Drawing a Line Under David Coote, and How PGMOL Can Improve

Plus the crazy cognitive dissonance surrounding discussions of referees

*“Drawing a Line Under David Coote” was genuinely the title of this draft piece, most of it written before the second video emerged. At the time of writing, no official confirmation has arrived on the cocaine video and the further derogatory statements he allegedly made about Liverpool and Scousers*

First, no one will be happier than me if I never have to write another article on officiating. Beyond some VAR data, I had stopped tracking decision-making balances and frequencies, and was just getting on with enjoying the football.

But this was obviously a major week. A huge story. I wrote a couple of articles yesterday, which I almost deleted after the deluge of opinions blaming Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool fans, Anfield, the Kop, the tea-lady, and anything and anyone other than David Thelonious Coote.

(May not be his true middle name.)

Today I dusted them off and then merged them into something new, to get everything out of my system.

It’s a long read, so be warned.

Barring something truly extraordinary, or other refs doing something similar, or this incident leading to a wild swing in decisions going against Liverpool, or Anthony Taylor headbutting Arne Slot, I’m done on this subject.

So, here are my final thoughts, as I will return to the articles I was writing about Arne Slot’s marvellous Reds and an historically great season so far, that I hope isn’t undermined by this important but annoying sideshow.

Not easy

Refereeing is not easy.

But that’s why it’s incredibly well-paid at the top level in 2024 (compared to a lot of jobs), and is great for egotists who want to be the centre of attention, and have power and control; as well as decent people, who simply enjoy enabling a game of football to take place.

At the top, it also allows you expensive holidays and expensive habits.

But football discourse is weird.

In football, the out-group can turn out to be *literally everyone who doesn’t support your club*, but who then call you biased, in their über-biased way.

You then become the out-group and 95% of the rest of the football population becomes the in-group.

“Fuck those Liverpool fans, the crazy Scouse [insert the word ‘cunts’ here, as it seems to be in vogue]”.

And to be a serious non-independent football writer or pundit you have to dismiss all criticism of referees, and stick to the script that football is not flawed in any way beyond incompetence, lest we all just lose faith and it all falls apart; Oz revealed, furiously servicing himself behind the curtain.

(If you work for Sky, for example, say there’s nothing to see here.)

Because a lot of football fans *are* paranoid and wrong about officials (some are genuinely insane), and never use Big Data (just a few incidents out of context), it seems safer to just say they’re all paranoid and wrong about officials.

As ever, the nutters ruin it for the normals. People assume the nutters represent the normals.

No one wants to be labelled a conspiracy theorist, which, in polite society, has become almost the worst thing you can be in 2024.

And indeed, saying things like the Sandy Hook massacre of little children was staged is deplorable; beyond mental. Beyond repulsive and obscene. See, that’s a conspiracy theorist for you!

Some of the worst people are conspiracy theorists; but some of the worst people are also people who deal in other forms of dishonesty.

Occasionally, some conspiracy theorists are right.

A lot of danger can be done by ignoring patterns and warning signs.

Imagine the lunacy, in the 1850s, of suggesting that the water supply on a certain London street might be infected with something strange causing mysterious deaths, and then going to a water pump and mapping out the data of where people died, and where they got their water.

What utter witchcraft! After all, not everyone there was dying. And no one was seen drinking from the water pump and then immediately getting ill. There was just data.

Cholera, people knew, was caused by miasma – or tainted air. It was miasma, you dummies!

But tainted water or not, the truth is that it’s safer just to dismiss absolutely every claim a football fan might have about refereeing biases as “nonsense”, even if the law of averages suggests any group will include a sickly mélange of bad eggs, rotten apples and sour grapes.

(*Except* English referees, of course, who are above all scrutiny. Only the foreign ones are dodgy, right? English referees were all baptised in the Font of Pure Honesty in the foyer at the FA HQ.)

We need to be wary of wild claims, and snuff out unhinged conspiracy thinking.

And of course there is far too much grand conspiracy thinking around officials.

But to dismiss every single smaller thing out of hand, without evidence, is its own kind of stupidity; it’s own kind of conspiracy, where people conspire, in backchannels and via social pressure, to say that they there is no conspiracy, and nothing but pure utter honesty (or incompetence), and to even question any integrity is itself a crime.

Most conspiracies are probably wrong. But if 10% or 20% are true conspiracies (covering up corruption, enacted biases, or just human error to compound the mistake), then that’s very different from zero.

The key is to both look at data, which I’ve used, and analyse incidents, to spot patterns; again, while being careful of apophenia.

My hunch, as a result, was that Coote was that Coote didn’t like Jürgen Klopp, and it affected his officiating Liverpool games, on balance.

But then, you probably need further evidence of anything untoward, that might possibly skew a referee towards being biased and dishonest in his work.

That kind of direct evidence might include, say, calling someone a ‘German cunt’, and much more; which shows the mindset and the inclination, which is very intense. This was not David Coote saying the Jürgen Klopp is slightly irritating. This is full-on contempt, of the kind that will skew anyone’s decision making.

So, what is it that the video proves, aside from shocking unprofessionalism?

It’s the *motive*, of course.

Means, motive and opportunity. Coote has them all now.

Having the means, motive and opportunity does not make someone guilty. Of course it doesn’t.

However, before we could only infer the motive of contempt. Now the motive has been admitted.

If there’s also some circumstantial evidence, such as a pattern of data, and a video proving someone’s motives, it’s then, at least, a case to be answered. As I always say, strange betting patterns are analysed, but not strange officiating patterns.

It’s not “nothing”. It may not prove to be “something”. But it’s not “nothing”.

And not what the litany of talking heads have come out and done, with “there’s nothing to see here”.

