if it turns out squad depth matters less than I think — I will be the first to write a piece admitting it. Mispronouncing a player's name is a mistake of the ear. Getting a prediction wrong is a mistake of the craft. I only hope my errors are of the ear.