The David Coote videos have just made the debate around ...

Several things sprang to mind after watching the videos which appear to show Premier League referee David Coote referring to Jurgen Klopp in what we’ll call unflattering terms.

One is that it’s oddly quite jarring hearing a referee swear, particularly dropping the biggest swear word of all, the one typically reserved for special occasions. It’s a bit like seeing your school teacher in a shop, or a children’s TV presenter drinking a beer: logically, you know they must do those things, but it’s so far out of context it’s almost impossible not to be very slightly and briefly baffled by it.

Another is: where the hell is Coote in those videos? It looks like he’s just met some students on a night out, got chatting and gone back to theirs for some warm cans of lager. How did that happen? How did that conversation start? Did he genuinely think, after recording the second video in which he solemnly intoned “just to be clear, that first video can’t go anywhere”, that he was covered and that the clip wasn’t immediately going into a group chat somewhere? When the furore has died down and the dust has settled on this matter, we need to hear much more about the precise circumstances.

But, of course, the primary reaction is that Coote is going to have to start looking for alternative employment, unless he has an extremely good explanation or this turns out to be a very convincing deepfake. At the time of writing, he has been suspended by PGMOL pending a full investigation. A PGMOL source with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, indicated that Coote has not denied it is him pictured.

Aside from anything else, if the videos are genuine then the lack of judgement shown, not just in saying what he said but allowing himself to be filmed saying it, is probably enough to spell the end for him as an official of any kind, never mind as a Premier League referee.

At the risk of treating this far too seriously, the point of the law in the real world is that justice not only must be done, but must be seen to be done. Coote has now created a situation where there will be suspicion over every decision he’s made with any vague relevance to Liverpool.

Arguably, it’s not the headline insult that is the worst thing. Calling Liverpool [quite a bad word] and Klopp a [very bad word] would be bad enough, but what does the most damage is calling Klopp a German [very bad word]. Derogatory comments about a club and manager, plus flippant xenophobia, equals a big fat nope.

Presumably, Coote’s colleagues emitted groans that registered on the Richter scale when this emerged: here are a group of men and women who spend their lives fending off allegations of bias, of anti-Club X sentiment, who do their best to reject even the appearance of impropriety. Coote, it seems, has now ruined all of that, feeding the instincts of anyone who thinks there is some malign reason for any decision that they disagree with.

It’s not even the wackiest of the conspiracy theorists that this will resonate with: just normal fans who vaguely accuse a referee of bias. This will, to use a very overblown phrase, radicalise people who were previously just tribal: they are now far more likely to scoot straight past, “Oh, that was a bad decision I disagree with”, and go straight to, “Remember what David Coote said? Exactly”. Search on social media and you will already find people combing through decisions Coote has made relating to Liverpool, some of them many years ago, and treating this as some sort of gotcha moment.

It’s also worth noting it’s not a particular surprise a referee might be less than enamoured with Klopp. For all his undoubted positive traits, treating match officials with personal or even professional courtesy at all times is not one of them. He’s a man who routinely screamed in the faces of fourth officials and celebrated so hard in front of one of them, John Brooks, that he pulled a hamstring. If you had to deal with that, you might be minded to call him a [very bad word] too.

And this isn’t restricted only to Klopp. Just because abuse of referees as a group is normalised doesn’t mean the individual referees aren’t going to take it on board and, in unguarded moments, call the people who abuse them a [very bad word].

It’s perfectly possible for someone to think that about someone in their working environment and still act professionally and fairly when dealing with them. All of us have probably done that. In all likelihood, Coote has done that in his dealings with Klopp.

The point of being a referee is not that you don’t have personal feelings, opinions, biases — whatever you want to call them — but that you overlook or suppress them in the interest of objectivity. Which it’s perfectly possible to do. Nobody is neutral about everything. A referee might dislike a club’s owner, or the way their fans react to them, or their new away kit, but as long as you give a penalty because you purely believe a penalty should be given, all of that is fine.

We should also say that, while Coote deserves criticism, this appears to have been a mistake made at some point a few years ago (nobody is really sure when it happened, but the references to social distancing in the video will date it roughly) that he is now paying for with some gusto. He doesn’t seem to have an account on X and while he does have an Instagram it’s private and he doesn’t seem to have ever posted: on balance, it’s probably for the best if he isn’t on social media. Liverpool are yet to comment officially and it doesn’t sound like they’re planning to: at a time when they could have curried favour with their fans by piling on and making this much worse for Coote, they’re to be commended for staying out of it.

The shame of all this is there are nuanced conversations to be had about officiating. About subconscious behaviour regarding pressure, influence and big clubs vs small clubs. About how the personal relationships between officials affect how they officiate, whether that’s Mike Dean not calling a colleague to the VAR screen because he doesn’t want to cause a friend grief, or senior officials influencing the decision-making of their more junior colleagues. About whether the minor celebrity status that has been granted to these referees has inevitably led to a situation like this.

But this sort of thing, something that can be used to back up accusations of nefarious conduct — regardless of whether those accusations are even in the least bit true — drowns all of that out. The debate around refereeing decisions is now about a billion times more tedious.

(Top photo: James Gill — Danehouse/Getty Images)

Nick Miller is a football writer for the Athletic and the Totally Football Show. He previously worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, ESPN and Eurosport, plus anyone else who would have him.