It’s almost like a parent of a psychopath claiming their child could not have murdered someone, as “they’re just not like that”; the utter cognitive dissonance that, as a protection, keeps such thoughts as unthinkable. Even if little Johnny was found with three bodies in his fridge.

Circumstantial evidence is as valid in a court of law as direct evidence; you don’t need to see it snow overnight to know that it snowed overnight, if there’s six feet of snow* on the ground.

(* not to be sniffed at.)

To suggest a referee might have an agenda against a specific football club and/or its manager, to such a degree that it affects his work, is hardly as startling as, I don’t know, the once-unsayable things like the billions and billions raised by self-proclaimed ultra-altruist Sam Bankman-Fried might not be above board?

Or, were there signs about Harvey Weinstein? Patterns in his data, as it were?

Of course, these are more serious scenarios, but that’s how investigations work. I spend a lot of time studying serious crime, and patterns, as a way of getting away from thinking about football. But some of the processes can be applied.

(If I was not ill and now old too, I might have tried to retrain as a geographic profiler in recent years, when football writing seemed too draining. As an aside, I used data to correctly judge the height of the Golden State Killer before he was caught, with the ranges given by 20-or-so surviving victims and eye-witnesses ranging from 5’6” to 6’0” if memory serves. I just averaged them out, and it later proved spot-on. Maybe that was a lucky guess, mind!)

You don’t look at all the times Harvey Weinstein was perfectly lovely, which was often, having recently read the book on him and Miramax (Down and Dirty Pictures, by Peter Biskind, written before any of the rape stuff was public), because he could be charming, generous, funny, and lovely. Everyone said so.

And then, at other times, he’d be the most horrible person, according to the book, doing and saying vile things, threatening people, intimidating people, firing people.

And, it turns out, he’d also rape the living shit out of women.

He wasn’t stupid enough to just grab every woman as they came into the office, every single day, year after year, and defile them. Rapists don’t get a pass on the day they don’t rape someone.

Again, these are extreme examples, but used to prove the point that even the worst people, doing the most extreme things, did not do them all the time, or even most of the time. Or even close to most of the the time.

They did them when it suited, when they felt they could get away with it; when the mood struck.

There were over 9,000 days in Ted Bundy’s adult life when he didn’t rape and murder someone. So what?

He used to volunteer on a suicide helpline, joined various churches. Top bloke, our Ted, people thought. He killed up to 50 women, but no one suspected anything, due to all the time he spent not killing women, and being a thoroughly charming bloke who often pretended to have a broken arm.

(This is like the security guard at the public baths played by Steve Coogan bemoaning that no one talks about the years when someone didn’t drown in the pool, before he lists every single year when no one died in the pool, plus, of course, the year when someone did.)

Jürgen Klopp was a proven winner, but focusing on the 38% of the time he didn’t win games does not alter the balance of the evidence.

Had he won only 38% of his games, he would not be considered a winner. The balance of evidence would shift from elite to fairly shit.

As a Premier League official you should not be above scrutiny; but you should be held to high standards.

You should not be assumed to be corrupt, just as you should not be assumed to be beyond corruption, as if you are not even human.

Instead, we’ve seen attacks on Klopp, and how it’s all his fault.

All the fault of Liverpool fans upsetting Coote.

Poor Coote, the victim in all this.

As ‘Seb’ noted on the site, “Classic DARVO - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.”

Classic DARVO

Sky Sports’ Ponzi Scheme of Truth

The game, like life in general (certainly online), is increasingly built on lies and falsehoods and untruths. Undergirded by bullshit and bantz. Buffered by Big Betting, Sky Sports selling us the fantasy of fairness.

You think Luis Díaz was onside? You stupid crazy conspiracy theorist!

In that moment, as we all rewound Sky+ and paused our TVs and held sheets of paper against the screen to double as lines, we could se that he was miles onside. You didn’t even need the lines.

What crazy nutters we were, thinking we’d found a horrific error by the officials that wasn’t being acknowledged. Why didn’t we just use tinfoil, and make them into hats?

No replay was shown, no mention made by the commentators as, in their ears and in the ears of the director and other comms people at Sky, the words “good process” were followed by:

*Assistant VAR: Offside, goal, yeah. That’s wrong that, Daz.*

*VAR: What?*

*Replay operator: On-field decision was offside. Are you happy with this image? Yeah, it’s onside. The image that we gave them is onside.*

*Assistant VAR: He’s played him, he’s gone offside.*

*VAR: Oh fuck.*

*Replay operator: Delay, delay. Oli’s saying to delay, Oli’s saying to delay.*

*VAR: Pardon?*

*Replay operator: Oli’s calling in to say delay the game. The decision is onside.*

*VAR: Can’t do anything.*

*Replay operator: Oli’s saying to delay, Oli’s saying to delay.*

*VAR: Oli?*

*Fourth official: Yeah?*

*Replay operator: Delay the game, to delay the game? Stop the game.*

*VAR: They’ve restarted the game. Can’t do anything, can’t do anything.*

*Assistant VAR: Yeah, they’ve restarted. Yeah.*

*VAR: I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything. Fuck*.

That’s what everyone at Sky heard live, via the multi-way comms they all hear, like football omnipotents.

So they purposefully showed no replay, when the first thing to do, as a broadcaster of football, is to show replays of a controversial mistake; and they then glossed over the incident at half-time.

The most explosive PGMOL error arguably since Stuart Attwell gave a goal for a shot that went yards wide in 2009, around the same time a goal was allowed to stand against Liverpool when a shot hit a beachball and went past Pepe Reina (which the laws said should have been ruled out).

Perfect for TV. A major fuck-up at Stockley Park, and the viewers will be amazed at this! What golden TV! Insane!

