How is Joey Barton funding his war with the British legal system?

Blink and you’d have missed the 80-word statement Joey Barton tweeted last week, a few days after he was spared jail for an orchestrated campaign of online abuse.

His appeal against that criminal conviction was ‘now formally underway’ he declared to the world, proclaiming he was making a stand for free speech. Barely 1,000 people retweeted this – miniscule by high profile ex-footballer standards – and attempts by various Barton followers to tag Elon Musk into what the 43-year-old insists is a state-sponsored conspiracy all came to nothing. Musk didn’t respond.

Undaunted, Barton read out his tweet again this week at the top of his podcast Common Sense with Joey Barton in which he appeared wearing a T-shirt featuring an image of himself in shades above the words ‘A so-called criminal opinion’. Someone suggested they could sell this range as merchandise.

It is the second time this year that Barton has declared he is appealing a criminal conviction, having done the same when found guilty of kicking his wife in the head, and with lawyers indicating to Daily Mail Sport that the process could cost at least £40,000 each time, his mounting legal payouts and costs are draining what appear to be rapidly diminishing levels of personal wealth.

In the Liverpool Crown Court case, where he was handed a six-month suspended jail sentence for attacks on Eni Aluko, Lucy Ward and Jeremy Vine, Barton inserted himself into a list of high-profile celebrities, including Johnny Depp and Rebekah Vardy, who have had to meet the punishing legal costs of a libel case. Vine and Aluko have both won their libel cases against him.

But Barton has a declining social media profile (2.5million compared with 2.9m two years ago), a very modest podcast audience, and a toxic reputation which will make advertisers reluctant to touch him. The size of his imminent libel pay-out to Aluko has not been disclosed but, taken with the £600,000 he had to pay Vine, it could take the damages payable for his X outburst to over £1million.

The judge in the criminal case was told by Barton’s barrister that his personal wealth ran into ‘millions’. Yet the company he set up to run his commercial work, Joey Barton Promotions Ltd, shows liabilities – unpaid financial obligations – exceeding its assets by £76,273, according to documents lodged at Companies House two weeks ago.

That’s a financial situation £10,000 worse than a year earlier. If creditors pressed him for payment, the firm’s solvency could be tested. The company bank balance shows Barton to have no cash at hand. He is running a £16 overdraft.

There may be other sources of income for Barton, who lives in Widnes, Cheshire. His football career did provide some potential financial security into retirement. He earned around £60,000 a week for three years at Newcastle United (£9million), £35,000 a week for three years at QPR (£5.5m) and probably the same at Burnley, for whom he was one of the stand-out players in their promotion to the Premier League in 2015-16.

The big money for an average Premier League player like him would come in sign-on fees, when there is no transfer fee because a player is out of contract. That sum could have been anything from £1m to £8m when he left Newcastle for QPR in 2011. With other earnings, he will probably have earned £30m from his playing career and with investments, could have retired with £40m.

Barton has a well-documented gambling addiction, which saw him banned from the game for 13 months and fined £30,000 in 2017, though whether losses ate into his cash pile is unknown.

He will have picked up money from his sacking in 2023 by League One side Bristol Rovers, who could have paid him £300,000 by showing him the door two years before the end of his contract.

But the events of the past few months – including evidence in court that he left two women in fear of their personal safety and tweeted about one of them, Aluko, in a racially aggravated way – render him unemployable and dependent on vanishingly small media earnings to mount a bizarre war on the British legal system.

He has certainly invested in his podcast – telling the court last month that he was out ‘trying to set up a podcast studio’ when Cheshire Police officers first arrived to question him about his X abuse. But its 60,000 YouTube subscribers make it niche at best, compared with brands like The Overlap, with its 1.5m subscribers and The Rest is Football with 450,000. The pod attracts an estimated 2,000 listeners a week, with very few ads, and that number will be tested by Barton expressing some very strange beliefs at the mic in recent weeks.

He undertook a signature interview, run across several shows, with David Icke, the conspiracy theorist best known for his claim that the world is secretly controlled by shape-shifting reptilian aliens disguised as humans.

He has also spoken this week of how he has found a ‘higher power’ by being off the drink. ‘I haven’t had a bevvy now in 17 days, or something (and I’ve) tapped into a higher power,’ he said. ‘Some people argue it’s AI. Some people argue it’s God. Whatever it is to you, tap into the higher power.’ 

His football talk has included a description of Liverpool’s Alexander Isak as a ‘mercenary whore’ and a questioning of why Vincent Kompany played for Belgium when his father is from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

If this is the platform Barton is basing his future income on, then he has his work cut out. Vine told Daily Mail Sport that Barton’s pleas to his followers for cash to fight the libel case provided hints that his money might be running out.

‘He was saying, “We’re locked and loaded. We’re ready to go. I’ve got deep pockets”,’ Vine reflected.  ‘But at the same time, he was appealing to all of his followers to give him money. And then he also says, “Your money will go to the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital”. It was baffling. Either he needed the money for the case, or he didn’t. I did have a sense of a very disturbed soul.’