A former Liverpool defender who made one senior appearance for the club has stated he has no regrets about leaving the game at the age of 26.

Joe Maguire, a left-back by trade, made his single appearance for the Reds in a January 2016 FA Cup third-round fixture at Exeter City.

The defender departed the club on a permanent basis in 2017 to join Fleetwood Town, though he has stated he felt “regret” over the move after feeling out of place at the club shortly after arriving. He later gained EFL experience with Crawley Town, Accrington Stanley, and Tranmere Rovers.

Maguire found playing farther down the pyramid to be a “toxic” experience, and he decided enough was enough once his contract at Tranmere expired at the end of the 2021/22 season.

He has subsequently taken flying lessons, owned a property and a cleaning business, and earlier this year went backpacking around Colombia with friends.

“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,” Maguire said of his choice to end his career in the game. I wasn’t enjoying the career I want, but I blamed everything else because I refused to acknowledge football could be the reason.

“And that’s when I said to myself, ‘Let’s go.'” I just had a year left at Tranmere, so I’d leave, take a few months off, enjoy the summer, and then see how I felt. And if I didn’t miss football and started feeling happier in my life, it would be obvious that football was making me miserable, and I would quit.”

“I thought it would be really good for me, going down a couple of divisions,” he said of his experience after leaving Liverpool and descending to the lower leagues, and how this taught him he needed a way out of sport. I expected the culture to be even more hardworking, with everyone working together, but it was simply… fewer driven people, people taking shortcuts, people having small talk in the corner about the boss perhaps being fired.”