Column

Culture

Football

Leading

Sport

13 November 2024

7 min read

Referees and stupidity

What one referee’s foul-mouthed rant tells us about the nature of sport, and authority.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A striker is about kick a football towards a goal, a red beach ball sits between him and the goalkeeper.

Darren Bent and the beach ball goal.

Sky.

Picture the scene:

You have a monthly column writing about football from a Christian perspective. You’ve just finished this month’s piece and are about to send it off to your editor.

Before you do, you go to make a coffee. You open Twitter, only to find your timeline filled with videos of a Premier League referee openly slagging off a Premier League club and manager in some of the most obscene ways imaginable. You sigh, trudge back to your laptop, and begin re-writing your column.

Deary, deary me.

It is difficult to even begin quantifying the amount of trouble Premier League referee David Coote is in, following the emergence of videos in which he (allegedly?!) calls Liverpool Football Club “s***” and former manager Jürgen Klopp a “German c***”. It’s not clear when the video was filmed but given Coote (allegedly?!) mocks social distancing regulations, it may well be from a few years back.

There is also a second video in which Coote says: “just to be clear, that f***ing last video can’t go anywhere. Seriously.” The person next to him chimes in: “He’s a premier league referee. Let’s not … let’s not ruin his career,” seeming to confirm that Coote is the person in the video. This second person then goes on to say: “let’s face it: we’re good blokes” seemingly oblivious to having said in the previous video: “Liverpool are all f***ing b******s, and we hate scousers.”

The marks perhaps a new low point in the relationship (if that’s not too generous a term) between fans and referees. I talked last month about the prominence of conspiracy theories amongst (some) football fans; we might forgive some Liverpool fans for thinking this particular referee had it in for them …

My wife and I were at Anfield last Saturday for Liverpool vs Aston Villa. David Coote was the referee. We’re lucky enough to sit in the front row at Anfield, and David Coote and his linesmen were warming up directly in front of us. Even before kick-off, some people in the crowd were making sure Coote knew what they thought of him.

In the first half, Villa winger Leon Bailey brought down Mo Salah as he was seemingly through on goal. Normally this would be a red-card offense for denial of a goal-scoring opportunity; in this instance there was not even a foul awarded. It’s safe to say that the people sat near us think even less of David Coote than David Coote thinks of Jürgen Klopp.

In the grand scheme of things, David Coote will be fine. He’ll probably end up as a pundit somewhere, earning more than he does currently for telling viewers why any given refereeing decision in any given match was the right one.

According to a statement by PGMOL (the body responsible for Premier League officiating), Coote has been “suspended with immediate effect pending a full investigation.” But you never know, if any institution can contrive to find a way for someone to keep their job after this, it’s PGMOL. He might be back not-brandishing red cards straight after the current international break. In April 2023, assistant referee Constantine Hatzidakis was caught – on camera – allegedly elbowing Liverpool full-back Andrew Robertson in the face. After a PGMOL investigation, he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

But for some Liverpool fans the leaking of this video is nothing other than vindication. “We knew he [and, by extension, other refs] were corrupt. This is just proof!”

But this is, I fear, only bad news for the sport. There is already a widespread ‘us and them’ mentality when it comes to the footballing establishment. It often feels as though football happens despite referees, not because of them.

The footballing media don’t help this. Most post-match analysis now centres on the referees. Did they make the right decision? Should that person have been sent off? Were there too many yellow cards? Were there not enough yellow cards?

I am, frankly, bored of talking about referees. I watch football to see Mo Salah be the best player in the world, or to see Virgil Van Dijk be the most imperious human being that’s ever walked on the earth. Not to see some wannabe police officer have a power trip. Look, I wouldn’t want to be a ref. They’re subject to horrific abuse, both in person and online. And yet, the increasing centrality of referees and refereeing to football discourse is unhealthy for the sport.

Only those secure in their authority and competence can operate with the vulnerability necessary to have that authority and competence questioned.

The breathtakingly arrogant assumption of authority that oozes from every fibre of Coote’s being in the videos is, I think, somewhat indicative of the way authority has been wielded in this country in recent years.

Such heavy-handed wielding of authority – whether it’s Boris Johnson’s incessant disbelief that anyone would have the gall to question his decision to party during lockdown, or the apparent ease with which David Coote seems to imagine himself the most important person on the football pitch – all ultimately stem, I think, from insecurity.

