By the look of his wide eyes and vacant stare, it is unlikely David Coote will recall much about the night that now threatens to leave his career as a Premier League referee and his reputation in tatters.
But the ramifications of Coote’s expletive-laden assault on Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool will be felt from the top of our football pyramid to the bottom. His moment of dismal and pathetic hubris has done a great disservice to our game. For this is about integrity, the most fundamental of all refereeing principles.
Match officials from the Premier League down to the blokes with tea towels for flags on the Sunday mudflats will feel the ramifications. The consequences will be theirs to suffer.
Referees and their assistants will always make mistakes. They all whistle when they shouldn’t and fail to spot things that they probably should. But deep down we forgive them their human frailties, their misjudgments, their occasional failures to spot what appears obvious.
We do that because we presume they are honest, we know they are regularly being conned by the players in their charge and we presume they are doing their very best to get difficult calls right.
Premier League referee David Coote has been suspended over comments he made in a leaked video
Coote (middle) went on an expletive-laden assault about Jurgen Klopp (left) and Liverpool in the video
Coote’s future as a Premier League referee will now be decided by the PGMOL
In short, we expect our referees to whistle without prejudice. We presume all games begin with a blank canvas, without a vested interest and, ideally, with an absolute and utter ambivalence to what the outcome is.
Because without that one basic tenet, we do not really have a refereeing system and without that we really do not have a game.
Coote has threatened all that. He has placed that in jeopardy. Coote and his stupid, pie-eyed friend holding the mobile phone on which this 73-second career suicide note was filmed have undermined all of that in the time it takes to say ‘upload’.
It looks to have been a very long evening indeed and Coote now faces a very long time out of football to think about it all.
The 42-year-old has been suspended by his employers at the Premier League and it will be a miracle if we see him again. Frankly, we should not see him again. Unless this footage — filmed in two equally damning parts — turns out to be the malicious work of some AI genius, there can be no way back from this.
The truth is that all of our referees will have players and managers in the game that they don’t like. Human nature and all that. Some of them may even share Coote’s view of Klopp.
Referees take an awful lot of stick from an awful lot of people on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon. And in these pages and on our platforms we have campaigned hard for them to be treated more fairly and more humanly.
But none of this forms much of an excuse for the sheer reckless stupidity of what Coote has done. Indeed we wonder today what colleagues in the refereeing community such as Stuart Attwell will be thinking of all this.
Coote deemed a potential red-card challenge by Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey on Liverpool’s Mo Salah on Saturday not to be a foul
Coote was previously part of matchday referee teams that Klopp fumed at after games
Attwell is the VAR official whose impartiality was questioned wickedly by Nottingham Forest after his work at a game between the Midlands club and Everton at Goodison Park last season.
Forest and their owner Evangelos Marinakis essentially accused Attwell of being biased because he is a supporter of Luton, relegation rivals at the time. In short, they questioned Attwell’s integrity and were recently punished severely for that.
It is this questioning of motive and integrity that referees push back against every time they step on to a football field. It is the most cutting of all allegations made regularly against them and, of course, it is unfounded.
Yet the reaction when this story broke on Monday shows just how quick many football fans are to believe that referees are, indeed, ‘bent’.
This is exactly what the conspiracy theorists have been waiting for. Coote and his sickly preening vanity has handed it to the mob on a plate. This is their ‘told you so’ moment and, further down the line, the yearly struggle to recruit referees at all levels of the game has just grown that little bit harder.
The reality is that Coote — a Premier League referee for six years — has failed PGMOL head Howard Webb and his honest and well-intentioned drive for greater transparency around decision making.
He has failed every referee who has ever made a wrong call — in other words, all of them. In a world of VAR chaos and at a time when standards never really seem to improve, Coote has gone a long way to stripping away the one remaining layer protecting officials from the mob, their presumed objectivity.
The relationship between players, managers and referees is built on mutual trust. It has to be. Usually it is the players we accuse of failing to keep their end of the bargain. But the last image we have of Coote, the last one we may ever have, is that of him waving away a clear red-card foul by Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey on Mo Salah at Anfield on Saturday.
‘No foul’ was the call and though we all saw it for the mistake that it was, we presumed human error. We did not presume bias, malicious intent or pleasure taken. Now many people will presume exactly that. So there it is, the damage is done.
This is the harm rendered by Coote and his desperate piece of iPhone vanity. This is the damage felt all the way to the roots of the game.
When he reflects on all of this, he may consider that he needs to choose his friends better. But that’s where the sympathy towards him begins and ends.
