A club statement on Joey Barton.

Newcastle have finally released a statement on the future of Joey Barton, and the general content of the statement is that the club will be making no comment on the future of Joey.

It's taken a few days for the club to add to the rather ridiculous and vague four line statement released on Monday detailing that the player had been transfer listed and had an asking price of £0 following on from a series of outbursts on the micro-blogging network 'Twitter', however in this statement there are signs of an agreement between the club and the player.

The club statement said:

"We understand the level of interest in the clubs decision to offer Joey Barton a free transfer."

"However it would not be dignified nor would it serve any useful purpose for at this present time for either the club or Joey to air their private issues on this matter in public."

The club and the player have important business to focus on over the next few days and both parties have come to an agreement that we will not comment further at this time."

Make of that what you will but it seems as though there has at least been some dialogue between the two camps, although obviously the result of that dialogue is quite clearly going to remain private until further notice.

Barton has been training with the reserves today and remains frozen out of the first team at Newcastle although whether this statement represents a thaw in the approach from either side or whether it's a clue that a transfer is not a million miles away from happening remains to be seen. We certainly won't be hearing about anything on

Personally I feel it's the latter but hope it's the former. The only problem with my hope is that both parties are not known to back down which is why I have some doubts about a ceasefire resulting in Joey staying on Tyneside.

There is interest in the player so I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens from here.