Last week, Joey Barton issued a brief 80-word statement on Twitter, coming shortly after he avoided a jail sentence for orchestrating a campaign of online harassment. His message, which announced the launch of his appeal against the criminal conviction, was framed as a defense of free speech. However, the tweet gained minimal traction, with fewer than 1,000 retweets—a surprisingly low figure for a former high-profile footballer. Attempts by his followers to involve Elon Musk in what Barton, 43, claims is a state-sponsored conspiracy were ignored, receiving no response from Musk.

Barton remained undeterred and reiterated his tweet at the beginning of his podcast, Common Sense with Joey Barton. During the episode, he sported a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of himself wearing sunglasses, accompanied by the slogan “A so-called criminal opinion.” There was even a suggestion to turn this design into merchandise.

In a case at Liverpool Crown Court, Barton received a six-month suspended sentence for attacking Eni Aluko, Lucy Ward, and Jeremy Vine. He has likened his situation to those faced by high-profile figures like Johnny Depp and Rebekah Vardy, who have dealt with the hefty legal costs of libel cases. Notably, both Vine and Aluko have secured victories in their libel suits against him.

Despite his defiance, Barton’s influence on social media is waning. His follower count has decreased from 2.9 million two years ago to 2.5 million now, and his podcast audience remains relatively small. Moreover, his controversial image makes it challenging to attract advertisers. The exact amount he must pay Aluko in the libel settlement remains undisclosed, but alongside the £600,000 owed to Vine, the total damages from his outburst are expected to exceed £1 million.

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.

Joey Barton leaves Liverpool Crown Court after being found guilty of online harassment – but he is launching an appeal which will come with sizeable costs 

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 shows liabilities 

Barton attends Westminster Magistrates’ Court with his wife Georgia in January – he was found guilty of assaulting her two months later

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.

The size of Barton’s imminent libel pay-out to commentator Eni Aluko has not been disclosed – but it will be sizeable

Barton was ordered to pay Vine £600,000 in libel damages after the former footballer’s online attack

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.’