But no, Sky glossed over it. Why?

The product.

They need more and more of our money, to show more and more games, to people who are increasingly sick of more and more games. They need more and more gambling ads, to prop it all up, too, in a sport sick with gambling addiction (not that any ref could ever have a gambling issue or bet on games, or possibly roll up a note and snort something off a table, as they were all born to virgin mothers, and again, all baptised in the Font of Pure Honesty in the foyer at the FA HQ).

If Sky will literally cover up an offside decision, in cahoots (Cacootes?) with the PGMOL, what else are we expected to believe?

That the officials cannot be dishonest or biased is like a religious mantra, a shibboleth.

If you give people lies and bullshit and post-hoc nonsense, then they will distrust your integrity. You lose trust, just as the American election showed the effects of a loss of trust in mainstream broadcasters and institutions (and independent creators are a mix of the good, the bad and the terrible).

Wild distrust leads to anarchy, and maybe that’s why institutions try to hide their mistakes, as anarchy isn’t really good for anyone; anarchy just turns everything to shit.

But revelations then just make people even less trustful.

Darren England, cocky perhaps, and if memory serves, part of a crew that had done a needless game (£££) abroad in the days before, made a stupid but honest mistake.

Sky, however, initially covered it up, presumably in league with the PGMOL. That’s the truly revealing thing here, in their efforts to conceal.

The horrific error of communication, it seems, could not be analysed until *after* the match, as it called the legitimacy of the match into question. The show had to go on, the gaffe ignored.

Except this is football. Sport. Not the theatre.

Football is not entertainment. Football is sport, and sport is different. Broadcasting sport should not alter the sport, in terms of thumbing the scale of fairness.

Sport can be, and hopefully is, entertaining. But it has to be allowed to be boring at times, as it has to be fair.

You can’t make it less boring by making it less fair. Once F1 started making calls to suit its Netflix viewership, the death of televised sport was foreshadowed.

This is the post-truth age, though, where politicians on either side have their own sets of things they cannot say or admit to, due to the fear at being cast out. Toeing the party line used to be a choice; now it’s all or nothing.

Football is already in a terrible mess over the owners it let in with state-backed money, and before that, the criminal elements from Russia that changed the game, just as they changed London. Horses were bolting, left, right and centre, and you can’t get those bloody things back.

Everyone needs their share of the pie, with more and more making millions in side-hustles and third parties, but it seems they need more and more games to make the same amount of money. More is at stake, the higher the stakes get. Billion-dollar industries attract all kinds of unsavoury types. Always have, always will.

Corruption is clearly everywhere within football organisations all over the world.

For example. Inter Miami were gifted the FIFA Club World Cup spot that should have been reserved for American champions, before they were American champions, because of Lionel Messi; and they lost, and could not become American champions. The superstar qualified the club for the tournament, not results.

This is not sport; this is entertainment. This is show-business. This is bullshit.

But! – all English referees are honest, and even if they’re shown to be rabidly hateful, they are too good as men (almost all men) to take that into their work.

David Coote is “captain sensible”, Peter Walton tells us, in the immediate aftermath of über-defence PR that sprang up all over the place. Which should perhaps be the final nail in the coffin of Walton’s career in the commentariat.

Confirmation Bias

Saying “but Coote gave Liverpool this decision!” does not disprove anything, just as Ted Bundy helping an old lady across the road proved nothing.

If you suggest David Coote might be making more bad decisions against Liverpool than seems normal, because you suspect, via observations and data, that he hates the club and mainly its manager (and is bitter and resentful), and then, years later, it’s revealed that he thinks the manager is a “German cunt”, because he’s bitter and resentful, then ...

... wait, what do we call that?

Being right?

Or confirmation bias?

But confirmation bias doesn’t apply when you suggest someone is guilty of something, and then they are proven to be guilty of something. And Coote is definitely guilty of thinking Klopp is a cunt, so on that part I was right.

Whether or not it affected his officiating is open for debate, and thus we should be debating it. Not sweeping it under the carpet.

The data suggests it did; that he once didn’t send off Fabinho, or gave an offside as offside, does not suggest that it did. Doing your job properly and honestly some of the time does not remove the times you did otherwise.

But such was Coote’s vitriol, and so one-sided is his decision data, that you might think “you know what? He hates Liverpool and Klopp!”.

Again, we could see this, via the data, and via watching all Liverpool games. Indeed, some of these games we watched multiple times, as that’s what you do if your team wins, or if you’ve got another reason to rewatch games.

Meanwhile, people who didn’t watch all Liverpool games and haven’t studied the data are telling us that we’re wrong, because we’re Liverpool fans, so we are automatically wrong. (Or just ‘out-group’ football fans.)

In addition, though he’s become the villain of the piece, Klopp almost never called out refs before or after games, in the way other managers put pressure on them.

He just berated them, in the moment, for being substandard when they were substandard. He faced them; he didn’t go behind their backs.

That must be embarrassing and emasculating. That’s why you need decent referees, who can rise above it all; secure in their own skin.

Equally, it’s not like Klopp was the only person to ever shout at refs.

As such, officials had every right to dislike Klopp; but when, for years, I could accurately guess the refs who disliked him (including Coote) and back it up with the data, as well as the anecdotal evidence, I feel it’s no surprise to say that, on average, Coote was proven to call against Liverpool far more than for Liverpool.

Again, my hunch: he hates Liverpool, and/or he hates Klopp. It’s possibly just the latter, but it bleeds into the former.

I didn’t realise he’d record a video full of xenophobic hatred and Scouse-baiting with someone else, but referees should not be shrinking violets, nor swayed by criticism.

Sadly, they are.

