How deluded Joey Barton tries to reinvent himself but burning EYE, biting finger & kicking wife prove he’s vile thug
MANAGER after manager gave football thug Joey Barton another chance – but no matter how many times he promised to change his ways that terrifying short fuse was lit.
On Tuesday, the 42-year-old former Manchester City midfielder was given yet another shot at redemption when a judge didn’t jail Barton for kicking his wife during a drunken row.
That was despite the notorious self-styled ‘hardman’ having two previous convictions for serious violence.
Rather than being grateful for being handed a 12-week suspended prison sentence following his harrowing assault on his spouse Georgia at their London home, Barton criticised the court and posted the IRA slogan ‘our day will come’ on the social media site X.
Writing that phrase in Gaelic was typical, pretentious posing by the one England cap player who frequently tried to convince the world that he is an intellectual.
Following a six month prison sentence in 2008, Barton became a columnist for the Big Issue homeless magazine, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time, told The Guardian about his love for modern art, studied Buddhism, talked about philosophy and condemned homophobia.
But all those words ring hollow today, because in recent months he’s made a homophobic slur against TV pundit Gary Neville and offensive remarks about “skin pigmentation merchants”.
All that is a long way from the statement he made after his convictions for hitting a man 20 times in a city centre fracas and attacking his Manchester City team mate Ousmane Dabo during training.
Back in 2008 Barton said: “Hopefully I can be the role model I’ve never been. My reputation will precede me until the day I die and for some people that can’t come soon enough.”
Kicking-off
That reputation was horrendous back then and has only got worse since.
The Liverpool-born footballer was given his first opportunity at Man City by then manager Kevin Keegan back in 2003.
But it didn’t take Barton long to make a bad impression.
Having been voted the club’s young player of the year, he got sent off for arguing with the ref, was red carded for a shocking tackle during a friendly and put a young team mate in hospital by burning his eyelid with a cigar in December 2004.
During a Christmas party, dressed as Jimmy Saville, Barton thrust the lit cigar at 20-year-old Jamie Tandy’s face – leaving him hospitalised with burns to his eyelid.
Barton was fined £60,000 by the club and there was talk of offloading him, but Keegan accepted his apology.
My reputation will precede me until the day I die
Joey Barton
Keegan said: “What meant much more was to see him stand in front of me in a room and hear him say how upset and sorry he was.”
Not upset enough to learn his lesson.
Barton ended up in more trouble in 2005, running down a pedestrian in his car and breaking his leg and then slapping a 15-year-old Everton fan during a tour of Thailand.
When his team mate Richard Dunne stepped in to defuse the row, Barton is said to have bitten him on the finger.
Witnesses reported a trail of blood as the two players were pulled apart, with a City spokesman later clearly laying the blame at Barton’s door.
Manager Stuart Pearce considered letting Barton rot in a Thai prison, but after what was described as a “tearful apology” from the midfielder he was fined two weeks’ wages, sent home and placed on an anger management course.
Heading to jail
Team mate Ousmane Dabo was to count the cost of that second chance two years later when Barton blew up on the training ground, punching his teammate several times until he blacked out.
Dabo was taken to hospital with a suspected detached retina, but was later given the all clear.
The strutting Barton bragged: “He wasn’t a natural fighter. I’m from the streets. There’s your difference.”
In 2008, he pleaded guilty to assault and was given a four-month suspended prison sentence plus 200 hours of community service.
What meant much more was to see him stand in front of me in a room and hear him say how upset and sorry he was
Kevin Keegan
City finally washed their hands of the talented midfielder, selling him to Newcastle United.
He was now ‘Big Sam’ Allardyce’s problem.
On 27 December 2007, CCTV recorded Barton punching a man 20 times, before turning his anger on a 16-year-old boy who ended up with broken teeth.
The footballer said: “I went for the gobbiest kid, punched him once and dropped him.”
The judge, who sentenced Barton to six months in prison, said: “You were restrained by others but ignored them and acted in an extremely violent and aggressive manner.“
‘Reformed character’
It might have been a longer spell behind bars if others weren’t generous enough to try to find the good in the repeat offender.
Keegan provided a character reference stating that Barton was now a “far more responsible individual” and the Sporting Chance blamed the violence on his “addiction to alcohol.”
Having claimed he was going to turn his life around, trouble followed him around.
The player was accused of racially abusing Aston Villa’s Gabriel Agbonlahor during a game and in 2009 Barton told new gaffer Alan Shearer that he was “a sh** manager with sh** tactics” during a dressing room confrontation.
This was followed by a further attempt to rehabilitate his public image.
