I watched Joey Barton try to bask in the publicity of his court case but it only showed his true nature: Violent, foul-mouthed, narcissistic, raging against his own irrelevance... and guilty

Joey Barton was an established professional at one of the five British clubs he played for when the manager there warned a new member of the backroom team to beware his surface charm.

‘You might be fooled when you first meet him,’ the manager said. ‘Don’t be.’

When the end of the season arrived and it was time for squad and staff to disperse for the summer, that manager set the same member of staff an unusual holiday challenge.

‘Buy yourself a copy of a book called The Psychopath Test at the airport,’ he said. ‘Read it on the beach and when you get back, I want you to tell me who it’s about.’

The book, by journalist Jon Ronson, attempts to define what makes someone a psychopath, and includes a meeting between the author and an eminent psychologist, Robert D Hare, who explains the traits: superficial charm, narcissism, manipulativeness and a raging ego which does not take well to being challenged. 

When the team re-assembled for the new season, the manager asked the staff member if he’d read the book. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘And before you ask – Joey Barton.’

That staff member describes to Daily Mail Sport how a coaching team member who had managed Barton at another club warned that he would ‘be trouble’ for them. ’That was an understatement,’ the insider says. ‘And here we are, all these years on, still talking about Joey Barton. Unbelievable.’

The same swaggering ego landed at Liverpool Crown Court last week. Barton looked like the cock of the walk, with his polka dot handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, an elaborate scarf, holding doors open, charm personified with people around the court.

On Friday he was found guilty of six counts of sending 'grossly offensive' social media posts to Jeremy Vine, Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward. He is due to be sentenced on December 8, when, the judge informed him, he will not be allowed to wear the British flag scarf that he wore to hear this week's verdict.

Press officers at clubs he has played for, approached by Daily Mail Sport as part of our attempt to make sense of this deeply odd individual, describe him as ‘no problem,’ ‘as good as gold’ and utterly charming, who would delight nurses at some club hospital visit or other.

Challenge him at your peril, though. The remotest perceived sleight can bring out violence, aggression and the forces of holy hell from this hyper-sensitive individual, who is drowning in victimhood and as incapable of displaying remorse for terrorising two women pundits and a TV presenter on X as he was last year when convicted of kicking his wife in the head as she lay on the ground.

'He’d think nothing of picking on a young player he felt threatened by in training,’ a source from another of his Premier League clubs tells us. ‘He’d have no concerns about it being a kid.’

It was a 16-year-old boy he punched the living daylights out of near a McDonald's in Liverpool city centre in 2007, which saw him jailed for six months. 'I went for the gobbiest kid, punched him once and dropped him,' he said of this, not remotely embarrassed by the idea of attacking a child. It was a 15-year-old Everton fan he slapped in Thailand in 2005.

Young people have not been the only targets. Barton’s Manchester City team-mate Ousmane Dabo was 30 when he left him unconscious, with a detached retina, at the training ground. 'He wasn't a natural fighter. I'm from the streets. There's your difference,' Barton said of that attack.

Using the Liverpool overspill district which he hails from to present an image of himself as the heroic street kid is a popular ruse of Barton’s.

‘I’m a working-class kid from the St Johns Estate in Huyton who played football,’ he said on Wednesday when prosecution barrister Peter Wright KC put it to him that he had a chip on his shoulder and had been ‘convicted of violent offences’ in his private life. ‘And it’s in the plural, “offences”,’ Mr Wright reminded him.

Barton glorifies in a violent upbringing, delighting in the fact that his father was the member of a football hooligan gang. 'Survival instincts are deeply engrained,’ he once said of it. But on the streets of that Huyton estate, there is very little sympathy to be found for him or the things he says about the place.   

‘He gives this place a bad name with his s*** and his big talk,’ a grandmother with three young children in tow tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘We bring our kids up to show respect. Don’t blame us for the fact you’re a thug.’

A young mother says Barton’s talk shames women like her who are raising children to contribute to the world. ‘It might not be posh but that doesn’t mean we don’t teach them respect and manners,’ she says. Barton might be one of their own, but they don’t seem to like him.

Most players with a history of physical violence like Barton would disappear from view once their playing days had finished. But his verbosity, excruciating to witness when he testified on Wednesday, is part of his attempt to reinvent himself as an unreconstructed working-class thinker. This was helped by his ghostwritten autobiography No Nonsense, published with a moody black-and-white cover image of its goateed subject nine years ago.

There are brief moments of clarity in the pages of that book, as he describes his ‘inner child’ and ‘immature character within’. But despite framing the book as the first step on the road to some kind of redemption and self-awareness - ‘My behaviour was occasionally psychotic. I had such a deep-rooted dislike of what I had become,’ he writes – it reeks of self-indulgence.

‘I’ve done some bad things, but I’ve never killed anyone,’ - as if that is any measure. ‘I am emotionally driven, so a relapse is always a possibility.’ It certainly was in his case. After the book was beautifully ghostwritten for him, he just carried on hitting people. He left his wife, Georgia, with a lump on her head where he kicked her while she lay on the ground.