I get that they are human, and we can forgive some flaws; but who would trust a referee who said things like that about their club and its manager?

Belief

We need to believe in the fairness of the league and all its processes, but it’s hard when certain clubs are punished and others aren’t, based on who can afford all the best lawyers; and bad decisions from officials are often so bad that no one trusts the PGMOL anymore.

At times, rather than address and fix issues, we are instead told that we are wrong. We are gaslit.

That gets you through this latest crisis, but it doesn’t solve the deeper issues. You win that war by virtue of it falling silent, eventually, but as we’ve seen in politics everywhere, resentments bubble up and the resentful can take control.

I genuinely think the PGMOL has improved in several ways, but every major lie or cover-up or post-hoc hallucination takes their integrity out at the knees.

The Accidental Leakage of Truths

People ‘leak’ information when they talk, and admit things without knowing.

Mark Clattenburg said that the ref needed to give AC Milan a free-kick as soon as he could, as if one must be invented. He leaked the secret of inventing something to please home fans.

Mike Dean said on live TV that he didn’t overturn his mate’s decision when a VAR. He was forced to walk it back. Even though he said it, he unsaid it, and it was memory-holed.

Dean then recently said the first bad foul was ‘free’ and that you shouldn’t book players early as it makes life harder for yourself.

(This is in part as sending off players is deemed to be ‘ruining in the game’, which is ludicrous, but which the broadcasters seem to agree with, as they don’t their live game turned into a training match of attack vs defence.)

Peter Walton, like Dean, leaks like crazy; he’s a one-man sieve.

Walton said a few weeks ago that refs are not biased, because essentially they can be even more biased in the opposite direction!

“If anything, I think referees are likely to give borderline decisions against home teams at times like this — *they want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd*.”

As I’ve said, it’s the motivated reasoning behind borderline calls that’s alarming; but also, how that spreads to less-borderline calls.

*They want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd.*

Shouldn’t they want to make the right decisions?

*They want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd.*

Isn’t it a clear foul? You’re essentially just picking which situation you prefer, not whether it was or was not a foul.

*They want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd.*

This explains why my data has shown that Mancunian refs are more generous at Anfield than non-Mancunian refs, and Scouse refs are more generous at Old Trafford and the Etihad than most non-Scouse refs; but that it flips completely in away games, and for Liverpool, a Mancunian VAR, safe at Stockley Park, feels no pressure to be fair.

For Liverpool, a Manc ref at Anfield is usually, if not exclusively, good news. A Manc ref away is usually, if not exclusively, bad news. A Manc VAR is mostly bad news.

None of this should be true, if refs just did the job of saying what they see, seeing what they say.

*They want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd.*

I can’t remember the last time a player was through on goal, was bundled over by someone running too close (or in this case, pulling a shoulder), and it was waved away as not a foul. I can’t recall seeing that. It’s not like shirt-tugging at corners in a crowd where everyone is at it.

At least Sky, via Dermot Gallagher, admitted this error by Coote.

As a quick aside, while Conor Bradley pulled the shirt of the Villa player at the weekend, he was also having his shirt pulled (these were things for the VAR, not Coote). Liverpool have only been given two foul penalties via VAR since its introduction, and neither involved anything other than take-out fouls on Diogo Jota. Man City have been awarded TEN foul penalties via VAR, so FIVE TIMES as many.

More on my analysis of VAR decisions here:

Study: A Proper Review of All 600+ VAR Premier League Decisions since 2019

So if it was the case that were Liverpool being given shirt-pull penalties, for when Virgil van Dijk and before he left, Joël Matip, were headlocked, blocked and dragged to the ground, fine.

Anyway...

When a Chelsea player should (probably) have been sent off at Anfield earlier in the season, for something similar to the foul on Salah, it was further from goal; the yellow instead of red was ‘justified’ by the distance to goal, and that a Chelsea player was covering, even though he was five yards back when the foul occurred, and only up with the play once Diogo Jota’s ribs had been smashed in. I still think it was a red-card offence, but not as clear as some others. William Saliba walked for a similar offence.

(This is a flaw officials always make: stopping the frame or looking at the situation when the players are on the floor, by which time defenders appear to be back on the cover. It’s as silly as saying a player ‘would not have caught’ a ball he knocks past the keeper, because once he’s suddenly stopped, the ball seems to move ‘too fast’, when in fact, so do players running at full speed. If Núñez was taken out by Martinez at the weekend, the ball would have run quickly out of play. Núñez can sprint at close to 25mph, and a pretty powerful shot might be 50mph, and no player dribbling the ball hits it at 50mph! Not even Darwin Núñez. But again, we’re dealing with a lot of midwits – medium IQ people – who don’t think in properly intelligent ways, with both analytical knowledge and football smarts and logic. Anyone who says the ball was going out of play or the defenders were back covering is likely being stupid, unless the ball was literally booted out of play or the defenders were back covering at the exact moment of the foul.)

Anyway, the debate is only ever: yellow card, or red card?

When have you ever seen no foul given?

The last I can remember is Jamal Lascelles booting Salah up in the air about seven years ago. (We’re back into the fact that Salah only gets a free-kick mostly every second game.) And the ref did nothing.

At the time, in 2018, Dermot Gallagher said:

DERMOT SAYS: “The only decision here is: is it a foul? And if it is a foul, it’s a red card. And yes, I do think it is a foul. The player [Lascelles] clearly hasn’t gone to play the ball.”

No, he kicked Salah up in the air!

It’s about as obvious as an offence gets, as was Saturday’s.

On Coote this weekend?

“DERMOT SAYS: If I was a referee, the minute Salah got clipped I'd blow my whistle. I'd be in control of the situation. I can justify stopping the game because I'm going to send him off. The referee does not think it's a foul for whatever reason - he says 'no foul' twice.”

