City sensation Bytyqi forced to retire at just 22

LONDON: Manchester City starlet Sinan Bytyqi has retired aged 22 due to a heart problem.

The midfielder – on loan with Holland’s Go Ahead Eagles – quit just months after Etihad boss Pep Guardiola offered him encouraging words for his career.

Bytyqi, who fled war-hit Kosovo with his parents as a baby, has now been made a City loan scout.

The Kosovo Under-21 ace told Daily Mail how his life changed late last year at training – just after he had been named in the Dutch topflight’s team of the week.

Bytyqi was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease that enlarges part of the heart, preventing it from working properly.

He said: “I went in and there was the manager, the coaches, the physios.

“I thought, ‘what’s going on here?’. It was weird.

“The manager pulled out a piece of paper and told me that they had found something on my annual heart monitoring test in Manchester and I had to go back to England.

“He also said it is the kind of condition that stops you from playing professional sport.

“They said if I continued playing I would have a 4% chance of my heart stopping and that if I stopped, that would be 1%.

“I’ve known since I was a child that there was something a little different.

“But something like this only shows itself when you are fully grown.”

Bytyqi has now switched to an off-field role but admitted: “All I ever wanted to do was play football.”

That dream had led to him leaving his family behind, aged just 14, as he moved from Klagenfurt to Austrian capital Vienna.

City spotted him played for Austria Under-19 squad.

And he says City’s then-Elite Development Squad Patrick Vieira was a huge inspiration on what he hoped was the path to the fist team.

Bytyqi said: “Patrick was unbelievable. It was tough when I first got here but he made a massive difference.

“Little things – he saw some players waiting for a taxi once after training and took them home himself.

“When my family came over, he took us all out for dinner to an Italian in town.” — The Sun, London