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

Culture

Migration

Politics

5 September 2025

6 min read

It's 2029 and PM Farage has reformed asylum

Are refugees really no longer deserving of our protection?

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Nigel Farage stands and gestures in front of a flag.

Reform.

The year is 2029 and Nigel Farage has just been elected as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom.

As one of many sweeping reforms in his first few months in office, the new PM has deported thousands of asylum-seekers to countries including Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran.

Upon return to these countries, it has been reported that several of these asylum-seekers have faced arrest, torture, and even execution.

Now of course this is only a fictional depiction of one possible future, but it is a future that would appear at least conceivable, given recent polling and the pledge of the Reform party leader to deport every individual who travels illegally to these shores, whether or not they may face a risk to life upon their return home.

Such statements would have been almost universally lambasted not so many years ago, but the current status of our immigration system - and politics - has seemingly rendered them palatable to a growing number of Brits.

“I don't think it's about hate,” said one caller to BBC Radio 5 Live when Reform’s plans were announced last week. “I think it's about the way [immigration’s] been handled up to now by this government and the previous government, [which has] created a lot of unease.”

Another caller admitted the issue had divided opinion, but provided a contrasting perspective:

“This is Nigel Farage all over,” she said. “It's what he's done since before Brexit. What does he need to win in this country? He needs division. And what's the most divisive issue we can come up with? Immigration. And what a privilege we have to live in a safe country where, God forbid, none of us will ever have to pick our children up and flee persecution!”

All of which brings us nicely back to the particular - and certainly complex - issue at hand: namely, what should be our response to those asylum-seekers who have genuinely fled from persecution and may face more of it should they be returned home?

The safeguarding of such individuals is at the very heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which all Western democracies (including ours) have ratified and long defended, and which includes the principle of “non-refoulement”: prohibiting "the forcible return of refugees or asylum-seekers to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution”.

“Our values have always been that where people are under a real and substantial risk of physical torture or persecution … then we as a country have always been prepared to have them,” former head of the judiciary Lord Thomas explained on another BBC Radio show last week. “I don’t think we should abrogate values embodied in the convention … because that’s part and parcel of our history and our tradition and our standing as a liberal democracy.”

And yet, as Lord Thomas’s interviewer correctly pointed out, this is precisely what Reform are pledging to do, should they come to power.

Indeed, an increasing number of politicians here and elsewhere now argue that the Refugee Convention and other similar treaties, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, must be reformed - or even ignored - in light of a much-changed world.

We are not the only country facing an immigration crisis, of course; nor are we the first to consider drastic measures to stem the tide of asylum-seekers arriving on our shores.

In his own first few months back in office, the US president, Donald Trump, made good on his own pledge to tighten up America’s borders by, among other things, deporting illegal immigrants.

Among them were several Iranians who claimed to have a reasonable fear of persecution should they be returned home, given their expressed conversions to Christianity.

In May, a US congresswoman proposed that legislation should be amended to protect such religious refugees from deportation, naming her bill, the Artemis Act, after one of the Iranians who had been deported to Panama.

In June, the issue returned to the headlines when another Iranian asylum-seeker was filmed having a panic attack as her husband and fellow Christian convert was taken away by the US’s immigration enforcement agency, ICE.

In July, the couple’s pastor - another Iranian Christian who had arrived in the United States as a refugee some years ago - travelled to the White House to conduct a three-day hunger strike in protest against the detention of his church members.

And in August, in an interview with the director of the advocacy organisation for which I work, the pastor called for “deep reforms” to the immigration system, saying that “most [Iranian Christian asylum-seekers in the US] tried many times to come through a legal way, like a refugee pathway, but there is no legal way for Iranians to become refugees in the United States.”

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?”

A legal pathway for religious refugees is also something that has been called for in the UK, including by the frontrunner to be the next leader of the Church of England - another Iranian former refugee, Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani.

So the need to reform the asylum system here and elsewhere is something that would appear to be agreed upon by all sides in the debate.

Reporting on the plight of refugees was not something that was considered part of my remit when I first joined Article18 midway through Trump’s first term in office. Back then, our focus was only on documenting the persecution Christians were (and still are) enduring in their homeland.

But as the years have passed and the numbers of Iranian Christians seeking asylum have grown while the opportunities for them to be resettled have drastically shrunk, the issue has become an increasing and ultimately un-ignorable concern.

In the last two years alone, my organisation has released reports on the plight of Iranian Christian refugees in Turkey, Georgia and, closer to home, Sweden, while concerns have also been raised about Iranian Christian refugees in several other countries, including Armenia, Iraq and Indonesia.

In each of these countries, as in Blighty, the common denominator appears to be simply that these refugees - however worthy their claims may be - are unwanted and untrusted by their hosts.

During my research, I came across a refugee support group in Colchester, Refugee, Asylum Seeker & Migrant Action (RAMA), whose director, Maria Wilby, I had the privilege of interviewing, and whose perspective has stayed with me.

Ms Wilby picked me up on a comment I had made, when I suggested that “one could understand why people may feel less sympathy for economic migrants, but surely not refugees”.

Her response was not dissimilar to the words of the second caller to 5 Live:

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?” she asked. “You’d go to the next country and ask them to feed them. And that’s what it means to be an economic migrant. It’s not about, ‘Oh, I’ve got a nice car, but I want a nicer car.’ These are people who are literally starving, and feel so disadvantaged that they think the next generation will also be equally disadvantaged. And of course then you try and move.

“And back in the day, it used to be that if you had a child in another country, they would basically be a native of that country. We’ve changed the rules to mean that migration and borders grow and grow. And actually, we’ve created this system – all of us have created this system by standing by and letting it happen – and it’s not right. If I believed in God, God certainly didn’t intend there to be borders. Nobody would. Why would you? It’s an unnatural concept. We are one world, and we should share it.”

I’m not sure Nigel Farage would agree, but whatever one’s perspective on the need for border control, surely we should all be able to agree that those with genuine claims to have fled persecution should be afforded our help, or at the very least protected from refoulement.

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