Despite some bold claims on his arrival, Joey Barton's time at Rangers did not live up to expectations, as the former Man City and QPR midfielder had parted ways with the Scottish club after just eight games.
The last of those eight games was a 5-1 drubbing at the hands of Celtic, and while Barton expressed that nobody wants to go out on a result like that, he claimed that the only regret he had from his time in Glasgow was the fact that he is not playing football right now.
At 34 years of age, Barton is not happy to missing action, although he did claim to have a number of options to return to playing in January.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Barton also claimed to have no issue with Mark Warburton, David Weir, or anybody at Rangers, but he is looking to move on to the next chapter of his football career.
He also added:
I was under no illusions, the media were quite critical of me when I was up there. 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.
If you're a journalist you wanted that Celtic-Rangers, Old Firm's back on the agenda. You wanted the toing and froing, you wanted the Joey Barton-Scott Brown because it was creating copy that was selling newspapers. You give a couple of sound-bites and they were away and running with it.
Barton also defended the idea of young coaches being trusted with managerial jobs, after former Rangers striker Kris Boyd was critical of the appointment of new Hearts manager Ian Cathro.
Interesting views on how coaching has changed, whatever you think about Barton as a player or a person, there is no doubt that he has a role to play as a pundit or analyst.
