What happened to Marcus McGuane, the English teenager who joined Barcelona in 2018?

Football Club Barcelona is not a place synonymous with footballers from England.

The last player from English shores to succeed at the club was Match of the Day Host Gary Lineker.

He joined the Catalan side from Everton in 1986 and enjoyed three fairly successful years at Camp Nou, famously scoring a hat-trick against Real Madrid in El Clasico.

It’s been over 30 years since an Englishman made it big at Barcelona, although one man tried to bring an end to that drought in 2018.

Marcus McGuane joined the Blaugrana’s B team from Arsenal as a teenager that year and there was hope he would follow in the footsteps of Lineker.

So, how did the Greenwich-born midfielder’s Barcelona adventure pan out? Sadly, not great…

The former England under-19 player hit the ground running when he touched down in Catalonia.

He received his senior debut in the Spanish Super Cup a month after arriving and quickly became a mainstay in the B team’s starting XI under Gerard Lopez.

But when Lopez was given the boot following a string of poor results, things went horribly wrong for McGuane.

Credit: Marcus McGuane

New manager Francisco Garcia Pimienta preferred local talent in the form of Riqui Puig and Alex Collado, which resulted in McGuane being banished from the squad.

“I felt the impact straight away,” McGuane said in an interview with iNews, per Goal. “(Pimienta’s arrival) happened on a Thursday before a game. We were travelling on the Saturday and I wasn’t even in the squad. It was a bit of a shock. After that it was tough. I never had the same feeling that I had during those first few months.”

Pimienta clearly wasn’t a fan and often deployed McGuane as a winger rather than in his natural midfield role on the rare occasions in which he played