Brandon Barker interview: Why Trent Alexander-Arnold's 'toughest opponent' is without a club

Trent Alexander-Arnold has little doubt. His toughest opponent? That would be the quiet young man sitting opposite me in a pub in Stockport while the Liverpool vice-captain wrestles with the dilemma of whether to leave for Real Madrid to pursue his dream of winning the Ballon d’Or.

It is coming up to nine years since Alexander-Arnold was “destroyed” by a teenage Brandon Barker in an under-21 match against Manchester City at Anfield, an experience the England full-back recalls as more chastening than any he had endured before or since.

Barker, a winger blessed with wonderful feet, balance and an explosive change of pace, was the subject of growing excitement at Manchester City at the time, name-checked by chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak as one of a clutch of young players who could have a bright future under incoming coach Pep Guardiola.

He made his first-team debut for City in an FA Cup tie at Chelsea a couple of weeks later. “At that point,” Alexander-Arnold told Liverpool’s YouTube channel in 2023, “I’m thinking this kid is going to be the best player in the world.”

But Barker never made another first-team appearance for City. Nine years later, after spells with nine clubs, including Rangers in Scotland, Omonia Nicosia in Cyprus and most recently Morecambe in English football’s fourth tier, the former England Under-20 winger finds himself without a club, waiting for the phone to ring and wondering whether, at 28, he can find a route back into professional football.


Brandon Barker has been without a club this season (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

Barker has no trouble recalling that game at Anfield, scoring one goal, laying on another two and giving Alexander-Arnold the runaround from start to finish.

“I’m sure he’s had more difficult games, given some of the superstars he played against, but it’s nice of him to say it,” he says. “I’d never played against him before. He looked very young and he was very small and skinny, whereas I was already established at that level. But I was pretty good that day, to be fair.”

It was far from a one-off. Barker was flying. He had been regarded as a serious prospect since joining City’s academy at age seven. “But it was after I got my speed, when I was around 15 or 16, that I started to feel I had a real chance,” he says. “When you’re playing with older age groups and you’re handling it, you start to think you’ve got a real chance.”

Barker started training with the first team regularly. “Training with players like David Silva, Yaya Toure, an amazing experience,” he says. “They’re two of the best players I’ve ever seen — especially David, like, wow, unbelievable. But technically I always felt I could handle it. I’d played for England in all the age group teams. I felt I could handle anything.”

He joined City’s first-team squad for a summer tour of Australia and Vietnam in the summer of 2015, as well as several training camps in Abu Dhabi, where he was enthusiastically introduced to the club’s owner Sheikh Mansour as someone he would be hearing a lot more of in the years ahead. In meetings with the club’s technical staff, he was shown a career path — starting with a couple of loan moves — that they felt could take him into City’s first team.

“They had a plan in place for me,” he said. “It obviously wasn’t executed in a way everyone hoped, but they definitely had a plan for me.”

In the summer of 2015, Barker signed a five-year contract at City, a huge show of faith in a raw 18-year-old. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is to do well for City,” he told the club’s website, “and this contract gives me the time to realise all my hopes.”

A few months later, Barker joined Championships side Rotherham United on loan. He scored on his debut against Ipswich Town, a lovely shot curled into the far corner, and won the man-of-the-match award.

But Rotherham were bottom of the Championship, hardly the ideal environment for a teenager taking his first steps in senior football. He was restricted to a handful of brief appearances from the bench before City recalled him in December, feeling his development would be better served in Manchester.

For the rest of the 2015-16 season, the final few months of Manuel Pellegrini’s stint as manager, Barker regularly travelled with City’s first team. “I was on the bench a lot,” he said. “I was always close to coming on. But it’s hard to push players out of the way when they’re established internationals on god knows how much money a week. So I was travelling with the first team without playing — and that kind of hindered me because it meant I didn’t play as many games for the reserves (under-21s) as I probably needed at that time.”

His debut finally came in February 2016 as a second-half substitute in a 5-1 defeat at Chelsea in the FA Cup. The circumstances were not ideal, with Pellegrini resting most of his senior players before a Champions League match away to Dynamo Kyiv, but Barker says it was a “special moment” and he felt he “did OK” — well enough to be named in the squad for the match in Ukraine a few days later.

But his progress was thwarted in bizarre circumstances, relating to a break-in at his home a few weeks earlier. As well as his car and other valuables, his passport had been stolen — “which I didn’t realise until the day of the flight” — forcing him to pull out of the trip to Kyiv.