For whatever reason.

Maybe Coot thinks Salah is an Egyptian cunt? After all, he doesn’t seem to like foreigners.

So to say Coote had shown no bias against Liverpool in his decisions ignores this utter outlier, as well as the overall balance of data. (Again, not every decision Coote has given has gone against Liverpool, as no one would be so stupid as to make it even more obvious than it already was.)

Again, we shouldn’t just focus on single incidents.

But it was a remarkable incident.

Coote, we are told, also let Fabinho get away with a potential red card against Brighton; but also, a similar foul on Luis Díaz by a Spurs player. These are small beer.

More telling, he also denied a double-touch of the hand by Martin Ødegaard (who yes, was falling over, but that’s why he deliberately handled!), and the Jordan Pickford on Virgil van Dijk remains inexplicable, other than it happened after Coote was already full of contempt for Klopp and his players.

These are not some minor incidents; the Divock Origi one in 2019 was something I’d forgotten, but was obviously a clear foul, even if not something you expect to get a young official to give as a VAR when there’s a moody old ref, Martin Atkinson, in charge who literally stopped giving Liverpool Big Decisions in 2015, after Steven Gerrard slated him in his book, and Klopp arrived.

(It’s almost like there’s a pattern of refs getting upset, and their data radically changing 🤔)

That’s five or six major errors against the Reds in just 16 games, three as ref and 13 as VAR; four of which were inexplicable, to the balance of maybe one borderline red card for which Fabinho got lucky, and a couple of fouls he asked the referee to look at.

Of course, Coote was hanging out with Martin Atkinson in 2019, on the party island of Batam, as a quartet of refs cuddled the local party girls. This is not necessarily anything other than good fun, in the aid of golfing charity event (albeit that sounds like a ‘tough’ charity gig, huh?! – it’s hardly walking from Land's End to John o' Groats barefoot, is it?)

This perhaps distracts from the more serious misdemeanours. As may any fake accusations.

A witch-hunt of Coote is not what anyone needs.

But if genuine evidence of disturbing things emerge, including the latest allegations of snorting cocaine during his duties at Euro 2024, with a ‘friend’ of his quoted as saying, albeit not to a newspaper I’d consider remotely reliable:

“He also described Andy Robertson as a "Scottish prick”.

“... He did say that the worst place to referee was Goodison Park due to the young Scousers screaming, shouting, swearing at him and calling every name under the sun before the games had even started.”

But, if true, all those Evertonians laughing at Liverpool right now might have cause to consider the general anti-Scouse theme that, alas, is sadly prominent in English culture, and has been since the 1980s.

(Along with people of a certain age, 40-60, loathing Liverpool FC because they were successful during their entire childhoods and youths, with the fans blamed for Heysel, where the deaths were caused by both sets of fans fight in a stadium unfit for purpose; and Hillsborough, where Liverpool fans bore no responsibility but all of the blame, especially in places like South Yorkshire and Nottingham, where the myths likely lived longest. Coote grew up in Nottingham at the height of the lies.)

Borderline

Go back to Walton’s quote, from the same man who called Coote “captain sensible” this week:

“If anything, I think referees are likely to give borderline decisions against...”

... and that’s my point.

Bias is in who you give the borderlines to, give the 60-40s to. Bias is when your preference tips the scale.

If you give the borderlines to one team or the other, all the time, it’s arguably worse than one or two big calls.

Bias is in the people police stop-and-search; the choice of one similar job applicant over another based on some inherent characteristic.

While DEI can push this too far in the other direction and actually lead to greater resentment and prejudice, bias is in accepting the application of Mr Smith over Mr Singh, if it’s close enough to get away with.

(If Mr Smith is a frothing lunatic with an IQ of 12, and Mr Singh is a smart man, then Mr Singh will get the job, unless the business is trying to self-destruct.)

My bias is towards the club I support, but I’ve also defended referees who other Liverpool fans think are rotten.

I’ve tried to use data to look at which refs give decisions at a normal rate, and which ones have data that I find odd.

Sky produced a weird video last night that felt like state propaganda.

“Err, what about all the decisions David Coote gave FOR Liverpool?”

Wednesday 13 November 2024 15:44, UK

“A look back at six previous VAR incidents where David Coote gave guidance that benefitted Liverpool.”

Rather than analyse everything with all the video they have, they focused on things like offsides, which I’d already dismissed from my Coote analysis (and all VAR analysis), as offsides are offsides.

That said, Coote did give offside in the days before there was margin for error, when Liverpool scored what looked a ‘level’ goal in the last minute to beat Everton, which he duly chalked out, having already failed to send off Jordan Pickford that same game.

That felt like a borderline call, where the official’s preferences become clear.

But I did not include that, as most offsides are correct; certainly in the past couple of years, with margin for error built in.

(I’m looking forward to the Sky Sports video “the six times David Coote did not do cocaine”; and “the six times David Coote didn’t call Klopp a ‘German cunt’.”)

To have made at least four seriously bad subjective howlers and at least four more bad calls against Liverpool (with just a few subjective calls for) in 16 games is the full evidence. It shows a leaning towards whoever Liverpool are playing.

I’ve already slated Martin Samuel this week for purposefully misleading his readers by saying it was just ‘three incidents’ in ‘five years’, and ‘all as VAR’, when Samuel himself had previously noted that for three years, Coote was kept off Liverpool duty*; and Samuel should know that Coote has only reffed the Reds three times now in the league, two of which involved not seeing the most obvious things at the Kop end, when there was no crowd of players blocking his view (and no crowd at all at Anfield for the first one, or does Anfield still intimidate refs when empty?).

