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

Books

Culture

Original sin

Trust

22 July 2025

6 min read

When the penny drops, on the Salt Path or a London street

Being taken in unleashes dark, unpalatable emotions

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting show Adam and Eve wide-eyed after the fall.

Paradise Lost, Emil Nolde, 1921.

Nolde Foundation Seebüll.

Doubts about the honesty of The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir of walking the Southwest coastal path with her ill husband Moth, have raged in the past weeks. Investigations revealing the duo’s real names, financial history and the medical unlikelihood of the reversals in Moth’s degenerative condition, as presented in the book, provoked thousands of readers to express anger and disappointment at being duped. But being taken in and learning from it is part of being human: a lesson in how to trust more wisely, rather than not trusting at all

Last summer I was scam mugged on my local high street. Passing a frail pensioner pulling loose notes from his pocket, I picked up his fallen tenners and returned them. Six steps later, a woman shrieking I’d thieved her “granddad’s” money grabbed my arm. Cue a few minutes of struggling and shouting, before I got away, bruised and humiliated, but still gripping my bag. Vowed afterwards to always walk on by if I saw someone needing help on London’s streets, as it could be a set up.
But this detachment didn’t last. Being a goodish Samaritan is hardwired, even on the capital’s occasionally mean streets. We want to support and connect with our brothers and sisters. Withdrawal from our fellow citizens makes us more unsafe, not less. As Kaya Comer-Schwartz, London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, said: “The safety of our town centres is more than just policing – it's about building stronger, more connected communities where everyone feels secure.”

Certainly, a police officer would have been a welcome sight while tussling with my would-be conwoman. But I was grateful to the handful of people who stopped, as they would be my witnesses if the assailant went full mugger, in frustration that the ploy for me to open my bag had gone awry.

Memoirs also entreat us to bear witness, explaining the betrayal felt by some of the Salt Path’s two million readers who invested emotion and empathy in its uplifting tale of a hard -done -by couple finding solace in nature. Identifying with the memoir’s midlife, everyman duo and believing a long trek through the Southwest is a silver bullet for homelessness, financial woes and degenerative medical conditions, does not make the Salt Path’s former fans saps, it makes them beautifully human.

Raynor and Moth’s unmasking as Sally and, still remarkably healthy, Tim Walker, who lost their Welsh farmhouse following accusations of embezzlement against Sally and owned a property in France when claiming to be homeless, has lifted the lid on the publishing industry’s hunger for real life stories, with morally simple, feelgood narrative arcs. Bonus points if the tale includes a “nature cure”, where nature is not just a balm for grief and pain, but somehow vanquishes it altogether. Fact checking takes a lower priority than shaping a story into a series of emotional hot button scenes, with a neat, satisfying ending. And publishers may be guilty of their own sleight-of-hand by incentivising booksellers to personally recommend to customers a list of predetermined titles, creating the aura of ‘word of mouth’ hits.

Mean Girls’ great line “Jealous much?” captures journalists’ enthusiasm, mine included, for the Salt Path scandal. How can bestseller success pass over writers with have spent decades crafting phrases like popular orange vegetable to avoid writing carrot twice, yet shine on Raynor/ Sally’s repetitive, clunky prose? ”We lost. Lost the case. Lost the house.” Her dizzying ascent from unknown debut non-fiction author, with only a piece in the Big Issue to her name, to a book deal with Penguin, seems to other writers a mystery as great as anything in her trekking tale.

Feeling deceived unleashes these dark, unpalatable emotions such as envy and desire for revenge. I long nourished fantasies of catching the scammers in action and deflecting their next victim by shouting “Look! Granddad’s dropping his money again,” before handily nearby forces of law and order brought them to book. Even if you lose little materially from a con, the loss of dignity and sense of agency from becoming a mark, a manipulated, dehumanised bit player in another’s exploitive narrative, takes time to get over.

Popular accounts of online romance fraud feel designed to give audiences a sense of superiority, ‘I’d see that coming a mile off’, over the victims, reinforcing their sense of shame. Yet evidently with many thousands being lured by romance fraud, the perpetrators use effective psychological coercion techniques. Omniscient superiority needs to be replaced with empathy and support for fleeced, broken-hearted victims.

Grifters are part of life, but their reductive, empathy-free, world view does not have to be. As singer Nick Cave’s counsels, cynicism is not the answer: "Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”

Religious origin stories, including the Garden of Eden, contain an element of falling for a trick. Eve does the serpent’s bidding, and she and Adam are banished from paradise. “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Emil Nolde’s painting Paradise Lost, 1921, catches perfectly the moment the penny drops with Adam and Eve on the consequences of falling for the serpent. Yet by the following chapter of Genesis they start a family, moving on with life with new insight.

To never confront disappointment would be to remain as an infant, without the opportunities to grow and develop as adults.

In the Good Samaritan, one of the best-known parables, Jesus transforms the categorising question ‘who is my neighbour?’ into the universal quest of ‘how can I be a better neighbour’? Our bonds with our communities, a sense of shared humanity are the best, possibly the only defence, against those who would mislead us or do us harm.

Celebrated American journalist Ira Glass said: “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” Published in 2018, The Salt Path’s direct, film-like scenes of survival against the odds and against the elements, would have resonated with all the people who saw their security and lifestyle nosedive after the 2008 financial crash, never to recover. Suspending disbelief, Raynor and Moth’s 620-mile wild camping trek, represented a symbolic railing against a heartless economic system.

My experience of the penny dropping a fraction too late to escape the scammers, has made me revise my self image as a streetwise Londoner. On my way to pick up holiday money that afternoon, my head was full of travel plans rather than focused on the here and now, a tendency I must curb.

If my assailant was writing her memoir I like to think our scrap would be the opening chapter, where she is at a crossroads of having to mug somebody in broad daylight, with a small, attentive audience, or rethink her street hustling career. Dressed in a fake leather biker jacket on a hot summer day - the smell lingers in my olfactory memory - her outfit was possibly an homage to Catherine Zeta Jones’ catsuit in Entrapment. As we know from all the TV series on con artists, looking the part is key.

Finding out the reality of her life since I broke free of her grip 11 months ago would not be hard, as she is now stationed outside Premier Foods by the tube station, in much scruffier clothes, asking for a pound for water. This sideways, or probably downwards move, in the street economy appears to be working out for her, and the peace of the neighbourhood.

Despite having lived in small rural communities for decades, throughout all The Salt Path controversy, nobody has come forward to say the Winns / Walkers were good neighbours. Setting this right could be their next adventure and next bestseller.

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