He didn’t train with the first team again for weeks after that. He was “devastated”, feeling as if the passport incident had been held against him. Pellegrini “did bring me back in the end”, he says, but he didn’t feature in another matchday squad.

The next three years were something of a blur: a pre-season under Guardiola at City (“Even after one session you learned so much and felt like, ‘I can see why this guy is the best’,”) followed by spells on loan to NAC Breda in the Dutch Eredivisie, Hibernian in the Scottish Premiership and Preston North End in the English Championship.

There were some notable highlights at Hibernian in particular and a superb solo goal for Preston against Leeds at Elland Road, but there were also a few injuries and a recognition that the big time that seemed tantalisingly close in his late teens seemed miles away by the age of 22.

He says he felt his hopes of making it at City were over when they signed Leroy Sane from Schalke in an initial £37million ($53m) deal in the summer of 2016. Sane was only nine months older but had already made 57 first-team appearances for Schalke and won three senior caps for Germany, even featuring in their European Championship squad earlier that summer. Both had been rated as outstanding teenage talents, but Sane was fast-tracked into the first team at Schalke and went from strength to strength, whereas Baker’s career stagnated.

“Timing and your career path are so important,” he says. “I had friends in the England (development) teams who — no disrespect — were nowhere as good but had played 100-plus games in the Championship by the time they were 19 and their careers have gone that way (gestures upwards).

“I’m not saying it’s easier to start lower down, because it’s different for every player and it’s all ifs, buts and maybes. But you need to play when your iron is hot.”

Inside the polarising world of youth football

In English football, there is no shortage of stories of teenage prodigies who shone brightly at youth level and then, for whatever reason, faded from view.

But Barker’s story is unusual because it is harder to categorise. It doesn’t revolve around an injury or a self-destructive lifestyle. It isn’t one of those “too much too soon” stories of a player blinded by the trappings of potential stardom.

We go back to a phrase Barker used earlier. For how long does Barker feel his iron was hot?

“I’d say it was hot for quite a while when I was at City,” he says. “But I had senior internationals in front of me and I felt I couldn’t really do any more at City in the reserves especially. I needed to play first-team football every week to kick on, which means going on loan.

“But then you go on loan and it can feel like the loan club doesn’t have your best interests at heart. You’re not their player, so they’re just trying to milk you. It’s different now, the way clubs manage the loans, but it’s difficult.”


Barker on loan at Oxford United in 2021 (Clive Mason/Getty Images)

It might sound like Barker is making excuses, but most figures in youth development would acknowledge the issues he raises — both regarding the loan system and, more generally, the challenges faced by homegrown players at big clubs where there is a constant drive to recruit not just ready-made talent or the first team but potential stars in that 18-21 age group. Pathways to the first team can become almost impossibly congested.

At the same time, Barker admits he failed to make the most of some of those loan moves and the opportunity that followed when he joined Rangers in the summer of 2019.

He talks enthusiastically about certain aspects of the Rangers experience — “a phenomenal football club”, “you don’t realise how big the club is until you get there” — but he admits he didn’t make anything like the kind of impact he expected to.

On paper, he was part of the squad that won the Scottish Premiership in 2021, denying Celtic a record-equalling 10 in a row. But he started just four league matches that season. He was on loan at Oxford United when Rangers were crowned champions. Midway through the following campaign, his contract at Rangers was terminated by mutual consent.

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“I was buzzing for the boys,” he says. “But… there were difficult moments. I would play a game and feel like I’d done enough to stay in and then I wouldn’t play for the next month. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the manager (Steven Gerrard). We actually got on. But he just mustn’t have fancied me as much as when he signed me. There were times when I didn’t do enough — in games, especially.”

He performed well at Oxford, but their defeat by Blackpool in the League One play-off semi-finals denied them promotion and, with it, the chance to sign Barker from Rangers. His next stop, at Reading on a short-term deal, was a nightmare. He had been there only three days when coach Veljko Paunovic was sacked. If he needed time and a new start to build up his match fitness and get his career back on track, Reading, fighting for their lives in the Championship under former England captain Paul Ince, was not the place.

A free agent in the summer of 2022, he moved to Cyprus, joining Omonia, signed by Neil Lennon, who had managed him at Hibernian. Again it started well, with a goal away to Gent to help them through to the Europa League group stage.

But Lennon was sacked two months later. Lennon’s replacement, Yannick Ferrera, picked Barker regularly, but only lasted three months. Ferrera’s replacement, Sofronis Avgousti, made sweeping changes and Barker was out in the cold again. His iron was no longer hot and a bright future was far behind him.

