David Coote video undermines PGMOL and gives conspiracy theorists a field day

Referee’s comments have opened the door for hysteria and paranoia to become rife in an increasingly tortured sport

There are few more tedious people in modern football than big-club fans who believe conspiracy theories. A VAR decision went against Manchester United? Arsenal got a soft red card? Mike Dean was spotted listening to Simply Red, he must never referee Manchester City again! Cry me a river.
Most supporters put up with their teams losing regularly, frequently unfairly, and receiving a fraction of the coverage of the Champions League elite. So spare us the bleating when you experience a fraction of our pain. Unfortunately such whinging is about to reach previously uncharted levels, and we have David Coote to thank, the man who proved a million stopped clocks right.
Until now it has been easy to dismiss cries of bias and imagined agendas as blinkered paranoia. It is the sort of hysteria whipped up by a fervent internet which considers Bill Shankly’s “much more serious than that” quote as pathetically weak. Sometimes clubs themselves issue pious statements complaining about perceived injustice. This was all before we had seen a video of one of the men trusted to keep Premier League games fair describing Jurgen Klopp as a “German c—”.
This, to put it as non-hysterically as possible, is not a good look. Not just Coote’s words but whatever thought process led him to speak so indiscreetly while being recorded. But the lasting damage will come from the violence of his language towards the former Liverpool manager. He has poured petrol onto a tinderbox and lit a boxful of matches, just to make sure.
It is a stomach-dropping video to watch, obliterating the ideal of bland stoicism we expect from officials. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before such plainspeaking was captured in a society where everyone is one have-a-go gotcha moment away from unprecedented social media reach. But clearly the PGMOL has several questions to answer.
Presumably it knew nothing of this video until it emerged on Monday, but it knew enough about Coote for him to take charge of more than 100 Premier League games. It gave him the League Cup final last year. Here you wonder about the chronic lack of resources football is working with for its officials. If the pool of potential referees was sufficiently deep you would not see reckless behaviour like Coote’s at the peak of the profession. Anyone liable to make such unwise statements into a live microphone would have been weeded out long before reaching the top.
We often wonder why entire tournaments like this summer’s men’s European Championship pass without the sort of controversy which seems overwhelming in the Premier League. This overlooks every country sending its best team of officials to tournaments. Perhaps here is a solution for the Premier League, which has never been shy about looking abroad to improve the quality of its product.
Apart from Australian Jarred Gillett, the first person born outside the British Isles to referee a Premier League game, our approach has always been to shop local for referees. International purists upset about Thomas Tuchel taking the England job must love it, but it may be time to widen the net and start offering commensurate financial reward for playing such a key role in the richest league in the world. A Premier League official will earn a maximum of around £150,000 per year, about the same as Youri Tielemans makes each week.
It is still possible to feel sympathy for the pile-on Coote will now endure. Referees are held to a moral standard we do not expect of any public servant. The pressure is enormous, the abuse from managers appalling and the hatred players and managers invite when blame-shifting after defeat almost intolerable. Coote has said some rude words into a smartphone, it is hardly taking a bribe. It is also plausible to hold the opinion that a manager or player is despicable and still apply the laws fairly when working on their games. We all have colleagues we dislike, we are rarely driven by a vengeful desire to tamper with their spreadsheets.
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Football fans are incapable of applying this real-world reasonableness to a game which houses all of their most drastic emotions. Fans’ feelings are forever conflated with those working within the game who have a professional relationship with the sport. Coote has taken charge of 56 clubs’ games in English football, six involving Liverpool. He has only shown their players his 38th-highest number of yellow cards per game, and zero reds.
Hard to see when he will have another chance to prove his neutrality and we must all live with the consequences of a broken system. Wacky interpretations of rules, woeful delays during VAR consultations and Howard Webb and Michael Owen explaining why some of those pored-over life-sapping decisions were actually, with the benefit of hindsight, totally wrong.
The main impact though will be a lingering stench of the official who blew the illusion of neutrality. It will stick like a discredited doctor linking vaccines to autism. Every circular argument about bias will now include this line: “But what about David Coote?”