Joey Barton backs Kevin Keegan’s view on female players talking about men’s football

The Bristol Rovers manager took to social media to support the former England boss after his recent comments

Bristol Rovers manager Joey Barton has tweeted his apparent support for Kevin Keegan’s assessment that he doesn’t enjoy female footballers talking about men’s football.

The former Newcastle, Fulham and England national team boss was talking to an audience in a Bristol event recently and made the comments saying he doesn’t like to “listen to ladies talking about the England men’s team at the match because I don’t think it’s the same experience. I have a problem with that.”

Keegan’s comments drew ire from support groups and female fans, but Barton took to X/Twitter to issue a terse few lines of support, seemingly in agreement with Keegan’s sentiment that former Lionesses and their peers shouldn’t be joining in the assessment of men’s action.

“Kevin Keegan. Ballon D’or winner 1978. England manager. He’s bang on,” Barton wrote on social media.

Keegan had insisted he was a fan of women’s football in general and backed the presenters themselves as being of the highest calibre - Gabby Logan was singled out by Keegan at the time as a top example.

“The presenters we have now, some of the girls are so good, they are better than the guys. It’s a great time for the ladies,” he added.

“But if I see an England lady footballer saying about England against Scotland at Wembley and she’s saying, ‘If I would have been in that position I would have done this,’ I don’t think it’s quite the same. I don’t think it crosses over that much.”

Keegan added he saw it as “a great time for the ladies’ game” in general and that the standard of play when he visited the Lionesses while England manager was higher than he had expected it to be.

Barton has his own long history of making headlines, from altercations on the pitch and in dressing rooms as a player to more recent episodes as a manager. Last year he told the FA to “stop rewarding failure” and sack Gareth Southgate from the England national team job, while across 2021 and 2022 he was cleared of assault against both another football league manager and against his wife, the latter after a judge ruled he could not have a fair trial because prosecutors would not call the alleged victim to give evidence.

Several years ago Barton, then Fleetwood boss, made a comment saying women’s football was essentially a “different sport” and should be tailored accordingly with smaller balls and goals, to avoid it remaining “an inferior product”.

More recently, he was reported this season to have called one of his own players at Bristol Rovers an “idiotic young boy” for contributing to conceding a goal while injured, insisting his team needed to remove such “weak, feeble-minded individuals” to achieve promotion.