We have just seen the re-election of convicted felon Donald Trump as President of the United States of America. What a sentence that is.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Trump typifies the desperate kind of insecure man who craves authority. A man of deeply fragile ego, Trump’s attempted coup of January 6th 2021 – for what else can we say it was? – was the violent manifestation of an infant’s inarticulate magpie mentality, denied their most recent ‘shiny thing’.

A toddler with nuclear codes.

Only those secure in their authority and competence can operate with the vulnerability necessary to have that authority and competence questioned. In a move straight out of the Johnson/Trump playbook, Coote initially denied the videos were real, and then claimed not to remember their content, as thought that in any way served as mitigation. (Imagine: “Yes, your honour, that video certainly does show me killing the victim, but I can't remember doing so!”)

This is not a man whose authority is based on vulnerability or transparency.

Sadly, our politicians seem increasingly unwilling to display such vulnerability, and so do our referees. The latter might seem less important than the former, but they both speak to a broader culture of insecurity that leads the authority being wielded by the unfit.

And sport is uniquely placed to combat such insecure seriousness of authority. Because sport is, ultimately, really, really stupid.

In 2009, a Liverpool fan threw a beach ball onto the pitch in a match against Sunderland. As Sunderland striker Darren Bent took a shot, it ricocheted off the beach ball sending it one way, while the football went another. Liverpool keeper Pepe Reina dived after the beach ball, leaving the football to cross the line for a goal.

Sunderland won 1-0.

It was an unbelievably stupid moment. It was the pinnacle of sport as far as I’m concerned; exactly the kind of stupid nonsense I watch sport for.

I want my stupid sport back. The kind of stupid sport that people don’t feel strongly enough about to record videos as unbelievably arrogant as Coote’s. All sport is a gift from God, football included. It is simply a gift to be enjoyed; nothing more, nothing less. It is profoundly unserious in this respect.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons I think about a lot. Lots of advertising billboards come to life and begin harassing the residents of Springfield. The solution? Just don’t look. The billboards thrive on the attention; it’s what keeps them alive. Without it, they die.

Men like David Coote, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump thrive on authority; on being taken seriously. They are human billboards, advertising nothing but themselves. This makes them immensely unsuited to the very authority they crave.

Coote might have said “that f***ing last video can’t go anywhere. Seriously.” But the very fact that he recorded it in the first place, that he voiced such thoughts in the first place, displays exactly the kind of insecurity and temperament of character that leads to people absolutely buckling under the weight of authority.

What is football to learn from the David Coote incident? Just don’t look. The endless, austere-faced analysis of the minutiae of refereeing leads only to a culture that attracts people like Coote to the job in the first place. The sooner we stop talking football so seriously, the sooner we will be rid of the Very Serious MenTM ruining the sport.

Indeed, ‘looking’ at the world’s Boris Johnsons and Donald Trumps – them and the people that prop them up, like failed-author-cum-politician Nadine Dorries, or the inexplicably daft Elon Musk – is to give them precisely what they want: attention. They are attention black holes; you do not reason with black holes, and no good can come from playing around with them.

No, only Pepe Reina’s beach ball can save us from the David Cootes of this world.

Article

Character

Culture

Idolatry

Psychology

31 October 2025

6 min read

We need a sense of shame - but need mercy even more

Shame may be necessary, but only if it can be defeated

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Frankstein stares our from his covered face.

Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein's monster

Netflix.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of shame a lot recently. Both professionally and personally, it’s a topic that is demanding my attention. It’s following me around, insisting that I look it in the eye, shoving and nudging me – taunting and tempting me to finally snap and wrestle it to the ground. I guess that is the very nature of shame, isn’t it? It’s always so stubbornly there.

I’ve also noticed that it seems to have elbowed its way into cultural conversations; it’s been putting a real PR shift in, seeking rehabilitation in public discourse.

The actor, Jacob Elordi, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Kind of interesting, kind of not. The sliver of it that really caught my attention was when the interviewer asked Jacob,

‘What’s one lost art that you wish would come back in style?’

To which Elordi replied,

‘The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier’.

Gosh.

