David Coote has made a fool of himself – but worse, he's ...

In an age where trust is in short supply, the Premier League referee has given fuel to football conspiracy theorists

There is lots I do not want to know about the video featuring the Premier League referee David Coote. I do not want to know why it looks like he’s at a bleary-eyed after-party at some random guy’s house during Covid. I do not want to know who’s filming using the phone, and why, as Coote reveals his apparent loathing of Liverpool and Jürgen Klopp in language that would make a fishmonger blush. What I do want to know is what the hell persuaded him that opening his mouth at all was in any way a good idea.

Coote has been suspended from his position by Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) pending the outcome of an investigation into what took place. The referee’s organisation was not going to comment on Monday about how long this process might take, but unless internet rumours of the whole thing being AI-generated come true then it would appear the outcome is straightforward. The 42-year-old has brought the sport into disrepute and is surely at serious risk of never being allowed to referee again.

Let’s be honest, such an outcome wouldn’t seem unfair. Coote has made a massive fool of himself in a way that’s actually difficult to comprehend. In the third decade of the 21st century, a man in his late 30s was willing to go on camera and say ugly and most likely defamatory things about one of the biggest names in football and the club he worked for, which also happens to be one of the biggest institutions in the game. To say it was naive for Coote to imagine these remarks would never become public would be unfair to those who believe in the tooth fairy. It’s not just naive, it’s dumb, and it might even be arrogant too (a quality Coote is on record as deploring). A second video, in which Coote apparently instructs his unknown audience not to share the video – “just to be clear this video can’t go anywhere ... seriously” – is the sort of thing that has me making the chef’s kiss gesture even as I write.

Coote by all accounts has done a half-decent job over his six seasons as part of the select group of English referees. He’s refereed one international fixture: Armenia v Estonia in the 2020 Nations League.

He took charge of the Carabao Cup final two seasons ago, his most senior appointment and an occasion that passed off smoothly. Indeed it was not his refereeing but his turns as VAR that appear to have riled Klopp when he was Liverpool manager: a failure to intervene over the Jordan Pickford challenge that ruptured Virgil van Dijk’s ACL being the most prominent cause of complaint. Any suggestion that Coote was biased or out of his depth was generally lacking from the discourse before now. No longer.

And that’s the bigger problem with what Coote did. He let himself down, he let the game down, but he’s also chucked a whole scuttle’s worth of coal on to the flames of conspiracy. In the present day, fantasising about how the powers-that-be are biased against your team is a popular way of filling the hours between matches. Not just fans either, as Nottingham Forest proved with their public rant against Stuart Attwell which eventually resulted in a £750,000 fine being handed down by the FA. Everyone’s at it, and often without anything more than a hunch to go on.

Now, thanks to Coote, those fears can be underwritten. If someone suggests it’s fantastical to think that a referee would allow personal animus to influence their work as a professional, you need only point to this two minutes of idiocy by way of rebuttal. This is living, breathing proof of what referees actually think, you might say if you were already the sort of person who is infuriated by them. Why would I give them the benefit of the doubt again?

We live in an age where trust is in short supply, with more and more of us suspicious of the motivations of others. Football already had its own problems on that front and often rightly so. But these problems are about to get a lot worse. That an industry which takes itself so seriously should have its reputation for integrity severely undermined by a video of a grown man trying to seemingly impress strangers in a sparsely decorated bedsit would be funny if it weren’t so harmful. – Guardian