And by convincing himself he was some kind of philosopher, he exposed himself to all the more ridicule. His claims to have read books on Buddhist principles and the drug culture of the Tour de France while in prison for the Liverpool attack saw him invited on BBC’s Question Time in 2014.

He spent three days prepping for his performance, enlisting a Roehampton University philosophy lecturer to coach him. A classroom was even commandeered for the staging of a ‘mock programme’.

Yet his performance will be remembered for him telling a UKIP MEP that voting for the party was like voting for one of 'four really ugly girls'.

‘There was some nervous laughter and jeers. It was an excruciating moment, not quite what we anticipated,’ a member of the BBC Current Affairs team from that time tells Daily Mail Sport. Barton didn't see the problem, awarding himself a 'solid eight out of 10' for his performance.

He launched himself into the Wild West of X, a landscape of lunatic Alt-Right conspiracy theories and foul-mouthed venom for challengers, where there were plenty of people to make him feel immensely intelligent. He describes himself as a ‘spiritual leader’ on his profile.

His desperate search for attention prompted a particularly despicable claim about the murder of a Liverpool teenager, Anthony Walker, who was killed by a single blow to the head from a 2ft ice axe, inflicted on him by Barton's racist brother, Michael, and racist cousin, Paul Taylor, in 2005.

In the autobiography, he waxed lyrical about weeping when he heard the account of Anthony's mother 'walking through a trail of blood in the hospital corridor' where the teenager lay dying.

'As a parent, I'm haunted by the image of a mother's unimaginable despair,' he wrote. This was evidently total fiction. In 2023, to the dismay of Anthony’s family, he declared the young man’s death to have been the result of a 'f***ing scrap'.

Too discredited to earn any punditry work when his managerial career ended in failure at Bristol Rovers, he raged against Ward and Aluko after hearing them commentating on an Everton game while playing snooker in a pub. It was obvious from his court evidence that he coveted their jobs.

It was when Vine entered the social media fray in Ward and Aluko’s defence that the slighted Barton unleashed his campaign against the ‘bike nonce’, as he christened him. Elon Musk’s feckless platform did not display the remotest inclination to take down the personalised vitriol.

Vine’s successful libel suit cost Barton £600,000 and compounded Barton’s fury. He turned his civil and criminal offence into a ‘freedom of speech’ crusade, mocking and deriding the British legal system.

Under the terms of his bail, Barton had been warned not to make public pronouncements about the case, because of the risk of influencing the jury.

But after the first day’s proceedings on Monday evening, he tweeted a link to Daily Mail Sport’s court report, tagging Musk, and adding: ‘Freedom of Speech case going on in Liverpool today.’

It was Barton basking in the trial publicity, seeking to use it to win some profile for himself as a radical soothsayer.

The following morning, the judge told him that he took a dim view of this, reminding him of his bail conditions and the reasons for them. Barton was warned not to do so again. He did not take the tweet down. Engagement with it from Musk would have hugely amplified the tweet. He did not respond. 

By Thursday morning, Barton was tweeting about the case again - telling his followers he was ‘doing the Lord’s work’ as he headed ‘back into the inferno’ of court for his cross-examination. He was warned again.

What then ensued from the witness box, as Barton raged against the court system, the prosecution barrister, the police, ITV, football referees and his own legal team offered the jury a vivid insight into where his cyber-bullying had come from. The fact that he testified became deeply damaging to his defence team’s case.

Pathetic in the face of intellectual rigour from Mr Wright, he began brandishing a red A4 hardback book which he claimed was his ‘journal’, mapping out his daily thoughts, including the plans of his campaign to get women pundits removed. He urged the judge to hand it to the jury, to the bemusement of Judge Andrew Menary.

His orders to Barton to stop ‘grandstanding’ and using the witness box as a political pulpit were largely ignored. The judge could have held him in contempt of court but clearly did not want the case torpedoed and let things ride.

Amid Barton’s escalating fury, as it became clear that he could not bully his way through this arena, he called the prosecuting barrister ‘Peter’.

'It’s Mr Wright to you,’ Judge Menary told him. ‘I think you could help yourself. Please take a breath.’

Barton continually damned himself. He claimed that the term ‘bike nonce’, which he persistently directed at Vine, was simply a harmless description of a cycling obsessive. Yet during cross-examination, Barton misheard Mr Wright’s use of the word ‘nonsense’.

‘Did you call me a nonce?’ Barton asked.

‘I said, “It’s a nonsense”’, Wright replied. ‘Were you a bit sensitive about the remark being directed at you, there?’

Did Barton know the meaning of the word ‘narcissist’, Mr Wright also asked, before proceeding to tell him: ‘It is someone who has an excessive admiration of, and interest, in themselves.’

Barton, who says his tattoo of a wolf in profile on his calf represents ‘the mythology of the lone wolf’, will now return to the echo chamber of anger and conspiracy theories.

A violent, ill-disciplined, foul-mouthed former footballer with two Championship medals and one England substitute appearance to his name, who has been reduced to spouting anger and nonsense, raging against his own irrelevance.