Woke Barton
Barton went all eco-friendly by ditching his gas guzzling £170,000 Aston Martin sports car for a Toyota Prius and started to share quotes from philosophers on his Twitter account.
He whined that the media were wrong to brand him a “bad boy” and tried to explain his terrible track record.
Barton wrote: “Violence always comes from a place of misunderstanding and low to zero self-worth, well mine did anyway.”
There was little evidence of that lack of ‘self-worth’ in some of his Big Issue columns.
In November 2011 he boasted: “I know for a fact that if I set my mind to becoming a venture capitalist, a philanthropist, an anger management counsellor, Catholic priest, my mindset is such that if I want to prove people wrong then I’m able to do that.”
Violence always comes from a place of misunderstanding and low to zero self-worth
Joey Barton
Barton also started wearing trendy black rimmed glasses, as if he were some kind of beat poet and acted the class warrior by stating “working class time to take back what is ours, unite”.
He wore rainbow laces on his football boots in a show of support for the LGBT charity Stonewall and backed women’s football.
If woke had been a popular term 14 years ago, Barton would have been its definition.
The nasty side was never far from view, though.
Vile and violent
On field he headbutted an opponent while playing for QPR in 2012 and later that year kicked Man City striker Sergio Aguero after being sent off.
During his 2014 appearance on Question Time he tried to explain why he’d called Ukip the “best of a bad bunch” by saying the electorate had a choice “between four really ugly girls”.
Condemned for the sexist remark, Barton blamed “nerves”.
A spell as manager at Fleetwood Town ended in January 2021 after he was accused of assaulting rival manager Daniel Stendel, although he was cleared in court of the offence.
Poor results at next club Bristol Rovers saw him sacked in October 2023, with the domestic violence case hanging over him.
The account of his attack on the mother of two of his children in June 2021 heard during his two day trial this week should be enough to see him drummed out of the beautiful game for good.
Westminster magistrates court was told that Georgia rang 999, telling the call handler that her husband had just hit her.
PC Daniel Humphrey gave evidence that when he arrived at the Barton home in Kew, south London, Georgia had a “golf ball sized lump which looked swollen” on her head, plus a bloody nose.
Domestice violence
WHEN Joey Barton left prison in 2008 model girlfriend Georgia McNeil was waiting for him - but he didn't mend his ways.
Violent Barton has often posed as the perfect family man, declaring his love for his wife and their two young children.
That pretence was destroyed by the verdict of the court this week, which found him guilty of assaulting his wife in June 2021.
Fashion graduate Georgia, who studied at Liverpool John Moores and Northumbria Universities, had known him since around 2006.
The couple first set up home two years later after he was released from Strageways prison.
Fellow Liverpudlian Georgia set up her own fashion business and said “I don’t want to be known as a WAG.”
In 2011 they welcomed their first child Cassius Joseph into the world and he was followed by daughter Pietà three years later.
When Barton became manager of Fleetwood Town, he admitted in 2018: “My missus is brilliant at all that. She allows me to sleep while she does the feeds and the school runs. I’d be really struggling if I had to do it.”
The signs for a happy marriage were not good when he got into a brawl during his stag do in 2019.
But the lavish wedding at Aynhoe Park in Banbury appeared to go off wihtout a hitch.
Two years later he was charged with assaulting Georgia after police were called to their home in Kew.
Even though she had told police officer that Barton had kicked her, she stayed with him and refused to testify against her husband.
They are still together, with Georgia attending court appearances with her abuser.
The officer recounted: “She said she’d had an argument with her husband, he had somehow taken her to the ground, she said he pushed her and he either punched or kicked her”.
Georgia, who still lives with Barton, later withdrew her allegations and gave a very different version of events in court.
She claimed “it couldn’t have been Joe, he was too far away,” but that didn’t fit in with Barton’s account because he said he’d been in bed at the time.
After Barton was found guilty of assault, Judge Paul Goldspring, said the guilty man’s “record of violence” was not enough to “impose an immediate custodial sentence”.
Barton is set to go to trial again in November for malicious communications offences, which he denies.
On X, Barton called broadcaster Jeremy Vine a “bike nonce” and former women’s footballers Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward “serial killers”.
No remorse
At court on Tuesday he was clutching a book and sporting a goatee beard.
Remorse was in short supply.
Barton told his 2.7 million followers on X: “Really disappointed in the magistrate’s decision today.
“I intend to appeal this decision to a higher court, the crown court and whilst this process is ongoing that’s all I will say on the matter.”
The image at the top of his account reads ‘enjoy the silence.’
There is little chance of Barton keeping quiet for long.