Former Fortuna player Cantwell wanted to quit due to 'barbaric' Norwich

Cantwell was regarded as a major talent and came through the youth academy of Norwich. He was an English youth international and impressed as a loanee at Fortuna Sittard in the second half of the 2017/18 season. He played 129 matches for The Canaries, including 45 in the Premier League. It was all the more painful that he was no longer welcome at the first-team trainings last season. According to Cantwell, he was demoted to the reserves shortly after he had told the club about his struggles with processing the death of a family member.

"What hurts me the most is that I got stabbed in the back when I made myself vulnerable by being open. I was told to go to the U-23s because I wasn't mentally right at the time. I played for the U-23s when I was sixteen. That I ended up back there after all I had done for the club, when it wasn't about gaining match fitness... There were moments when I sat at home and thought I wanted to quit. I cried and wanted to quit football entirely," Cantwell says in the podcast The Beautiful Game.

In the interview, he describes Norwich's treatment of him as "barbaric". "It felt like they took away all the respect and my achievements. They thought I was different. They no longer recognized that I had been trained by the club itself and had won two Championship titles with Norwich," says Cantwell, who eventually reached out to club owner Delia Smith to tell his side of the story. Norwich agreed to a transfer to Rangers this past January. Cantwell started in the Champions League play-offs this season, playing against PSV twice.