Looking back, Joe Maguire can understand Jurgen Klopp’s confusion.
It was a wild and windy night at Exeter City’s St James Park in January 2016, an FA Cup third-round tie in the first few months of Klopp’s tenure at Liverpool. A very young Liverpool team trailed twice as Exeter came close to inflicting a famous FA Cup upset.
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Somewhere in the maelstrom of that evening, Klopp turned to his substitutes’ bench and told Maguire he was coming on for his debut.
Maguire felt ready. He had joined Liverpool’s academy at under-nine level and now, at 19, he was about to step onto the first-team stage when Klopp put his arm around the youngster’s shoulder and asked him: “Do you want to play centre-midfield or right-sided centre-back?”
Maguire didn’t know what to say. “I remember looking at him like this,” he says, shooting a panicked expression. “I just thought, ‘But I play left-back!’. But for some reason, I said centre-mid. Then Pep Lijnders (Klopp’s assistant), who had coached me in the reserves, came over and said, ‘No, centre-back! Joe’s never played midfield in his life!’.”
So he went on for his debut as a right-sided central defender, out of position and way out of his comfort zone. Liverpool’s youngsters held on nervously for a 2-2 draw and, if Maguire was relieved to get through it unscathed, so too was Klopp, who was still coming to terms with English football as well as some of his fringe players.
“I guess if you’re coming on on your debut, the ideal situation is when you’re 3-0 or 4-0 up on a good pitch at Anfield — whereas that night it was windy and the pitch like a mud bath,” Maguire says. “But you take it.”
He’s glad he did. The opportunity never arose again. Maguire was on the bench again for the replay at Anfield, trained with the first team on and off for two and a half years and joined them on a pre-season tour of Australia and south-east Asia, playing in front of huge crowds in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. But that FA Cup tie was his only competitive appearance for Liverpool.
There are no hard feelings. Maguire smiles as he casts his mind back to happy times training with Steven Gerrard, Philippe Coutinho and Sadio Mane, being told by Brendan Rodgers that he and his fellow youngsters had to join the senior players on a night out in Brisbane, which ended at 4am in the queue with Daniel Sturridge at McDonald’s and James Milner watching cricket on his phone.
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But the good times didn’t last, which is why, at the age of 27, Maguire is happy to declare himself a former professional footballer — starting his own businesses, taking flying lessons, visiting Paris Fashion Week and, even more improbably, backpacking around Colombia with friends. He is enjoying life for the first time in years, relieved to have escaped the “toxic” existence that overtook his career and left him “feeling like a slave to the job”, sitting in the dark, turning to alcohol, lost and alone.
Maguire was always realistic about his prospects at Liverpool. A year after his debut, he found himself “in that gap” between the first-team squad and reserves. He was “happy with life” but appreciated that, having turned 20, he needed to be playing elsewhere.
So in January 2017, he left Liverpool for Fleetwood Town, who were challenging for promotion from League One to the Championship. In an interview with Fleetwood’s website, Maguire declared himself “delighted”, excited by the club’s ambition — all the usual platitudes when a player signs for a new club.
There are photos of him smiling as he signed the contract, but he wasn’t smiling inside.
He had been at Fleetwood a matter of hours, spending time in the gym and canteen while waiting for the paperwork to be completed, and he already had a sinking feeling. Some of his new team-mates gave him the time of day but others seemed hostile. The manager, Uwe Rosler, was indifferent. There was no warm welcome and it shocked him.
“I can’t put my finger on it,” he says. “I was just thinking, ‘It’s not right, this place’ — not for me, anyway. It was a weird feeling, not something you want to feel when you’ve signed for the next three years. I remember driving home and thinking, ‘Hmmm. Regret that’. Almost from the start, I didn’t want to be there.”
It is quite the admission — and it is not something Maguire is suggesting is unique to Fleetwood. He also had spells at Leyton Orient (on loan from Liverpool), Crawley Town (on loan from Fleetwood), Accrington Stanley and Tranmere Rovers and says he encountered the same feeling. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, he felt a family environment at Liverpool, whereas elsewhere the atmosphere felt cold, fractious, dog-eat-dog.
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“At Liverpool, you had people like Jordan Henderson, who was a great role model, and all the lads were extremely humble,” he says. “They didn’t drive flashy cars or wear flashy clothes. They’d go out of their way to ask how you and your family were.
