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Joey Barton has told BBC Radio 5 Live he was expected to perform like a "Neymar, Messi kind of player" after joining Rangers, but said he had no regrets over his move to Scotland and no bad feelings towards anyone at the club. Barton, 34, ended his brief and ill-fated spell at Ibrox in November after being suspended following a training-ground row in the wake of a 5-1 defeat at Celtic but he says he has no bitterness over the way his high-profile summer move to Glasgow worked out. Although unable to discuss the incident and discussions which led to his exit under the conditions of his severance deal, Barton told BBC Radio 5 Live: "It was an opportunity I couldn't let pass. I would do it again. It's a great football club. It's a phenomenal place, it's completely unique. "The only regret I've got is not playing football now. No player wants to miss football when they're fit, especially not when you're 34 and you don't have another 10 years to play and you're watching Match of the Day and reading the papers and everyone else is playing football and you are like: 'I would really like to be doing that right now.' "My last game for Rangers was a defeat in the Old Firm at Celtic Park. Nobody wants to do that, nobody wants to play eight games for a club, you want to have more of an impact, certainly for the amount of backing the fans gave me and the belief they put in me and for the football club to get me there in the first place. So, incredibly disappointed. "I've got no issues with Rangers, Rangers is a fantastic football club. I have no issues with Mark Warburton, no issues with Davie Weir, no issues with anyone on the board. "Life is too short to look back and hold on to things and think, 'If I could have played that way, or done it that way, this would have happened.'" The former Manchester City, Newcastle United midfielder and once-capped England international questioned people's expectations of him when he moved to the Scottish Premiership. "The media were quite critical of me when I was up there," he said. "That's the nature of the industry when you're Joey Barton and you go and play for Rangers who are a massive club in Scotland. You're going to get criticism if you don't play fantastically well and I didn't play fantastically well there, albeit I only lasted eight games. "The difficulty for me lay in the fact that before I went up there they kind of built me into this Neymar, Messi kind of player, which I wasn't. "I'm a player that's never been blessed with an enormous amount of talent, speed, tricks. I'm somebody who has always served the higher purpose in terms of the team, always done well when that's been at the fore. I've never done particularly well when the onus has been on me to go on and create and do things. "Everyone was saying 'you've been caught out by the standard of Scottish football, you've looked down your nose at Scottish football'. I didn't. I knew what I was getting into." Barton, who has been training with former club Burnley, added: "I'm focusing on the future, I've still got that bit about me where I step back south of the border and have an enormous amount of credibility and people want me to come to the football club. "My phone has rung a number of times about where I'm going to be in January, so I'm lucky." Information from the Press Association was used in this report.
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