If there is one thing we know about Joey Barton it is that he won't go quietly when his latest slump into recidivism catches up with him and the Football Association remove him from the game until some point towards the end of the year. Barton is facing a ban of rare severity and you have to wonder whether the penny will finally drop for all the people who have indulged him.

The Queens Park Rangers midfielder had certainly taken a lot of people in before the most conclusive evidence yet that his reinvention as renaissance man was a deception. A pretty good one, in fairness, given that Barton can be charming and eloquent and hold his own in any company. But a deception, nonetheless.

He has been rumbled now and there will be little in the way of public sympathy when the disciplinary panel plays the video of his red card last weekend, sees the face of a man who has spent too long in the hurt business and concludes that someone this dedicated to violence merits one of the longer punishments ever handed out.

An elbow to the chin, a knee from behind and an attempted butt at Eastlands in Premier League's final round, together with a previous red card for another bout of unsolicited aggression, could mean a 10- to 15-game ban at Wednesday's hearing. Ten would take us to the end of October. Fifteen would bring us to December and, by then, who can say where he will have washed up?

Barton has already been moved out of Newcastle and Manchester City through the back door and it is clear now that QPR would get rid of him in a shot. After that, Barton has a real problem because the bottom line is there won't be many clubs queueing up for an £80,000-a-week serial offender.

Barton has certainly become a disappointment since the first time I met him in 2004 just as he was breaking into the City team. Everything seemed so much more innocent back then. Barton was unpretentious, streetwise and straight to the point. He was also courteous, generous with his time and without a hint of ego. He was mortified, for example, that another interview had carried the headline: "I'll be better than Keane, Gerrard and Vieira." Where he was from, he explained, he would hate to be seen as bigheaded or having ideas above his station. "In many ways, the wiry 21-year-old is a throwback to a different era," I wrote at the time. "In a game of inflated egos, declining moral standards and the depressing widening in the gulf between players and supporters, an hour in his company actually feels refreshing." Sometimes in this job there are things you read back that make you wince.

Soon afterwards the stories started to come back about the way Barton talked to staff at City. Then followed the first reports that he was dangerous. There was the argument with the YTS trainee that ended with Barton stubbing a cigar into the boy's eye. Then the pre-season trip to Bangkok when a 15-year-old Everton fan was slapped across the face and the journalists who witnessed it were shocked by the scale of Barton's temper and where it nearly took him. Very soon everyone in football knew Barton had a fuse like Tommy deVito's, Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas. Treat with caution. Don't, whatever you do, call him funny.

Then we came to City's end-of-season dinner in 2007 when Barton had started to think of himself as the most important member of the team only for Richard Dunne to win the player-of-the-year award. Staff at City are convinced this contributed to what happened two days later, when Barton attacked Ousmane Dabo from behind, punched him to the floor and then carried on hitting him even when he was unconscious.

Barton was already in prison by the time the court case came around, this time for raining blow after blow on a teenager in Liverpool city centre. Watching from the press benches at Manchester Crown Court, the stand-out moment was not the sight of a Premier League footballer being taken down in handcuffs, it was the people in the public gallery, sitting forward in their chairs, staring at Dabo on the opposite side of the room. They never took their eyes off him for a second.

Forgive me then for never fully going along with the Barton roadshow and all the talk of a reformed character, when you never had to wait too long before the next round of malevolence on Twitter or threat of menace. It is just that everyone is so pathetically grateful to see a footballer with a bit of personality these days, Barton was embraced as some kind of class experiment and broadsheet pin-up. Barton popped in for morning conference at the Guardian (charming, apparently), appeared on Newsnight and got a book deal, to be ghosted by a Times columnist. The working-class lad from Liverpool became a subject of fascination. Wasn't it great, his fan club said, to find someone who saw blandness as his enemy?

Well, yes, to a point. Football is littered with people who are as colourless as water. It is the way they are media trained: to see little and say even less. So thank heavens there will always be the odd rogue. It was just there was always going to be a time, between quoting Smiths lyrics and Googling Nietzsche, when Barton showed he is not as clever as he would like to think. "Why do people always want to solve any conflict with a fight?" he asked on Twitter. "As a pacifist, I find it incredible." How he must have laughed from behind his keyboard.

A personal theory is that Barton craves attention, maybe born out of insecurity. The violence is one thing, but it is made even more unappealing by the fact that his default setting is self-justification and denial. As for his abilities as a footballer, perhaps the best way to sum it up is that the fourth-worst team in the Premier League were looking to move him on even before his latest return to ignominy. Barton made more inaccurate passes, 490, in the opposition half than any other top-division player last season. Manchester United were linked with him last summer and Sir Alex Ferguson was bewildered. "What kind of manager do they think I am?" he asked of the newspaper that printed it.

All of which is a far cry from how Barton appears to see himself when he talks of being accomplished enough to play for England and excluded only because of the baggage he brings. There will be more of that, presumably, in his book. More spite and settling of old scores. You quickly learn with Barton it's never his fault. And for a while, the deception almost worked.