Welcome back to Old Gold, our Sunday email spilling forgotten stories from the past.

It's Christmas time, and Joey Barton is running his mouth off. So really there was only one choice for this week's Old Gold.

It’s Joey’s sick and twisted outing at the 2004 Man City Christmas party…

FOOTBALL

🚬 Bare-chested, demeaned, and dangerous

It’s Christmas party season, which for most of us means a couple of mulled wines, a gaudy festive jumper, and and ill-advised hook-up with a co-worker.

But Premier League stars have a habit of toasting Jesus’ birth with sliiightly more debauched antics...

Liverpool’s 1998 Christmas do ended with Jamie Carragher smothering himself in whipped cream and shagging strippers, as a “stunned” Michael Owen cowered in the corner.

And then there’s time time John Barnes got into the festive spirit by dressing up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

One Newcastle United Christmas party turned sour when the players exchanged Secret Santa gifts, and jailbird Duncan Ferguson was given a t-shirt showing him behind bars.

German midfielder Didi Hamann, meanwhile, unwrapped a copy of Mein Kampf…

And who could forget last year, when sleazebag extraordinaire Silvio Berlusconi promised his Monza players “a coachload of whores” if they beat Milan or Juventus. A month later, they beat Juve 2-0.

But those scandalous shindigs all pale in comparison to Man City’s party in 2004, when a certain Joey Barton decided to stir the pot.

For his fancy dress outfit, Barton donned a garish tracksuit, white wig, gold jewellery and cigar as the not-yet-disgraced-but-still-very-suss DJ Jimmy Savile.

Years later, after Savile was exposed, Barton claimed the costume was in fact John Lennon…

After inhaling masses of free booze, the Man City players concocted their own party entertainment: setting fire to each other’s costumes. Barton soon got in on the act, targeting fresh-faced youth player Jamie Tandy.

Deciding to give the mouthy Scouser a taste of his own medicine, Tandy found himself a lighter and set fire to Barton’s costume, which to be fair was probably doing Joey a favour.

After ripping off his burning shirt, Barton recalled standing “bare-chested, demeaned, dangerous”.

“I’ve been bred to bite back, to take revenge,” he explained in his autobiography. “I thought it would be a fantastic idea as a payback to him to stump the cigar out on the back of his head. A burn for a burn.”

Although that’s not quite what happened… Barton instead stubbed out his lit cigar in the youth team player’s eye. Barton claims Tandy simply turned around at the wrong time.

As Tandy legged it to the toilets to tend his burns, Barton was confronted by the youngster’s brother. Joey punched him four times, and when Tandy emerged half-blinded from the bathroom, Barton decked him too.

Already in manager Kevin Keegan’s bad books after inciting a 10-man brawl during a pre-season friendly, Barton was handed a whopping fine of six weeks’ wages and made to enrol on an anger management course.

Over a decade later, Tandy blamed his career hitting the skids on the incident with Barton. But Joey was quick to defend himself: “He was a gobshite long before I went anywhere near him”, he explained.

And to rub salt in the wound, he delivered a damning verdict as to why Tandy never made it. “He was overweight and lacked talent.”

That’s it for today… still want more?

🎙️ They torched cars, kidnapped caretakers, and hospitalised each other with dressing room beatings. Meet the Crazy Gang on The Upshot podcast.