Marvin Park: The Real Madrid player who was once on Tranmere’s books

Born to a Nigerian father and a South Korean mother, Park started his football journey with Sporting Ciutat de Palma in his native Majorca. Then his parents moved to England for work – settling just over a mile from Tranmere’s Prenton Park ground. It proved the perfect backdrop to his next steps in the game.

After joining the club in 2009, aged nine, Park spent two of his three years at Tranmere as an attacking midfielder or winger under the coaching of Neil Garnett, the brother of then-academy boss Shaun, the former Rovers defender.

“He was a shy, young little lad who did not speak much English but as soon as you saw him play you could tell he was different to all the rest,” said Neil Garnett.

“He had pace, technique, he could play with both feet and he was strong. Some players don’t look fast but seem to glide past people and that was what he was like.

“He was a mouse in training but when he got on the pitch he was a lion. He was fearsome. The way he played football was unbelievable and the total opposite of his personality.”

Park was part of a promising crop at Rovers that also contained Coventry City’s Declan Drysdale and Fulham’s England youth international Sonny Hilton.

And after a series of impressive displays, which included helping Rovers win the Keele tournament – one of the UK’s biggest international youth football competitions – Park’s reputation started to grow.

“His development was unreal. There was interest from Liverpool, Everton, Wigan, Blackburn and Manchester United. If he had stayed in England, the big clubs would have come and got him,” Garnett added.

West Ham’s Aaron Cresswell and Everton’s Tom Davies are recent examples of the success of Tranmere’s academy production line, with Dale Jennings also notably switching to Bayern Munich before drifting into non-league on his return to England.

However, despite Park’s “abundance” of talent, Shaun Garnett initially had reservations over how far he could progress.

“He would walk down on his own, sit on the coach on his own and you would welcome him to training and he didn’t say a word,” he said.

“People who don’t understand football wouldn’t get why being quiet is a problem. I played with Pat Nevin, who was a quiet lad, but Marvin just didn’t speak – that was something new to us.

“The standard at Tranmere has always been good but to go from here to Real Madrid – where do you hear anything like that?”