Richard Lee was born in Oxford in October 1982 and spent fifteen years as a professional goalkeeper, making around two hundred appearances and keeping goal in both the Premier League and League One. He signed for Watford in 2002 and stayed eight years, playing 110 times, with a loan spell at Blackburn Rovers along the way. England capped him at under-18 and under-20 level.
He joined Brentford on a free transfer in 2010, and it is that first season at Griffin Park that Graduation describes. It began badly enough that he called it a car crash: a poor pre-season, dropped by the manager, and cup football as his only route onto the pitch. What turned it was a penalty shootout against Charlton that December. He won four shootouts that season, taking Brentford into the fourth round of the League Cup and to the Football League Trophy final, and was voted the club’s Player of the Year. Then, in March, he dislocated his right shoulder — the same shoulder that had troubled him since 2005 — and missed both Wembley and the rest of the campaign. Thirty-three appearances, a trophy final watched from the stands, and a season that is a better story than most promotions.
He played 87 times for Brentford in all and collected a promotion medal in 2014. He retired at thirty-two, at the end of the 2014/15 season, because the shoulder had finally run out of patience, though he came back briefly for Hampton & Richmond Borough that November and again, for a single match, for Dunstable Town two years later. Across his career he saved eighteen penalties and lost only one shootout.
Much of what Graduation is actually about is the mental side of the job, which Lee argues is both the difference between goalkeepers and the part of the game least likely to be trained. A keeper’s errors are public and final in a way that an outfield player’s are not, and what separates one from another, in his telling, is how calmly and how consistently they handle the aftermath. He had to learn that about himself before he could use it.
Since retiring he has taken a media degree at Staffordshire University, funded by the PFA, and worked as a pundit and reporter for Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday. He is a director of the goalkeeper training franchise GK Icon, mentors young keepers through his own management company, set up The Goalkeepers’ Union, and co-wrote a second book, So, You Want To Become a Professional Footballer? He is also blunt with young players about what he learned the hard way: that football contracts are short, that retirement tends to arrive without warning, and that the time to prepare for the rest of your life is while you are still being paid to play.