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1 day ago
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“I didn’t want to stand out from the crowd. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.” Fair points, there, from David Coote. Or as he must now apparently be described, cocaine ref David Coote, shamed ref David Coote, sacked ref David Coote and, because some kind of equivalence is being drawn, gay ref David Coote.
At the same time these statements from Coote’s interview with the Sun newspaper raise some equally important questions. First, given this, why did David Coote decide to do an interview with the Sun newspaper that serves no obvious purpose other to out himself as a gay man?
Second, why did the Sun want to do this interview, and once there, why choose to frame it as a classic outing, like it’s actually 1986 and David Coote is the minister for potatoes? And third, why is this person in the Guardian newspaper now complaining about that fact?
These are all legitimate questions. Arguably they’re the only really interesting questions arising from the revelation that a man who previously worked in football is gay. The obvious answer to the first two, referenced with exculpatory haste in the furniture to the article, is that this is an attempt to break down football’s “macho culture” around these issues.
Does anyone really believe this is the chief motivation here? Is it really the case that Coote and the Sun feel they simply must act now to defuse that hostility? The immediate evidence suggests the public hates referees quite a lot more simply for being referees. The overriding reaction on social media has been an impatient, yes, fine, OK, but what does this have to do with VAR? Football: mad, but in a good way. Sometimes.
Then again, nothing is really clear here. The article itself seems convinced at all times that it’s telling us something vital. But what exactly?
There are two obvious issues. First is the presentation of all this as primarily a gay story, combined with continual pre-emptive “not that there’s anything wrong with that” asides. At times the whole thing reads like a very clever piece of performative satire on football’s ability to tie itself in knots over homosexuality.
There is a have-our-cake-and-eat-it element in this. Is David Coote being gay a legitimate story on its own merits? Not really. The English referee Ryan Atkin came out seven years ago, but it wasn’t front-page video-interview news. James Adcock, who has also officiated in the Premier League, came out three years ago and this was a small cheerful story on an inside page.
So why is Coote being a gay man the top line? Why do we get the headline “Coke Ref’s Agony: I’m Gay”? Why are the words “So … I’m gay” cut in as the opening exchange of the interview (in reality this came up some way down). Coote also once again denies being involved in spot-fixing towards the end, which really is a big deal because this is a criminal offence that goes right to the heart of sport. But no. Go big with the gay stuff.
There are simple reasons for this. People love gossip. The Sun is all about news, telling the story and getting the scoop in peeled-eyeball detail. It’s very good at this. Here is a story and a headline that people will read. Welcome to the industry.
The issue here is the tone and the purpose of this story. Spare us the needless hand-wringing over macho cultures. The presentation of this as a gay story, front and centre, straight in like a wrecking ball, is simply a monetising of Coote’s distress, cash for prurience, tears for clicks.
This is undeniably good for the Sun’s revenue model. But who else does it help? Is it kind to Coote, who cries at least three times, talks about the pain of coming out to his parents, and who surely would not be doing this without some kind of outside pressure? At times it is hard shake the feeling what you’re watching here is a kind of hostage video.
More widely, does it achieve its aim of normalising this issue? Is it going to make a doubtful 17-year-old feel like working in football? Jon Holmes of the consultancy group Sports Media LGBT+ sees a parallel with stories four years ago threatening to “out” a Premier League player, complete with silhouette cutouts and titillating hints and clues. At the time Sports Media LGBT+ published an open letter signed by more than 200 bodies and individuals calling for greater sensitivity dealing with this issue in football.
“I would be concerned about stories like this which are sensationalised on the basis of driving interest and gossip, and which can perpetuate negative connotation’s around being gay in professional football,” Holmes says. “I also have concerns about the method of delivery of this kind of story, a video with adverts all over it driving traffic and monetising the story. And the general tone of subsequent conversations around this when there are really important issues to be discussed here.”
This leads into the second problematic area. This is the association of homosexuality with vice, the idea of gay men as troubled, flaky and unreliable outsiders. This is clearly not overtly intended by the journalists involved. But it is nonetheless present in the intersection of tone and content.
So we get the constant nods to shamed ref, coke ref, sacked ref. There’s a classic reference to “living a lie”, to the suppressed emotion around Coote’s gay identity, all of which are linked by association to taking cocaine and to an inability do his job properly.
Again this is there in the optics, the juxtaposition at the top of the “white powder” video with the “I am gay” video. It’s there in the fact being gay is front and centre the whole time, raised initially in response to a question about how often Coote took cocaine. Even the story about Coote arranging a sex party in a chain hotel after a Tottenham game (it is, on the face of it, hard to imagine a less erotic sex party) is framed as a gay issue.
“Is that something that came about because of the pressure cooker over your repressed sexuality?” he is asked. The answer seems to be no, as it is towards the end when Coote is asked: “Are you aware of other referees and footballers who are gay?” Because they always recognise each other you see. Gaydar. Ever heard of it?
Is it appropriate to compare this clumsiness to issues raised by stories around Raheem Sterling a few years back? At the time various newspapers were criticised for the tone of their coverage of Sterling’s off-pitch activities, which included buying his mother a house and having a tattoo of a gun on his leg.
The implication was that linking “gun culture” and flashy consumerism to a young black footballer is a way of propagating harmful stereotypes. The Sun’s head of PR at the time, Andy Silvester, denied this in a letter to the Guardian. “That is a very serious charge that stands up to no scrutiny whatsoever. Race was not a factor in the slightest in our decision to cover the story. We would have run the same story had the tattoo been on Jordan Henderson’s arm.”
In fairness, the same point could be made here. A heterosexual referee taking cocaine would also be a massive story. Plus sexuality is something Coote chose to bring up, not his interviewer, although no doubt the content would have been discussed beforehand. What are we supposed to do when he makes that link? Play it down?
The issues comes from the framing. There is an uncomfortable echo of the tone of homosexual prejudice in Britain in the previous century, in politics, the civil service, the army, education. Delicate chaps you see. Open to blackmail. Cant’t really trust ‘em.
True to form a few hours later the man on the sports radio show could be heard announcing that Coote’s travails shone a light on “the dark places that hiding your true identity can lead you”, as though drug abuse and personal breakdown are natural collateral qualities to being privately gay.
By the end the real takeaway is how brutally football has chewed this person up. Coote will no doubt be accused of trying to wangle some kind of media career out of all this, something that is only possible if you haven’t actually watched the video or lack the capacity to feel human empathy.
The fact is homophobia is a big problem in football, not least at grassroots level, where last year’s Football Association review reported a near-20% increase in allegations of discrimination relating to sexual orientation.
Is David Coote, tearful, stricken, powder-snorting, and presented here as an example, above all of gay men in football, really going to help with this? Is the link made here between sexual identity and behaviour going to encourage anyone else to come out at any level and challenge the reactions of those around them? Probably not. But then, if you think about it, everyone involved surely knew that anyway.
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