A promising post-playing career blown apart by careless words
Joey Barton is back in course, this time on malicious communications charges. Doesn't sound like the sort of thing a media personality should be getting involved with.
You have to wonder about the sheer level of entitlement underpinning such a move. When Joey Barton decided to lurch into free speech absolutist territory in the second half of last year, he did so with the grace and poise that he demonstrated on a football pitch. This wasn’t so much a bull in a china shop as a gazelle, kicking its legs artlessly in four different directions at the same time as though in some sort of panic.
Upon the axis of fucking about and finding out, Joey Barton is sailing merrily into the latter territory, and the consequences of his click-chasing now seem likely to come back to haunt him. There do seem to be times when some individuals seem to start believing that such laws couldn’t possibly apply to them. Joey, as one media professional to another, I’ll let you in on a little secret; if you want your media career to survive, you have to know this shit. Blundering through and shouting “free speech!” when called out is not going to cut it.
His behaviour over the last few months has, of course, torched any possibility that he will ever be considered for the sort of punditry role that you suspect he feels he deserves. No mainstream broadcaster of repute is going to employ someone who cannot be trusted to work alongside female colleagues without denigrating their performance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that they are going out live to mass audiences, broadcasters tend to prefer reliable voices and faces over those who ‘shoot from the hip’.
Perhaps there’s space for Barton on GB News or somewhere like that as their Head of Football, but even they have limits on what can and can’t be said and regardless, this would be a million miles from Soccer Sunday on Sky with Roy and the boys. His YouTube Channel has less than 20,000 subscribers, and viewer numbers are variable.
He is capable of pulling in a small audience that is worth… something. Those with 150,000 views may pull in $1,500 (around £1,150 at the current exchange rate), but those are rare. Recent podcasts have drawn less than 5,000 and where there is interest in him, it quite clearly comes from his position as a culture warrior rather than in anything he has to say about actual football. Billie Piper’s ex and the most divorced man in Ireland have both been recent guests.
This is the rabbit-hole he’s chosen to go down, and they tend to be a one-way journey. Football clubs are broadly protective of their reputations, and while there were some who considered him to be worth a gamble prior to the end of his last position at Bristol Rovers, it seems unlikely that there will many in the future.
Those who persist with this nonsense seem impervious to the idea that the rest of us are heartily sick of their confected ‘culture war’. It’s just white noise now, a low, steady drumbeat of noise that resembles nothing so much as that of old men shouting at clouds. You’d think the clue might be in the very fact that it’s an older audience, that time will continue to march inexorably on and that things will change, because they always have.
And within this world, there is little tolerance for language that frequently oversteps the line into the grey area between strongly held opinion and hate speech. Joey Barton, who wanted that media career so badly, did the one thing which demonstrated his unsuitability within that realm; fundamental carelessness with words.
Contrary to what Barton may think, it is not impossible to be critical of female broadcasters and pundits. But we have hate speech laws and we have malicious communications laws, and if Barton wants the play with the big boys in the press room, he needs to understand that a right to free speech does not necessarily mean a right to be as wilfully offensive as you like, with no recourse to consequences.
Of course, it may well be that he gets away with this. It’s hardly as though he hasn’t done so before, after all. But that fundamental truth remains. He was in an incredibly privileged position, hired by more than one EFL club as manager while able to hold down such a high profile in the media that he was invited onto Question Time. It’s not difficult to imagine how he saw himself as part of that gang, burying the hatchet with Keano, Wrighty and GNev, and then laughing and joking his way through a decades long post-football career during which he talks and people listen.
But what’s his best case scenario now? A far-right news channel’s provider of another two minutes of hate? (Let’s see if he gets that reference.) A crank’s YouTube channel for people who are far more interested in him for his hates than his insight on football? Perhaps he’s fine with this. Perhaps he considers them a completely adequate replacement for the lights of Soccer Sunday or leading a club into the Premier League as their manager. When you stop and think about how much he’s thrown away, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that his loss will be considerably greater than ours.