A short-term deal with Morecambe, in League Two, brought the promise of a fresh start and a chance to build his career back up. But after two appearances, Barker suffered a serious hamstring injury in training. “It came completely off the bone and required surgery,” he says. “A real sickener.”

That was just over a year ago. It killed Barker’s hopes at Morecambe. He left when his contract expired at the end of last season and, while he has fully recovered from his hamstring injury, he is yet to find a new club.


Barker playing against Manchester United in a Europa League group game in 2022 (AFP via Getty Images)

At this point, you would be forgiven for worrying that Barker’s story might be about to take a dark turn, whether a tale of unfulfilled potential might become a tale of woe.

Happily, that is not the case. He says there have been “difficult moments”, particularly in the last year or so. “But at the same time I feel blessed,” he says. “Not many people from the estate where I grew up (in Monsall, Greater Manchester) have had these experiences and opportunities.”

A quiet, happy-go-lucky nature can indeed be a blessing. But in professional sport, it attracts suspicion, particularly when seen in conjunction with a rare talent. From the very start, at academy level, coaches have challenged Barker, asking whether he really wants it enough.

As far back as 2020, when he was Rangers, some of his former coaches questioned in this article in The Athletic whether he would fulfil his talent.

Former City academy director Jim Cassell said, “He is a unique talent, but we see a lot of boys like Brandon who don’t reach the level that we hoped they would reach and that is because we don’t continue their development once they go past a certain period.” By “we”, he meant coaches and the football industry in general, so fixated on short-term results rather than long-term improvement.


Baker celebrates scoring the sixth in Rangers’ 8-0 win against Hamilton Academical in November 2020 (Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

Another coach, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, said that he felt Barker lacked self-belief and wondered whether he might fare better in behind-closed-doors matches during Covid-19-enforced restrictions.

But several of Barker’s best moments and best performances have come in high-pressure games or in hostile atmospheres. He says self-confidence has never been an issue. In person, he comes across as placid, easy-going — and maybe that has been more of an issue.

“A lot of managers have said that to me,” he says with a sigh. “That’s just the way I am, unfortunately. I’ve never been able to change it. My old agent used to pepper me every week about it: ‘You need to look angry! Stiffen your body up!’.

“But it’s something I’ve never been able to change. I’m a laid-back person. I’ve always had that label — ‘too laid-back’, ‘too chilled out’, ‘doesn’t want it enough’ — but I’ve been playing football since I was seven. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s nothing to do with an ‘attitude’, so to speak. My attitude to football is spot-on.

“I’m never going to be the type of person who two-foots someone. I’m just not like that. I’m never going to be that person. People want you to change, but it’s difficult. I just wanted to be myself. I almost wish I could be different personality-wise if it would have shut people up and given me a better career.”


Barker playing for England Under-20s in 2015 (Tony Marshall/Getty Images)

Since leaving Morecambe at the end of last season, still suffering from the effects of that torn hamstring, Barker has been in limbo. He still regards himself as a professional footballer, but more than a year has passed since he last played professionally.

He is grateful for the Professional Footballers Association’s “elite rehabilitation” programme, which has enabled him to recover and train at St George’s Park. At other times, he has trained alone in parks in south Manchester and enjoyed kickabouts — casual by arrangement, but competitive by nature — with a group of ex-pros including former City players Joleon Lescott and Stephen Ireland.

At times over the past seven months, he has wondered how on earth he had got to this point: without a club at 28, unsure whether he will get another chance to relaunch a career that promised so much.

The January transfer window was a sobering experience. There was interest from some clubs in the English Football League, but nothing crystallised in the way he hoped. Budgets are tight at that level and clubs want a player who can hit the ground running. When you have been off the treadmill for a year, it is hard to find a way back on.

As a free agent, he can still sign for a club. He was initially reluctant to drop into the fifth-tier National League, but he is ready to consider anything now.

Money, he says, is not important. That first professional contract he signed at City as a teenager was substantial enough to bring him some financial security — and he was sensible enough not to blow it.

“I’ve never been too bothered about money,” he says. “One goal I had when I started was to help my mum and dad buy a very nice house. I was lucky enough to be able to do that. Me and my family have completely different lives now from when I was growing up, so I’m grateful for that.

“Setbacks happen. I’ve been through a lot, but there are footballers who have been through more setbacks than me. I’ve just got to keep trying and giving it everything I’ve got until I can’t do it anymore. I just want to play.”

(Top photo: PA Images via Getty Images)



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