“You go down to the lower leagues and all of a sudden you see flashy cars — all leased, obviously. Lads on 10 times less money, but it’s flashy clothes, big egos, cockier. I remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, what’s gone on here?’.”
Maguire had never been one for conforming to the “typical footballer” stereotype. On the day we meet, he is wearing a chunky orange sweater and, with his baseball cap, stubbly beard, iPad, and warm, outgoing manner, has the air of a young entrepreneur — which is exactly what he is now with property and cleaning businesses.
As well as taking flying and sailing lessons, he enjoys painting. “My mum and my sister paint and it’s always been something I enjoy,” he says. “I did art at A level and I invest in artwork and stuff like that. I’ve come here straight from a gallery actually.
“I’ve always been into different things as well as football. My uncle flies planes, which is how I got into flying. I love hearing about other careers and industries because in the football world, you’re so sheltered.”
His range of interests attracted bemusement from some team-mates. “People would say, ‘You’re not fully into football, are you?’. I’d say, ‘What makes you say that?’. I just like other things as well.
“The fact is, we used to finish at 12pm or 1pm every day. A lot of players say, ‘That’s it. I need to go home and do recovery’. I always wanted to go out and do something. I didn’t want to sit around every afternoon and evening doing nothing. I’d rather learn another hobby.”
But he freely admits his enthusiasm for football faded. “Things crept in: complacency, problems with my punctuality, but that was all based on not wanting to be there.
“At Liverpool, I would get up at 6am, do 100 push-ups and have a protein shake. I was a madman, but I wanted to push myself. That was the culture there. When I went elsewhere, I would get up with this lethargic feeling. That culture wasn’t there and it affected my mindset.
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“I thought it would be really good for me, going down a couple of divisions. I thought the culture would be even more hard-working, everyone in it together, but it was just… less motivated people, people taking shortcuts, people having little chats in the corner, talking about the manager possibly getting sacked.
“It gets so toxic with players who don’t play and managers who don’t speak to them — or who speak to them like s*** without any respect. That’s where I clashed with managers. If someone speaks to me a certain way, I bite back.
“You come from Liverpool, where it’s one massive unit of players and staff who want to do well for each other, then you go somewhere else and it’s very different personalities, lots of cliques, and it just feels toxic.”
One question that comes to mind during the interview is whether the environment he describes at Liverpool might have been too perfect. Critics of the modern youth development system often say that, while the best academies are geared towards the tiny percentage who make it at Premier League level, they might not be the ideal grounding for the vast majority, who encounter very different environments — on the pitch and off it — below the elite level.
Maguire doesn’t buy it. “I never felt at home anywhere else after leaving Liverpool,” he says. “But I can’t blame Liverpool. You can’t blame something for being too perfect.”
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Maguire enthuses about the different coaches he played under at Liverpool: Steve Cooper (now manager of Nottingham Forest) and Alex Inglethorpe at academy level, then Rodgers and Klopp with the first team.
It wasn’t just the quality of the coaching, it was their way of dealing with players: Cooper’s and Rodgers’ instinct for knowing what made each player tick, Klopp’s knack of “making you feel good” even if it was “just his presence in the building, his charisma, his smile, hearing his laugh down the corridor”.
He didn’t feel the same warmth from Rosler at Fleetwood. There were times when he felt he was being singled out for criticism, such as in a 2-0 defeat at Oldham Athletic in only his third appearance, “where I wasn’t anywhere near at fault for anything”. Other than Carabao Cup and EFL Trophy matches, he didn’t play again until Rosler was sacked 10 months later.
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He was finally recalled to the starting line-up against Portsmouth by caretaker head coaches Barry Nicholson and David Lucas in February 2018. In John Sheridan’s first match in charge, at home to MK Dons, he was voted player of the match.
“I was buzzing,” he says. “I’ve still got the Champagne bottle, my first Football League man of the match award. I was thinking, ‘At last. I’m finally going to crack it’.”
Then, a week later, he was pulled out of the starting line-up shortly before kick-off against Plymouth Argyle.
He was told it was tactical. “Plymouth had a left-footed winger, so he (Sheridan) supposedly wanted a right-footer to stop him cutting in,” he says. “We won the game and straight away I’m thinking, ‘Right, I can see how this is going to go’. But I didn’t think that was me done for the rest of the season.”
He played just once more for Fleetwood, in a Carabao Cup tie against Leicester City six months later, before joining Crawley Town on loan. He played regularly but for a team struggling near the foot of League Two. He was more than 200 miles away from his family. On the pitch and off it, it was a slog.
