Which Referees Hate Liverpool the Most? | OneFootball

Refereeing isn’t an easy job. It is important to put that front and centre in any discussion. The people in the middle are widely hated by both sets of players, managers from the two teams and everyone on the stadium. In the modern era, they get their decisions scrutinised repeatedly by the various broadcasters who show live football, without any real right to reply.

It is far from a job that most people would want in the sport, so due respect has to be shown to those that choose to take it on. The problem is, it definitely seems as though some referees have it in for your club, whoever you support. With Liverpool, some have definitely hated us. Here’s a look at them:

Ortiz de Mendibil

Ron Kroon / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

If Ortiz de Mendibil is a name that doesn’t sound all that familiar to you, that is probably because it is that of a Spanish referee who took charge of only one Liverpool game, which was played back in 1965. If it is a name that does ring a bell, the chances are that you’re an older supporter who holds a judge. de Mendibil was in charge of the second-leg of the European Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Inter Milan, with the Reds having won the first-leg 3-1.

Bill Shankly’s men were expecting to make it through to the final, but Tommy Smith would later say, “The Italians didn’t win it – the referee won it for them.”

The Spaniard never admitted to cheating and continued refereeing for almost a decade after the game, but the feeling amongst the Liverpool players and staff has always been that they were cheated. In front of more than 76,000 people, Inter scored two goals in two minutes, the pair of which were controversial. The Reds might well still have won, only for Ian St John’s goal to be disallowed for offside.

You might think it was just the referee having a bad game, but the Secretary of Inter, Italo Allodi, was repeatedly accused of match-fixing during his career and we know from the Calciopoli scandal that Italy has suffered from it before.

David Coote

The 2024-2025 Premier League season was barely a quarter of the way through when Liverpool played Aston Villa at home, refereed by David Coote. The Nottinghamshire-born official had long been the scourge of Liverpool supporters, making any number of odd decisions any time he was asked to take control of one of our matches. This game was no exception, with Coote seemingly waving play-on when Mohamed Salah was taken out by Villa’s last man.

Thankfully Darwin Núñez scored the goal to make Coote’s decision irrelevant, with Liverpool going on to win the game 2-0 when Salah netted late in the second-half.

In the days after the match, however, a video broke on social media in which Coote appeared to call Jürgen Klopp, the former Reds boss, a ‘f*cking German c*nt’. Speaking with someone else, who said that they ‘hate Scousers’, the referee’s position soon became untenable and he was suspended by the PGMOL. He was then later suspended by UEFA when another video emerged, this time seeming to show him sniffing cocaine at a time when he was supposedly in Europe as one of England’s referees for the European Championship, carrying out the VAR duty.

The hatred of Klopp that he demonstrated certainly married up with the performances he’d put in when refereeing Liverpool matches.

Mike Jones

Ben Sutherland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is not unreasonable for you to have no real sense about why Mike Jones’s name is on this list, if you can’t remember anything particularly egregious that he did whilst a Premier League referee. With that in mind, it is probably not all that correct to say that he seemed to ‘hate’ Liverpool. Yet when I tell you that he was the man in charge for the infamous ‘beach ball goal’ that Sunderland scored against us, it might start to make a bit more sense.

Darren Bent’s initial shot was heading straight into the arms of Pepe Reina in the Liverpool goal, only for it to strike an inflatable beach ball that a Liverpool supporter had thrown onto the pitch.

The match ball took a diversion, heading past Reina and into the goal. The decision should have been to disallow the goal according to the rules of the game, but Jones and his assistants decided to allow it. In the wake of the match, Rafael Benítez, the Liverpool manager at the time, was surprisingly philosophical about the whole thing, saying, “It’s a very technical question. It could be a goal, it’s difficult to say. In this case it has to be a goal”.

Benítez was wrong, however, and there is no question that Jones should’ve disallowed it. Was the fact that he didn’t a sign that he secretly hated Liverpool? Most of us think they all do anyway.

All of Them

Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the excellent Liverpool blogger Paul Tomkins has done some tremendous work looking at the manner in which the Reds are refereed different to pretty much every other team. He did a deep-dive into the data available to show that Liverpool just don’t get a fair shake from the men in the middle.

Sure, a few unusual things from referees can happen and we shouldn’t get too caught up in what it all means. Yet from 2015 onwards, there seemed to be a clear pattern of the Reds just not getting decisions in the same way as other teams tend to, with Mohamed Salah being a major victim.

Between 2015 and 2023, for example, Liverpool got the fewest penalties of the 24 teams that had played at least three seasons in the top-flight during that time. Referees from Greater Manchester, which seems to be almost all of them, are much more likely to give penalties to Mancunian clubs and much less likely to give Liverpool one.

At one point, Sadio Mané was the last player to be sent off against Liverpool for a second yellow card, which was when he was playing for Southampton, having gone on to sign for us, with the Premier League and Champions League and leave the club before another player was shown red.

Maybe it’s not true that all referees hate Liverpool, but the statistics are certainly fascinating.