It makes sense that this was Jacob’s answer; the interview was conducted to promote Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro’s new movie in which Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein’s monster. So, I get it. He’s been consumed with what components make up a monster, endeavouring to literally turn himself into one. He’s been ruminating on the recipe of evil, and perhaps he’s found one key ingredient – shamelessness. Maybe Jacob, having dwelt on such, has subsequently looked out at the not-so-fictional ‘monsters’ wreaking havoc and has diagnosed the same thing, a distinct lack of shame.

It's a solid thesis.

It reminded me of another recent interview, this one with the acclaimed author, Zadie Smith. She said,

‘Shame gets a bad rap these days. I think it’s quite a useful emotion, corrective on certain kinds of behaviour… I assume people – including myself – are just deeply, deeply flawed. And so, shame is usually quite appropriate on a day-to-day level… shame is a kind of productive thing to create change. I guess I do believe that. I know it’s definitely a Christian emotion, that’s why it’s so out of fashion. But I always thought it quite productive in the gospels, that idea that you assume that you are entirely in sin. I always assume that.’

I half agree with both Jacob and Zadie. In a way, I’d be a fool not to. Not to mention, proof of their thesis.

I cannot deny that I am, as Zadie points out, deeply, deeply flawed. There is a crack in everything I do, a fracture in all my best intentions. And yours, too, I’m afraid (but I have a feeling you know that). There is a brokenness to us, a breaking-things-ness. To each and every one of us, ‘hurt’ is both an adjective and a verb – something we feel and something we do. The things I want to do, I never manage. The things I don’t want to do, I seem to manage every day. I am falling short, missing the mark – I am so fallibly human.

To acknowledge such is not only obvious, nor is it simply ‘useful’, as Zadie suggests. It’s inherently spiritual, it’s paradigmatic.

Last summer, I hosted an event at which Francis Spufford, one of my most cherished wordsmiths, playfully quipped, ‘I’ve heard original sin (the notion that we are, as Zadie notes ‘entirely in sin’) described as one of the few theological propositions which you can actually confirm with the naked eye’. ‘Sin’, Tyler Staton similarly writes, ‘is simultaneously the most controversial idea in Christianity and the one most universally agreed upon’.

There’s something deeply wrong with the world. We all know that.

Which, presumably, is what Jacob Elordi is getting at – he’s observing bad people not feeling bad enough about the bad that they do, or worse still, the bad that they are. A healthy dose of shame is the medicine that this world needs, he suggests.

Oh Jacob, I sympathise with that. The thing is, I have a hunch that the presence of shame makes as many monsters as the absence of it.

And Zadie, I wonder if shame births as much destruction as it does ‘correction’.

While I agree with you both that, in a world as broken as ours, shame needs to exist in some form or another, it also needs an antidote. It’s a dangerous substance; toxic and destructive. Don’t let it fool you, don’t be over-generous to it – shame may (in its most moderate and appropriate forms) be an acknowledgment of the disease, but it is not the medicine. It could only ever be ‘useful’ if it is, ultimately, defeatable.

At least, that’s my – admittedly very Christian – conviction. That’s my take. I can’t pretend that it’s not as theological as it is sociological in its underpinnings.

I’m relatively new to the liturgical aspects of my own faith tradition (that is, the formalised scripts, actions and rituals that have long fuelled religious experience) , so I have the pleasure of not being numb to them. When I read the ancient words of ancient prayers, they shoot right through me, particularly these ones:

‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault...’

Ouch.

As I read those words, week in and week out, my brain creates a helpful montage for me – whirring through the countless ways in which I have failed – in what I think, what I say, what I do. I’m confronted with the ways that my breaking-things-ness has leaked out of me through my negligence, it’s spilled out of my weakness, the force of it directed at others through my own deliberate fault.

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.

But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral.

The moment that shame is acknowledged, its presence verbalised, its power felt – is the very moment it needs to be neutralised. It cannot fester, it cannot be afforded the loudest, nor the last, say.

And so, to Jacob Elordi’s interesting wish – that ‘people could experience shame a little heavier’, and to Zadie Smith’s fascinating thesis that ‘shame is a kind of productive thing to create change’- I hear you. I see what you’re getting at. But I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.

So, Jacob and Zadie, let’s agree to half-agree on this one, shall we?

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