Joey Barton doesn’t even like his own name. What hope have we got of him seeing that hatred spewed online has consequences?
We will get to the reason why his name irks him. But first we have to acknowledge that his self-constructed noble savage, who the football chatterati swooned over, who quoted philosophy and Orwell, and compared his club travails to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineering challenges, is gone. It was probably never there – merely an attempted and abandoned tactic to gain attention.
Back in 2011, his was the quintessential bad-boy-come-good tale. Yes, he had spent 74 days in prison for unloading 20 punches on a teenager during a night out. Yes, he had stubbed out a cigar on a teammate and beaten up another colleague at the training ground. But he had changed.
He had enrolled in a philosophy course. He’d had an autobiography ghost-written for him, which admitted faults and revealed the steps he had taken to redeem himself. He quoted lyrics from The Smiths. He was trying to be better.
But somewhere along the line, he clearly realised that pontificating on philosophy, left-wing slogans (“working class, time to take back what is ours, unite,” he tweeted in 2011) and morose 1980s pop lyrics were not nearly as much fun as misogyny, Islamophobia, sexism, transphobia and slander, all of which feature on Barton’s social media feeds.
Nor is it as lucrative. Especially when one has a podcast to promote.
And now the party is over. His downfall is complete after being found guilty of six counts of sending grossly offensive electronic communications, while found not guilty over six others. And it is karmic, poetic – and absolutely brilliant. It is not a defeat for free speech, as Barton tried to assert throughout the trial. It is a victory to people who refuse to be bullied.
Barton even tried to tell us that there is a conspiracy within the media and the arrest was politically motivated. Yep, a conspiracy. Talk about believing your own hype – and conforming to “edgy” tropes.
Barton outside Liverpool Crown Court (Photo: Getty)No, Joe, there’s no conspiracy. It is just the bits where you threaten people, disseminate hate or accuse innocent people of grotesque activities that it gets a little tough to justify. The jury found he had “crossed the line between free speech and a crime”.
We knew Barton was controversial. We also knew he was intelligent – apart from the 10 GCSEs and philosophical dabbling, his missives on social media occasionally displayed a modicum of wit.
Even the infamous comment where he compared Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward’s commentary to “Fred and Rose West” was a notch above the normal knuckle-dragging rhetoric of the anti-women-in-football brigade. You could almost imagine an early career Frankie Boyle using the phrase. Almost.
But his descent into accusations of paedophilia towards Jeremy Vine and reposting “take our country back” style divisive messages reveal that he is a thug. One who is not in control of his own fingers well enough to stop posting on X before he crosses the line.
He gave a clue during the trial as to the reasons behind his total about-face from working-class thinker to women-hating baiter. Put simply: pound notes.
He said in his defence of tweets that left Vine fearing for his family’s safety: “It’s like two boxers trying to sell a product. It’s him noising me up and me noising him up. We are trading. We are in a showdown for further down the line.”
We can extrapolate that admission into explaining why he felt the need to go to war on female commentators – and women’s football in general. To Barton, it is all a game, a career path, a method to get metaphorical bums on seats.
Who knows whether he believes everything he broadcasts? Because it is a big leap to take, from a 2010s Eric Cantona to monetising hate, making profit from slander (when he doesn’t have to pay £75,000 as he did to Vine earlier this year), becoming a beacon for the bigoted.
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But as Ward told the court, with 2.6m followers on X and 54,000 subscribers on his oxymoronically titled YouTube channel “Common Sense with Joey Barton”, there are consequences to his game. Ward said: “You can’t escape someone who has more than two-and-a-half million followers on Twitter, not just their tweets but people who latch on and message you and make comment.”
More evidence that he is merely a thuggish grifter rather than a freedom fighter is his allegiance to the “women in women’s spaces” discourse which frequently enters the realm of out-and-out transphobia. To summarise, he is pro-women when it comes to toilets and changing rooms, as long as they are not located in football grounds or television studios.
Oh, and his name. He prefers “Joe”, but the extra “y” was mistakenly put on a team sheet early in his football career and has stuck ever since. He doesn’t like it, he revealed in his autobiography – but not enough for him to change it. Why? Maybe he just enjoys hate so much, he even turns it upon himself.
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