Bald as a Coote: or, indiscretion in the age of conspiracy theories

David Coote will be up before the beak following the surfacing of some old videos of him badmouthing Jurgen Klopp, but this is really about more than that, especially in this day & age.

Part of the problem with the c-word is that it is so onomatopoeically blunt. It’s like being smacked over the head with a cosh, from the harshness of the ‘C’ to the vituperation of the ‘T’ at its end. And then, of course, there’s the gendered assertion of it. Your mileage may vary, but it’s obvious that it makes using the word a less than comfortable feeling for at the very least some.

But in the modern world, it’s also fair to say that it has lost some of its power to shock in recent years. One of the key differences between old media and new is that while old media has regulations limiting the use of ‘adult’ language, the internet has no such qualms, and it can feel at times as though we’ve collectively become desensitised to it all. People do still censor their own language to a surprising degree but, on the whole, the internet is free and easy with its cunts.

It should, of course, also be remembered that everybody loves feeling a little bit outraged, these days. In these troubled times, there’s no feeling quite as satisfying as sitting back in your chair, putting your hands behind your head, and thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m definitely morally in the right, this time”. The media already know this, which is what leads to headlines like the one at the top of this piece.

Oh, and there’s a couple of other little teaspoon of spice to throw in, here, too. Firstly, it's that so many people seem to be at least bordering upon being conspiracy theorists, these days. Our distrust for anything like authority has never been lower, and in such an environment ‘alternative’ theories are easily sought out online. We don’t trust governments. We don’t trust councils. We don’t trust the police. (In some of these cases, we may be right to do do.) We don’t trust the Premier League. We certainly don’t trust referees. And secondly, there's the small matter of the fact that he wasn't just a c-word, he was a “German” c-word. Make of that what you will.

So the story of David Coote, Jurgen Klopp, and an old video which has recently come to light is a game of several halves, which taps into the matters which stretch far beyond the specifics of this particular soap opera instalment. Because in a broad sense, it feeds into the story of how the well of football discourse has been poisoned over the years, and not only by some (very online) fans.

First of all, to address the most obvious aspect of this story of all, which is that Coote was very, very stupid indeed. The videos in question are understood to date from the 2020/21 season, by which time he was already a Premier League referee. For a man whose job it is to make judgement calls, to be recorded describing the manager of a club in such terms was just a really stupid thing to do, all the more so on video.

And it seems likely that he will pay a not-insignificant price for his four year old indiscretion. It seems unfeasible that he will be refereeing a Liverpool match again in the foreseeable future, and while it’s impossible to say what sort of punishment an organisation like the PGMOL will deem ultimately necessary following their po-faced investigation—your mind’s eye immediately turns to half a dozen referees in full kit (naturally), watching the videos from multiple angles on the screens and drawing lines across a screen to decide whether they were AI or not—but never refereeing in the Premier League again is at least possible, and perhaps likely.

There does remain an extent to which it’s perfectly possible to believe that there are some people who are taking it all a little too seriously. Tony Evans was excellent on this subject this morning. Evans makes the point that, well, perhaps Jurgen Klopp can be a bit of a c-word, and that managers have a long history of being this way, certainly back as far as Alex Ferguson and the Manchester United team of the 1990s.

Premier League managers have been using referees as a shield for their own deficiencies for years and, to be fair, they often make a very good one. They’re pretty unpopular across the board, they’re often a bit weird, they don’t work for The Club, and they don’t do post-match interviews, so any right of reply will often be delayed until PGMOL have got their act together to put out another statement (which won’t be taken seriously, because it’s written by referees or former referees, and no-one likes them).

It’s essentially all a food chain. Club owners routinely use managers as human shields by covering up for their own shortcomings by sacking them at the drop of a hat. If Spurs fired Ange Postecoglou tomorrow, for example, do you think the club would change permanently or revert to their mean fairly rapidly?

Managers usually prefer to blame referees to players for the reasons outlined above, but a desperate manager may go below the belt and turn on them too, or be Jose Mourinho. Of course, players who want to bite back usually know their place. Lavishly rewarded but vulnerable to losing their place in the team, they tend to quietly withdraw their labour rather than speaking out. ‘Losing the dressing room’ is definitely a thing.

Would it be that surprising if referees hated the guts of a lot of Premier League managers? No, probably not. Because while referees may be weird, Premier League managers are one of the very few groups of people who could classify themselves as weirder still, and many of their post-match comments have become increasingly extreme and swivel-eyed over time. Fans, meanwhile, want every decision given to their team. Indeed, increasingly that feels like a demand, from fans of some of the biggest clubs, at least.

Where does all this end up? There is a striking irony to the fact that Premier League’s great other bête noire is VAR, because the now apparently perpetual caterwauling about refereeing standards will only, if anything, result in an increase in its use. Perhaps there will be a point at which football will be declared unrefereeable and will have to be completely automated. Don’t worry, it’s already being looked into. And perhaps at that point, people will simply continue seeing what they want to see and blame whoever wrote the algorithms that power it, instead. 

Perhaps what makes the David Coote story ‘shocking’ is that it breaks the food chain. Referees are supposed to unseen and preferably not heard as well, making completely consistent decisions while also applying whatever the hell ‘common sense’ is supposed to be. They’re certainly not supposed to have opinions, and especially not ripe ones.

Was he stitched up? No question. There is audio right there on the video which confirms that the ramifications of saying something like that were known at the time of recording. He only has himself to blame for whatever comes next, but that doesn’t mean that we should take the reaction to it in good faith. Because bad faith is football’s dominant narrative, these days. And that remains the case, whether you think that Klopp is a Coote or that Coote is a Klopp.