There are no plans from refereeing body the PGMOL to drug-test officials in the wake of the David Coote scandal, with Uefa and Fifa currently not enforcing the same measures.
Coote, 42, remains officially under investigation by the Professional Game Match Officials Limited following a week of revelations, in which he was caught on video appearing to snort a white powder alleged to be cocaine. The referee is suspended while the matter is investigated and will almost certainly never return to refereeing.
Keith Hackett, the former referees’ chief, told Telegraph Sport last week that the PGMOL had thus far declined to test officials because Uefa and Fifa do not make it a requirement.
The rationale has long been that because referees and assistants are not in effect competing, there would be no advantage to gain in the same way as a player. Whether that might change with the allegations of recreational drug use is not clear.
The Football Association, which owns a third share of PGMOL, is responsible for anti-doping in professional English football. The programme is run by UK Anti-Doping, which administers blood and urine tests without advance notice after games, at training grounds and at players’ homes.
The PGMOL’s select group of referees meet this week at Loughborough University, where there is likely to be much discussion in private of the Coote situation. The meeting is one of the regular get-togethers, where officials train together with PGMOL coaches and analyse clips of contentious decisions.
Hackett told Telegraph Sport last week that he had previously suggested to the PGMOL board that referees should be subject to drug tests. It was considered by Fifa’s then chief medical officer Jiri Dvorak in 2012, but the matter never progressed.
Hackett said: “I thought, if the players have to go through this process, why not referees? That wasn’t accepted by the board. I think, at that particular time, it was just rejected as, ‘It doesn’t happen to referees’.”
Uefa has also been obliged to investigate Coote following the publication of an eight-second film allegedly showing him snorting powder through a rolled-up banknote. It was alleged to have been shot 24 hours after Coote served as the assistant VAR for France’s Euro 2024 quarter-final win over Portugal on July 5.
The Sun newspaper had earlier obtained video footage of Coote purportedly calling the former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp a “c—” after a dispute between the pair.
