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Robert Green has made more saves per game than any goalkeeper in the top flight so far this season, but the 34-year-old clearly enjoys being busy.
As well as having two young children to look after, Green began studying for a three-year Open University degree in business management (sport and football) last month.
Green sees his long-term future as being involved in the business of running a football club. It’s a very different prospect to the well-trodden path of a coaching or media role. So what makes him keen on being a suit?
“I wouldn’t say ‘suit’,” Green counters. “But it’s something that I’ve always said: once I’ve finished playing, my time on the pitch is done. It would be a shame to have learned so much and not add something back.
"I don’t know... It’s a bit arrogant to say I could change things, but you learn a lot and I’ve naturally taken an interest in where clubs are run well, where clubs can maybe improve and what key things you’re looking for.
“There’s not too many chief executives who have played football at a professional level. So, like many owners, they’ll have come into football and they will come straight in as a chief exec. It’s so different. It’s so crazy compared to other businesses, that sometimes it might take someone with that experience [of the professional game] to go: ‘I can help.’”
Green recently told The Guardian that the outside view of football is different to what goes on inside. He is happy to expand on that with Sport magazine.
“The things people look for on and off the pitch are very different,” Green explains.
“As players you look for certain things, such as consistency. If you were to say: ‘What do you want from your team-mates?’, I’d say I want them to stay fit; I want to be able to rely on guys who will give me seven out of 10 every week. Maybe an eight.
Whereas fans might say: ‘I need flair, I want someone to excite me.’
“So it’s just on the basic premise of what they look for. But then the actual day-to-day running of a club is very different to how it is perceived.
"Not a lot happens. Men come into work, train and go home. But because you’re living it every day, then on Saturday you go and play, it’s a different emotion to what a fan has. For fans, it’s a big release on a Saturday.
"They look forward to a game on a Saturday. That’s their release.”
Does that line of thought, we ask, extend to the sky-high expectations of players? Green has had more than his fair share of scrutiny, particularly after his infamous mistake in England’s first match of the 2010 World Cup.
“I just think the level of expectancy of your basic standard of goalkeeping or football in general is so high now,” says Green.
“Because of the nature of television, you get to see the best players in the world all the time. Everyone knows who Lionel Messi is, because Sky broadcast his games around the world.
"So people will watch that, and then maybe watch the football you see at Loftus Road, or wherever, and that’s their frame of reference. And it goes the same with goalkeeping.
"The frame of refererence is so high because the highlights of games are so readily available that you will see spectacular saves and goals every day.”
Green says he is much better at managing his expectations of himself now compared to his early career at Norwich – when, he tells us, if he had a bad game, he wouldn’t speak to anyone for a week.
“That, as a lifestyle, was pretty unsustainable,” he says. “You can get so wrapped up in the emotion of football sometimes that it’s not healthy.
"But now, having played 500 or 600 games, to have that rollercoaster that many times, you can’t do it.
"Now I can say: ‘That might have been disappointing for the team, but what can I take from it?’”
Green has been on something of a rollercoaster for QPR in his three seasons with the club, having played his part in a relegation and then a swift return.
The west London side again face a battle to beat this drop this term, sitting bottom of the table with eight points. But things are quite different to how they were for QPR in their previous Premier League campaign, particularly for Green.
“Because I’m playing,” he laughs. “But everything about it is different – it’s a completely different feel to the club.
"The lads who are there are lads who want to be there. We’re playing at a level where we’ve worked to get ourselves there, whereas the previous time it was a congregation of allstars, almost, from other clubs. And it felt like it was a bit thrown together.”
QPR face two of the teams they came up with in their next three games, with Leicester this weekend and then Burnley in a fortnight’s time.
“Okay, we’re slightly behind where we want to be,” says Green. “But we have the fixtures now where we’ve got teams around us.
"This Saturday against Leicester is one way you’re looking to take points: a minimum of one, and definitely three.
"We’ve lost more games than we’d have liked. But turning that around – turning those single-goal defeats into draws or wins – is where we need to improve.”
And you don’t need a university degree to tell you that.
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