(* And, in turns out, correctly so! Who knew?!)

Next, Anfield is not a broiling sea of rage most weeks, as Samuel and others seem to hint at, as if they haven’t been there since the 1970s. While I’m no longer able to go that much for health reasons, I had a season ticket for a few years, since first going in 1990, and my most recent visit was the defeat to Nottingham Forest, which I timed well. (I make it to a few games each season, all being relatively well.)

The atmosphere is often fairly sedate, watchful, engaged. People are always moaning about it being flat, and opposition fans mock, as if Liverpool fans are dying to be excited by the visit of Luton Town.

It’s not the 1970s anymore, lads. Lose the stereotypes.

It can still be hugely intimidating on big occasions, or in big moments; but most of the febrile atmospheres are in European games, with non-English referees. To be fair, the atmosphere has seemed really good in recent weeks, but I don’t think it should have been terrifying.

But so can smaller stadia with more rabid fanbases. They can seem genuinely hostile.

Liverpool fans also rarely chant about the ref, but the visiting fans are always chanting “the referee’s a Scouser”, even if it’s the first free-kick to Liverpool are they opposition have had ten (this literally happened).

(In a recent game, with Robert Jones the ref, the Manchester United fans were raging about the Scouser in the middle, and then he gave them a penalty.)

Once you play the Anfield game of “the referee’s a Scouser” bingo, you’ll notice.

It’s usually either just before or just after “sign on, with a pen in your hand,” or “feed the Scousers, let them know it’s Christmas time”; but no, there’s no general anti-Scouse sentiment in football, is there?

#LiVARpool

Even now, #LiVARpool remains a major issue for the Reds, as the (updated) graph below shows, with the balance of all subjective overturns/interventions by VARs excluding the more objective offsides.

(Graph updated as one item listed as a VAR call for Liverpool was the VAR, Lee Mason, trying to give a penalty *against* Liverpool and Fabinho at Fulham, which the ref rightly said was bonkers. So, one from the For column, added to the Against column.)

In, and under articles about Coote, rival fans still comment as if #LiVARpool is true, and referees may feel under pressure to not get abuse from the vast majority of football fans, who are not Liverpool fans (many of whom are anti-Liverpool, some more than others).

That said, I had dialled back my data analysis of officials, as it’s too much work, but had a piece on VAR in the pipeline, which I published this week in the aftermath of Cuntgate. (Not to be confused with a nice town in the countryside.)

I expected officials to be happy that Klopp has gone, and but even the calm Arne Slot has been baffled by the poor officiating at times; noting how a ref appeared to be giving everything to the opposition at Anfield, as if to show he was in control.

Welcome to England, Arne! Peter Walton even admitted it’s true.

Coote’s Future

The truth is that gross misconduct should cost people their jobs, if their jobs depend on certain standards of behaviour and relates to the kind of people they work with; and then they can go and get other jobs.

They may not be as well-paid, but that’s the price you pay. It’s not ‘cancellation’ if you break the standards of decency by quite some margin.

Coote has not been accused of crimes that are beyond the pale, and would restrict him from any further employment; but clearly he should not apply for any jobs on Merseyside, and in Germany.

(That said, I wrote this part before the cocaine accusations arose, along with further derogatory statements, but they have not yet been proved as far as I know. If they are true, then obviously he’s fucked, and is probably in a very dark place right now, and I don’t just mean the PGMOL HQ.)

Bad officiating also costs managers their jobs, clubs millions of pounds, and people like me valuable income compared to when the club is ultra-successful and people want to read about it.

(Funnily enough, my books about Liverpool failing to win the league by a point, or two points, are not amongst my best sellers.)

It costs the fans who pay £60 or more to go (plus all added costs), and seemingly hundreds per month to watch on at least three different platforms now, what they have a right to pay for: fair and unbiased officiating.

Indeed, one ex-ref said it was a ‘massive concern’ that a Premier League referee did not think it was a foul on Mo Salah at the weekend. It was such a bizarre decision that it felt like something was wrong. This was before the revelations.

You can say it’s just incompetence, until you see proof of malice.

Then, you at least have to take a look at integrity, and not say poor old Cootey, “captain sensible”, and suggest that it’s somehow impossible – IMPOSSIBLE! – for the clear malice shown to have had any impact on his performances.

Even then, I wish him no ill. I hope he comes out the other side of this a changed and better man.

He can have my full forgiveness, as long as he doesn’t go near a football match that involves Liverpool FC or its rivals.

I can forgive him. But I’ll never trust him.

The PGMOL and Improvements

Next, as I near the end of several articles that have merged into one giant purging, I’ve said I felt that the PGMOL are getting better in some ways under Howard Webb, who unlike some ex-refs (Mike Dean, Peter Walton) and some current refs (Coote) does not seem a midwit; nor some spineless goon like Mike Riley, Webb’s predecessor.

Webb, for all his faults, seems quite a reasonably sharp guy, not some mid-level superstore security guard like some of the others.

But virtually every ref is from the north of England; mainly in Yorkshire, the north-west, and the north-east. Then, as far south as Nottinghamshire.

And while it can be hard to find diversity if people don’t put themselves forward (and I understand why certain groups of people might not do so), it’s insane that they struggle to find refs from literally half the country.

That suggests some kind of in-group policy; certainly in the past, albeit any pipelines can take maybe a decade to correct.

(If there aren’t enough of Category X doing Job Y, and the job requires years of training and further years of building up experience, it can easily take ten years for the new intake to reach the required standards, and that includes coaching and management in football. If you cut corners and parachute people in, and they are not ready, it then reflects badly on everyone, and sets everything back.)

