Rangers midfielder Joey Barton has been charged with betting on 44 football matches.PHOTO/Daily Mail.
GLASGOW, United Kingdom, Oct 6 – Joey Barton’s calamitous season at Rangers has taken another turn for the worse after he was hit with a Scottish Football Association charge for betting on matches.
Barton, 34, is accused by the SFA of placing 44 football bets between July 1 and September 15 this summer.
Sportsmail understands Barton is not alleged to have bet on matches involving his own club Rangers.
Only one of the games involved a match involving a Scottish club, when Barton placed a bet on Celtic’s Champions League trip to Barcelona last month. He had gambled on the Catalan club to have a substantial victory. Barca won the match 7-0.
The SFA’s regulations ban players from betting on any football match and the rules have been the same in England since August 2014.
Barton had spent the past two seasons in England under those regulations while playing for Queens Park Rangers and Burnley.
Last season, Manchester City defender Martin Demichelis received a fine in the region of £22,000 from the FA after betting on 29 matches in a three-week period. The games Barton gambled on are believed to have been in England or in European competition.
In his recently released autobiography, No Nonsense, Barton revealed that he became the ‘unofficial bookmaker’ at Liverpool’s Walton prison while serving a six-month sentence for common assault and affray in 2008.
Barton is due to return to training with Rangers on Monday after a three-week suspension following a training ground bust-up.
The player who was capped once by England, back in 2007, was sent home from training following an altercation that was reported to have involved team-mates and coaching staff.
The heated exchange featured captain Lee Wallace and midfielder Andy Halliday as well as manager Mark Warburton and coach David Weir.
The confrontation took place in the days following Rangers’ 5-1 defeat by Celtic in the Old Firm derby.
Barton will now return with this latest controversy hanging over him and he is likely to receive a ban of one or two matches from the SFA. Rangers declined to make any comment last night. Barton has until October 12 to reply to the allegation, with a hearing set to take place on October 27.
-By Daily Mail-
