Whither the Premier League Bad Boy, that stock character who has long stalked the back pages of Her Majesty's press? Alas, it doesn't look good for this most two-dimensional of bogeymen, what with Joey Barton making his first appearance on the comment pages of the Times on the day it was revealed Craig Bellamy has ploughed £1.2m of his own money into the Sierra Leone football academy he founded in 2008.

To lose one handy stereotype may be regarded as unfortunate – and we all know what losing two looks like. Certainties such as Barton and Bellamy being wrong 'uns were the lodestar by which many hacks – and plenty of others – navigated their way through the perilous waters of modern association football. There was a time when no article about either player could omit a thunderous list of their misdemeanours, placed below whatever they'd just said and implying it was all of a piece.

Maddeningly for some, that is becoming harder to do. And given what we were schooled to think of him, how amusing that it is Barton more than any other player who has forced mainstream football coverage to admit more of complexity. Barton was always complex, as he explained in his Times column, which detailed his self-authored transformation from PLBB to steward of a million-plus Twitter followers, who have signed up for his thoughts on everything from history to philosophy to precisely how much of a tosser Neil Warnock is. "I was able to string a sentence together and debate issues that went beyond Nuts magazine," he explained, "and, yes, also capable at the time of mindless acts of violence."

And so with Bellamy, whose ITV documentary about his academy indicates a refusal to accept his designated place in the traditional order. One has to be wary of falling into the obverse trap of conferring immediate sainthood (hey – we do need our third expectations-busting bad boy, because three officially makes a media trend). But it has become distinctly more possible for players to take control of their own stories.

Even more interesting, though, is the sense that the hierarchy within the game itself is being shaken. In that context, for my money, Barton always felt like more of an antihero than a villain. That was almost certainly an affectation too far, given the likes of me were never exactly likely to be on the end of his lit cigar, but as someone who likes to waste their time concocting pointless Premier League theories, he always struck me more in the mould of comic book characters such as The Punisher – the type whose methods could be repulsive but possess a certain uncompromising allure.

I remember discussing this cobblers back in 2007, when a quite possibly apocryphal story had emerged from England's training camp. Barton had just received his first senior international call-up, and we lay our scene at breakfast, as Frank Lampard opts to move tables to avoid sitting near him. "It's all right," calls Joey. "I'm not going to nick your breakfast, you fat prick."

It is a tale that certainly has psychological truth – but whatever its literal veracity, Lampard didn't hide his distaste for the upstart Barton thereafter. Of course, it had been Joey who reflected publicly on the unbending arrogance of a so-called Golden Generation which imploded in self-regard at the 2006 World Cup, but still saw fit to swan back to Britain and unleash a wave of autobiographies on a seethingly shortchanged public. Or as Barton's more concise summary ran: "We got beat in the quarter-finals, I played like shit, here's my book. Who wants to read that? I don't."

He wasn't alone. Even the bargain bins couldn't shift those tomes, and where they ended up one can only speculate, given that pulped books have a variety of uses, from bitumen modifier to artificial snow pellets. Perhaps the new A3 tunnel road is bound with what used to be Ashley Cole's My Defence, or perhaps the white flakes which fell softly all over the Downton Abbey Christmas Special were once Lampard's Totally Frank. (As for the fate of the gold-plated Frank Lampard iPods which failed to ignite customer demand after the 2010 World Cup – some people never learn, do they? – they were genuinely melted down and recast as Hello Kitty iPods.)

But back to Barton's book review, which drew a most telling riposte from Lampard. "I don't think Joey Barton should talk about me and Steven Gerrard," he declared. "That probably says enough."

Oh, it did. It implied that football had an established and rigidly enforced hierarchy almost akin to an aristocracy, within which arrivistes such as Barton should know their place, and not have the temerity to proffer opinions about their eternal betters. "As a pro," ran Lampard's lofty conclusion, "and I know I'm talking about another player now, but you shouldn't talk about other players too much."

Perhaps one day Frank will get a call-up from the Times comment desk to discourse further on such outrageous etiquette breaches. Yet the story of the last couple of years has seen certain players ignoring such rules, to the delight of fans who pay to watch them. Who'd-a-thunk-it, but it turns out fans want to hear players' thoughts about all kinds of things, and after an era when access to players had become so limited as to be virtually pointless, things have changed in an exhilarating way.