I have also criticised the fact that Liverpool were getting the same refs all the time, not least as three of the better ones could not do Liverpool games (when Mancunian refs could do Manchester games), and familiarity was breeding contempt.

As a fact, Liverpool were getting fewer different refs per season than any other club.

So the bad ones, who had fallen out with Klopp, were sent back, time and again.

They might not have wanted to be at Anfield; or maybe they did, to prove a point. But they kept doing Liverpool games.

As I’ve also said that Tony Harrington (north-east again, mind) has impressed me greatly in his two games this season.

He just reffed them in a beautifully firm but logical manner, letting the game flow whilst also calling fouls, which most refs cannot seem to manage. He gave no Big Decisions for Liverpool, but seemed to ref the game, not the stadium. There were quietly forceful and somehow beautiful too. It was that good, i.e. he wasn’t terrible.

Anthony Taylor has been someone I’ve defending, based on data, for 1-2 years now, despite his Mancunian roots, and some terrible decisions in the past, such as not sending off Vincent Kompany at the Etihad for taking out Mo Salah with a two-footed lunge in 2019. (And a few other weird games he had.)

Overall, Taylor seems like the best ref now. He seems comfortable in his own skin, and that’s vital.

It’s not an easy job, so you can’t have wimps (speaking as a fellow wimp, albeit I did at least play football semi-professionally before I got ill).

Simon Hooper was awful at Spurs last season, and does not impress me. He’s certainly not a wimp. But he’s also not very good, and doesn’t look very fit.

Michael Oliver has grown far less generous to Liverpool, but is obviously still a top referee. As noted many times, I found his financially rewarding trip to Saudi (£3k for one game) deeply concerning, given his love of Newcastle United, but I hope that hasn’t been behind any shifts in his approach.

But again, we must be able to scrutinise refs without it being labelled conspiracy thinking.

One of the problems with any organisation that feels it’s beyond scrutiny and reproach – that is inherently godly and honest – will be how much it and its members try to get away with.

Just look at police, politicians, medical professionals (including various nurses and doctors of death), or the heads of organised religions. All above reproach, right? They were a few decades ago.

You can’t say anyone is guilty just because others have not been found to be guilty, but it does highlight the ‘cover’ of power.

In the 1950s, British people genuinely thought the police could not and would not lie (it said as much in a book I was reading about a 1950s ‘doctor of death’).

No one would have expected, or at least expressed, that priests were paedophiles, or that nurses and doctors would deliberately kill up to hundreds of people each, including babies.

Similarly, a lot of serial killers appear to have worked in law enforcement, and/or, even more frequently, been pillars of their church community.

The cloak of being too virtuous to do such things hides far seedier things, and sometimes venal things.

Maybe only rarely, as relative outliers. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t huge numbers of serial killers. But some who are were cops, doctors, nurses, priests, and so on.

As an aside, I don’t think many people in life accept bribes, but everyone seems susceptible to blackmail, if the right information is gleaned.

(Again, I wrote the paragraph above before it came to light that Coote may have snorted cocaine while on duty at Euro 2024, and if true, given what he has filmed and shared, the man seems like a walking ‘Blackmail Me’ sign. Ditto refs who perhaps play away from home, as it were, while on the road a lot, staying in hotels, and maybe going to party islands or trips to Dubai and Saudi.)

I mean, if it ever came to light that I have hundreds of hard-drives full of hedgehog porn, I’d be screwed. I’ve got some seriously spicy and spiky porcupine on porcupine action.

John Brooks, like Paul Tierney, seemed to have serious personal issues with Klopp (more bad rows on the touchline) that, like Coote, in my eyes, stopped them all giving Liverpool obvious decisions in subsequent games.

But the list this season, in order, hadn’t been too bad, until I saw Coote and Paul Tierney (VAR) before the weekend’s game and sensed trouble was in store:

Tim Robinson, Stuart Attwell, Anthony Taylor, Michael Oliver, Tony Harrington, Anthony Taylor, Simon Hooper, John Brooks, Anthony Taylor, Tony Harrington, David Coote; while Andy Madley and Darren Bond did the League Cup games.

Coote is now obviously off the roster, and maybe for good.

VAR In General

Finally, VAR has generally made things far worse by allowing us to see glaring errors, and then we feel far more cheated when those errors are explained away with the flaming bullshit of cognitive dissonance (“They both came in high”.)

Seriously, once an official has said of the image below that they both came in high, you’re not even talking about the same planet and laws of physics, let alone anything from the same sport.

If this was a CCTV incident in the street at 3am outside a nightclub, no one would argue that both men came in with raised boots. It is literally almost the least true thing you could say about the incident. One man would be guilty of assault, the other found to have been assaulted.

The outcome? Liverpool lost the league in part on the back of this decision. That’s all. Just the title, lost. It shifted the momentum back in City’s favour.

Because: grown men cannot say that one player went in with a high boot and the other had both feet on the ground.

And even if it wasn’t deemed worthy of a red card, this was deemed unworthy of a foul.

So while it complicates matters, officials have made life harder for themselves; including Dean admitting that he didn’t want to overturn his mate’s decision when the VAR, and then backtracking when he made the comments live on TV.

Again, Sky’s covering up of the Luis Díaz onside goal given as offside was deeply concerning.

I still find it one of the most baffling things I’ve ever seen, mind, along with a linesman elbowing a Liverpool player.

Good came from it, in that the process, which was not, contrary to Darren England’s self-congratulations, “good”, was apparently overhauled based on aviation communication protocols (as explained in the film Airplane 2!).

However, one other aviation-based recommendation I’ve suggested on here (since reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking but also a lot of air-crash programmes due to growing up around the less-glamorous side of the aviation industry) is that junior officers should have the same right to question something as senior officers.

