Footballer Rolando Aarons admits bar brawl affray charge
Newcastle United winger Rolando Aarons has admitted affray over a brawl in a bar's VIP area.
Bottles were thrown and weapons used when Aarons and his family and friends clashed with at least five men in Livello on Newcastle's Quayside.
The 22-year-old, his mother Joan Jacob, 46, and four others were charged with violent disorder.
However, prosecutors accepted guilty pleas to the lesser charge of affray.
Newcastle Crown Court heard the October 2016 fight happened at about 02:00 and lasted 90 seconds.
Aarons and his group had been celebrating a birthday.
CCTV showed the melee "blew up out of nowhere," Judge Edward Bindloss said.
A member of the other group was the first to throw an item, he added, and one man in that party suffered a "nasty" head injury when door staff intervened.
Aarons and his mother, both of Montagu Avenue, Gosforth, Newcastle, were charged along with his cousin Garfield White, 23, a serving prisoner formerly of Wordsworth Road, Bristol.
His friends Kallum Phillips, 23, of Kensington Park, Bristol, and Jamar Collins, 22, of Walker Close, Bristol, faced the same charge.
Action against White's sister Sabrina, 24, was dropped after it was accepted she had acted as a peacemaker.
The judge granted all defendants bail, except White, ahead of sentencing on 22 May.
Aarons, who was born in Jamaica and raised in Bristol, joined the club in 2012.
He suffered injury set-backs, though, and has been loaned out to Hellas Verona in Italy.