Joey Barton’s online grifting is disingenuous with apathy required to stop the libel lawyer’s wet dream

Back in November 1995, The Simpsons episode ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ aired for the first time. In it, there was a short story called ‘Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores’, where, during a lightning storm, giant characters from advertisements and store mascots all came to life and began to terrorise Springfield. The solution, put forward by an advertising agency, was for people to simply look away – because all that the animated store logos wanted was attention.

Nearly 30 years on, it’s time to put that same idea into practise in relation to the washed-up former footballer turned online grifter, Joey Barton. Once a man of limited footballing ability, his post-retirement career as an internet troll is serving only to prove that he’s even less talented away from a football pitch. As soon as the pseudo-intellectual well ran dry, all that was left was to transform into a libel lawyer’s wet dream.

On Saturday, Barton – a man who remains untroubled by the burden of integrity – spun the wheel of discrimination and landed on a homophobic opinion during Bournemouth’s 2-0 win over Arsenal. It was such a nonsensical and incoherent opinion that you’d have been forgiven for thinking it was generated by AI. The sentences were complete but the overall content lacked any sort of emotional intelligence to make it not seem like it was a paint-by-numbers bid for attention.

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It was like saying “I waited the fastest” or “her cooking tasted the loudest”.

As someone who doesn’t pay to use X, formerly Twitter, it’s unclear to me what interaction a post needs before The Lord Almighty, Sir Elon of Musk, will chuck a few magic beans in your direction – but what’s also clear is that, when payment is judged purely on interaction, suddenly reacting badly to discriminatory posts can be quite the money-spinner. Was it not Winston Churchill who said that an offensive tweet gets shared halfway around the world in the time it takes a wholesome tweet to get a few hundred likes?

Barton has dived headfirst into the hole of the unemployable. Untouched by the pundit-seeking broadcasters and unwanted by clubs on the hunt for a new manager, all that’s left is to suckle on the teat of the disingenuous opinion boob and glug down on the rancid milk of replies, quotes and reposts calling him a wanker. It doesn’t matter why people are reposting it; they are just because Big Daddy Elon will drop a lovely few cents into the bank account.

What he’s doing IS disingenuous. He’s on record in the past with directly contradictory opinions to those that he’s spewing in 2024 and, since the technology to provide a full personality transplant is yet to be developed, it’s probably fair to conclude that these are opinions he’s decided to have for money. He might believe them, he might not – but they pay and that’s all that matters.

And what’s left after that? The world isn’t put to rights by anybody shouting about what a colossal penis he’s been, it simply proves him right to do it — and he’ll do it again and again and again until, like Lisa Simpson and Paul Anka (for some reason) advised, people stop looking.

Not only does it help the likes of Barton to round up like-minded individuals, like some sort of Pied Piper but for arseholes, but it pollutes the lives of normal people who don’t want to be bogged down in such bile. It’s not nice for those people in whichever group is in Barton’s sights in his desperate pleas for attention to be reminded that there are people who would happily throw them under the bus for money, every time his latest tirade is shared repeatedly, like the bat-signal but for total wankers.

Quite rightly, people will question why so many words here have been dedicated to a man whose poison needs to be starved of oxygen. This needs saying and people need reminding not to inadvertently add fuel to the flames while trying to stick up for the people they want to stick up for – and at least this piece doesn’t add more to his wallet.

If you want to make football a more welcoming place for ethnic minorities, for women, or for the LGBTQ+ community, then the place to start is by not publicising racist, sexist, or homophobic material from people involved in the game. Shut Barton up by blocking him, ignoring him, and getting on with engaging with football in ways that can help your fellow supporters or are, at the very least, fun.

Now let us never speak of him again.