Many crashes occurred because the junior pilot saw impending disaster, but didn’t dare speak up. They sat quiet, as the plane ploughed into a mountainside, or into the sea. This still exists more in honour cultures, where it’s just not allowed to question a superior.

We actually saw with Coote, the junior and somewhat spineless ref, kowtowing to Michael Oliver for the bizarre penalty against Man United at West Ham.

Even then, Webb, in his half-revelatory, half-conveniently-cover-it-up show, said Oliver ‘misread’ it.

Maybe he used the word ‘mistake’ elsewhere, but it was a mistake. Not a misreading. Again, it’s like how foreign players dive, but English ones maybe went over a bit easy there.

Reverse the roles, and no way is that given as a penalty.

Next, having pointed out over 300 games without a second yellow to an opponent of Liverpool, when the going rate was 5-10 for other clubs in that period, that issue was eradicated last season, and other second yellows followed.

That may be coincidence, but runs like that, and the current run of nearly 200 games since Man City conceded a penalty via VAR (when we can all name at least two vital stonewallers that should have gone against them and changed the course of the title race) shows some kind of incompetence, bias or worse.

Any run of 200 or 300 games where something should occur 3-10 times, and occurs zero times, needs investigating, as you’re beyond any laws of averages.

It doesn’t have to be corruption, but maybe a fear to act is part of the reason for the lack of decisions.

I don’t think City necessarily get favouritism, but in big moments in big games with the title on the line, they’ve got away with some title-deciding ‘blindness’ on the part of the VAR, and it cost Liverpool last season and in past seasons; with City’s fanbase also harassing Michael Oliver, who used to give things against them and for Liverpool, but now just looks like he doesn’t give a shit anymore. (City fans got furious in late 2019 when Raheem Sterling wasn’t fouled, Liverpool broke away and scored.)

Maybe Oliver was harassed as being too pro-Liverpool, as one of only a handful of active refs at the time who had ever given Liverpool more than two penalties between 2015 and 2023 (March 2023, I believe), when I shared the data.

In a combined 168 league games in those eight years, Liverpool received just 12 penalties when the refs were Bobby Madley, Craig Pawson, Paul Tierney, Chris Kavanagh, Graham Scott, John Brooks, Jonathan Moss, Martin Atkinson, Mike Dean, Andy Madley, Darren England, David Coote, Lee Mason, Mark Clattenburg, Neil Swarbrick, Roger East and Simon Hooper. (And hardly any of those at Anfield.)

The disparity was partly, but not fully, redressed by Oliver, Taylor, Kevin Friend, Andre Marriner and Stuart Attwell, the first four being amongst the best refs (two now retired), and the latter the biggest ‘homer’.

With 31 from 133 games, Liverpool were more than 3x more likely to get a penalty (thus a more normal rate) if any of that quintet were reffing than if it were the aforementioned 17 refs, and it’s not like they reffed the games against the cannon fodder; and my point remains that you should not have such a massive disparity between decision-givers and bottlers avoiding doing their duty.

It throws questions on the integrity of the league, if there are too many bad, weak or bitter officials.

And it’s not just Coote’s general decisions against Liverpool, but the importance of them: key moments, in key games, that made no sense. Other refs also let the Reds down.

Liverpool got no help from Coote in the title-influencing Arsenal game last season.

Oliver could not see Jeremy Doku’s karate kick on Alexis Mac Allister, yet his seniority and insistence on “no foul! no foul!”, despite literally being blindside, seemed to intimidate Stuart Attwell, whose own data shows him to be the most weak and ‘homer’ of all referees I looked at (in games involving Liverpool, Man City, Man United and Chelsea), and thus not the strongest of characters.

Had Attwell been the ref and Oliver the VAR vs City, that would surely have been a penalty, just as there’s no way Coote gets Oliver to give a penalty to West Ham the other week.

Decisions should reflect what happened, not who the referee and VAR happen to be. Nor what will please the crowd the most; nor to please the Twitter mobs the most.

Removing officials from marking each other’s homework should have been implemented from the outset, but if not, senior/junior intimidation needs to be investigated.

Better

A lot of the issues I’ve discussed are becoming more historical now; this is a new era of Liverpool under Slot, and some of the referees are changing.

Some of the worst refs have gone, and Webb is implementing some good ideas.

But perhaps it’s also a smokescreen to cover the continuation of the bad.

However, if that’s the case to buy time and retain credibility while things are attempted to be improved and fixed behind the scenes, that’s more forgivable.

I can also find fewer generally concerning trends for Liverpool in the data (the last time I checked it all), beyond the continued distrust of foreigner Mo Salah, and how he gets almost no free-kicks, even if he’s grabbed, strangled and garrotted.

For a few years (5-8) there were an absolute ton of weird data gaps, or spikes in odd decisions from specific refs, but many anomalies have fallen away.

Liverpool no longer have to wait 300 games for an opponent to be send off for a second yellow.

Liverpool get a reasonable number of Big Decisions, and have risen to a heady third in the penalties-received balance, albeit well behind Man City (a better side in the period, but where Liverpool ranked as the 2nd-best side), who, as noted, also get five times as many VAR foul penalties.

City also going five years without conceding a foul penalty from VAR is also, indirectly, harmful to Liverpool; most notably last season at Anfield.

Liverpool get a normal number of penalties at Anfield and the Kop-end again, after years of refs apparently refs, in famous stadia, *want to show they are not being cowed by the crowd.*

I’m optimistic; as long as the PGMOL don’t blame Liverpool and Liverpool fans for all this, and it affects how they do Liverpool games. I just want normal, decent, capable refs, who don’t carry any deep hatreds that might warp their decision making.

That’s all.