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

Belief

Creed

Politics

27 October 2025

7 min read

If a King can pray with a Pope, there's hope for MAGA and woke to talk

Once bitter enemies found peace through prayer - offering a quiet challenge to today’s culture warriors

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The Pope and King Charles walk together from the Sistine Chapel

Royal.uk

Last week, King Charles met the Pope.

There was a part of me that wondered what Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer, and even the young Ian Paisley would have of made it. Not much I imagine. The days of sharp theological barbs thrown between Protestants and Catholics over the mass, purgatory, the place of Mary, praying to the saints and so on are largely over. I imagine they had a cup of tea, admired Michaelangelo’s painting in the Sistine chapel and had a chat, but the main thing they did was to pray together - the first time a British monarch had met to pray with a Pope since the Reformation.

So this was quite a big deal. Prayer carries much more significance than tea. But why did it matter so much?

To make sense of it, you have to remember the history.

In the aftermath of the English church’s break from Rome under Henry VIII, later consolidated under Elizabeth I, one of the most influential books that emerged from the English Reformation was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, originally published in 1563. Alongside the ubiquitous King James Bibles, copies were to be found in English homes up and down the country for centuries afterwards. The book was a grisly catalogue of Christian persecution down the ages, and a thinly veiled side-swipe at the author’s main target - the Roman Catholic church, or “popery, which brought innovations into the church and overspread the Christian world with darkness and superstition.” Back then, that was how most British people saw the papacy.

In 1605, a plot led by a group of English Roman Catholics to kill King James I of England (and VI of Scotland) and to blow up the Houses of Parliament was rumbled – the infamous Gunpowder Plot. For centuries afterwards on the anniversary of the conspiracy (until Health & Safety and modern squeamishness toned it down) the English lit bonfires, launched fireworks, and burnt effigies of the Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes to celebrate the deliverance of the nation from papal tyranny. At the time - and partly as a result of that event - Catholics were feared in England much as militant Islam is today in parts of the west – as a shadowy force infiltrating the nation from other European countries (mainly France and Ireland in this case), intent on changing the religion of the country, and imposing arbitrary and tyrannical rule on the population of Britain.

Later in the same century, the looming prospect of a Catholic monarch put Britain into a spin. Charles II had been restored to the throne in 1660 after his father’s execution during the Civil Wars. Charles’ own Protestant credentials were always shaky – a fear that was confirmed by his deathbed conversion to Catholicism in 1685, but at least during his lifetime he remained a Protestant Anglican. The real problem was the heir – Charles’ younger brother James, the rakish Duke of York who was most definitely a Catholic. The same fears of papal tyranny and arbitrary rule, taking away the precious freedoms of the British people were the talk of the coffee houses and broadsheets of the 1670s and 80s.

All the more remarkable then, that relationships between Anglicans and Roman Catholics have develop to such an extent that Anglicans (alongside other churches) were guests of honour at the late pope’s funeral and the inaugural mass of the new pope - and a King prays with a Pope.

So why have things changed so much?

Part of the answer is that times have changed. Europe is less obviously Christian than it was back then. The Christian churches have realised they don’t have the luxury of fighting over such matters. With Christian theology becoming less of a ‘public truth’ that held nations together (much as notions of freedom and democracy do for us today) arguments over it became less fraught and charged.

Another reason is the lengthy conversations that have taken place between churches in the ecumenical movement throughout the last century that have carefully been able to unpick the disagreements, clarifying what was and wasn’t at stake in the fights between Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox and others. These conversations haven’t solved all the issues. Different Christian denominations still disagree on a lot, especially today on issues like human sexuality and the like, but over time, they have at least brought clarity and a certain harmony to some of the historic disagreements. Anglicans still convert to Catholicism, and Catholics become Anglicans (or Orthodox or Pentecostals). The King and the Archbishop of York could not take Holy Communion with the Pope, but they could pray. I know from personal experience the depths of friendship that come when you recognise a brother or a sister in a Christian that you disagree with but in whom you can still recognise an essential commonality.

Another key part of the answer is that the Roman Catholic church has changed. Last year for example, the Vatican department that oversees relationships with other churches issued a study document called ‘The Bishop of Rome’. It was part of an ongoing conversation between the Roman Catholic Church and other world churches on the role of the Pope in the modern world. It talked about the Papacy as having a ‘primacy of service’, its authority linked not to the triumphant but the suffering Christ, of how the Pope offered a kind of ‘personal’ kind of leadership, Orthodox churches a ‘collegial’ form (led by groups of bishops) and the Protestant churches a form that stressed the importance of the whole community.

In other words, here was the Vatican asking other churches how the Papacy can be a help and support to Christians around the world. Back in the nineteenth century, in the first Vatican Council of 1869, the language was very different. The papacy was there by ‘divine right’, essential for the church, implying that other churches really ought to come back into the fold of the Church of Rome. The Roman Catholic church now seems to take a humbler, more generous stance which makes it possible for a King to pray with a Pope again.

It's a heartwarming story. We constantly lament today the polarised, fragmented and angry nature of our politics and our cultural debate. The ecumenical movement of the Christian churches over the last hundred years may not be the sexiest development in recent cultural history. It involved long and painstaking conversations, the building of friendships and relationships across suspicion, a willingness to see the good in the other even when you could not agree. Yet this combination of time, patient conversation and humility has yielded fruit.

In the seventeenth century, British Protestants saw Catholics as the deadly enemy seeing to undermine everything they hold dear - pretty much as some people do today see Muslims, or as progressives see conservatives or vice versa. Does this story hold out any hope of finding healthier ways to live together across our religious and political divides? Maybe. It's different of course because Catholics and Anglicans share the same basic faith, they recite the same Creed, they read (almost) the same Bible, they worship the same Jesus. With Islam we're talking about a different faith altogether. The ‘woke’ and the ‘MAGA’ people don’t seem to share much at all.

But yet we do share a common humanity. And with patience, conversation, a willingness to look for the good in the other, some form of peaceful co-existence, with freedom to debate, or even to change religion might become possible.

For that we can hope. And like the King and the Pope, pray.

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