Then came a move back up to League One, with Accrington Stanley, where he was in and out of the team in his first season and very much out of the picture in his second. And then on to Tranmere Rovers, where, with his enthusiasm fading almost immediately, he finally accepted that the way he was feeling was neither normal nor sustainable.
“My personal life had got worse,” he says. “I’d get massive mood swings — win, lose, playing, not playing. It got to the point where I had to ask my family to stop asking me about football. I didn’t want to tell them anything. I’d pushed away the girlfriend I’d been with for six years.
“I was living by myself, drinking in the evenings, not going into training the next day, saying I was ill. It got to the point where I was thinking, ‘This isn’t right, is it?’.”
How low did he feel?
“Looking back, extremely bad,” he says. “Sitting at home on your own in the evenings, drinking whisky. Why am I doing that? I never drink whisky. But I was sitting there with all the lights off, drinking whisky and bottles of wine in total silence.
“It’s hard to even say what my thoughts were. I wasn’t thinking anything.”
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Maguire realised he couldn’t suffer in silence any longer. He had sat in on various mental health and well-being sessions the Professional Footballers’ Association had laid on. Now he was calling its emergency helpline, asking if there was someone — anyone — who could help him.
He was immediately put in touch with a counsellor and assessed by a psychologist. “I started seeing her weekly and it was nice to speak to someone who could help me work out what was making me unhappy and what would make me happy,” he says.
The overwhelming conclusion — one he had been desperate to resist — was that football was the source of his misery.
“I always felt it was wrong to think about football in a negative way because it was all I’d ever wanted to do growing up and I know so many people would love to be a professional footballer,” he says. “I wasn’t having the career I wanted, but I would blame other things because I never wanted to accept football could be the reason.
“And that’s when I got to the point where I felt, ‘Let’s leave’. I only had a year at Tranmere anyway, so I would leave, take a few months out, enjoy the summer, and see how I felt. And if I didn’t miss football and if I started to feel happier in my life, then it would be clear that football was making me unhappy and I would walk away.”
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Looking at Maguire’s Instagram page, there aren’t many hints of his previous existence. He is still listed as an athlete and there’s one clip he posted in August of a goal he set up for Accrington against Salford City, along with some advice about crossing the ball, but otherwise, it’s flying lessons, clothes, the odd gym pic, photos from Paris Fashion Week and the Glorious Goodwood festival.
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Best of all are the pictures from his trip to Colombia with friends, travelling to Medellin, Cartagena and the Rosario Islands, visiting one of Pablo Escobar’s houses, playing football with local children, canoeing, swimming in the sea off the northern coast — “and staying in hostels, which I’d never done in my life”.
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It is an understatement to say he doesn’t miss football. Other than the odd kickabout with friends, he hasn’t played since he left Tranmere. He runs and works out every day and still watches football, but “I don’t crave it at all”.
Perhaps the most striking thing is when Maguire is asked to reel off a few highlights from his football career. His eyes light up when he talks about his years at Liverpool, but beyond that, “I can’t think of one”.
“That sounds a bit extreme,” he says. “I’ve got a few good friends I can take from it. There was my man-of-the-match award at Fleetwood, scoring my first senior league goal (for Crawley against Newport County), but… for years, from the day I left Liverpool to the last day at Tranmere, there weren’t many good days. Probably the best times were at Christmas when you went to visit the kids in hospital, which would make their day.”
Friends and family wondered if he was doing the wrong thing when he turned his back on football, but now they see the difference in him.
Maguire knows that, given the many perks of a professional footballer’s existence, some might struggle to relate to his experiences. “People imagine football must be the most perfect job in the world,” he says. “And it can be amazing. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get you down. It’s not as shiny as it looks. It’s not always a nice environment.”
He is glad to be out of it and he hasn’t looked back. “I wouldn’t have been able to have this conservation when I was still playing,” he says. “I’d be in my shell. I’d be shaking.
“But it’s weird. It’s like I can’t really remember that person. I feel so much healthier. Physically I’m in the best condition I’ve ever been. I’m smiling all the time. Even my skin is better. I’ve got my self-worth again. I’m in control of my life for the first time in years.”
If you would like to talk to someone having read this article, you can call the Samaritans in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123. Click here to contact them from the U.S.. Young Minds also provides support for young people across the UK experiencing a mental health crisis: Text YM to 85258.
(Top photo: Oliver Kay/The Athletic)