Jason McAteer joined Off The Ball to reflect on his career in football and the decision to leave Liverpool that still bothers him to this day. 

Having had to wait until he was 20 to make his breakthrough in professional football, that Jason McAteer would cost Liverpool £4.5 million only three years later is indicative of his startling ascent once he had got his foot in the door.

The team he supported as a boy, it is perhaps less surprising that he considers his departure from the club in 1999 a mistake to this day.

In conversation with Off The Ball, Jason McAteer, who represented the Republic of Ireland in 52 games, revisited the decision, his poor relationship with Gerard Houllier and what he believes he would now do differently.

"If I look back, I should have stayed to fight for my position and prove him wrong," admitted McAteer with over 20 years hindsight. "I like proving people wrong, but that was one of the times I didn't do it.

"That is probably one of the real regrets I have."

Jason McAteer with manager Roy Evans at Anfield after signing for Liverpool in a £4.5m deal from Bolton Wanderers.

Jason McAteer's trouble at Liverpool began with the arrival of Gerard Houllier as a joint-manager with the incumbent Roy Evans.

Predictably ill-fated, by November 1998, a matter of months after the Frenchman's arrival, Evans, who had taken up a coaching role at the club under Bill Shankly in the early 1970s and been there ever since, left the club. Ronnie Moran, who had first played for Liverpool seven years before even Shankly's arrival and, like Evans, remained within the club in various guises thereafter, similarly disappeared.

"Ronnie was released and a lot of the lads were very disappointed with how that came around," acknowledged McAteer in hindsight. "Gerard Houllier had come in and obviously the club were moving into the noughties.

"Liverpool was still a very traditional club and he just wanted to take it in a different direction. Once Roy had gone then the boot room had kind of died off."

At a time when the French influence over English football was growing, McAteer didn't see himself fitting in with Gerard Houllier's more conservative playing style.

"I just didn't fit for Gerard, but this was my club," he stated. "I'd been there for four years and we'd been playing really good football. We'd been knocking on the door of winning the title and I didn't feel like we were too far away.

"But he took the club in a totally different direction and I felt that I needed to play to keep my Ireland career going. Mick [McCarthy] wanted players playing week in, week out."

A player who had caught the eye of Brian Kidd at Blackburn Rovers, when Liverpool agreed a fee of £4 million with the Lancashire club toward the end of the 1998-99 season, McAteer decided that it was time to go.

Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier organises training.

Despite what he may have perceived at the time as Liverpool's eagerness to move him on isn't as clear two decades removed, however.

"We were training up at Kirby and that's about a 20 minute drive from Melwood," he recalled of the immediate days after the transfer had been agreed but the move uncompleted. "Gerard told me to get in the car with him and, I'll be honest, he tried to get me to stay.

"I just remember asking him at the end of the conversation if he could guarantee me first-team football and he just went, 'No.' So, I went and had a think about it."

In the end, for the betterment of his international career primarily, Jason McAteer decided against staying to fight for his place and joined a Blackburn Rovers side that would be relegated later that season.

"I didn't like him as a manager," he admitted of Houllier and the likelihood that things wouldn't have worked out if he had remained at Liverpool under the Frenchman. "As a fella, he's alright, ya.

"I wouldn't bring him round for Christmas dinner, but he was just more of a school-teacher kind of manager. He'd shout at you if you did something wrong and call you out in front of the other players.

"He was very strict and I always just play my best football under man-managers. I love them to bits, and will run through a brick wall for them."

You can watch Jason McAteer's interview in its entirety here. 

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