Lee Payne's journey: Football agent to life in Marbella

From football to Marbella: The reinvention of Lee Payne

Moving to Marbella has had a huge impact on Lee Payne's life. And it had already been a colourful one.

He rose from non-league football to the Premiership, making the leap to Newcastle United and playing 100 league games before injury ended his career at just 26. Undaunted, he became the youngest football agent in Holland in 1996, when there were only eleven agents in the whole country. He learned Dutch, and bridged the gap that brought so many Dutch players to British clubs in the nineties. His work took him across Europe, Brazil and South America. It was during those whirlwind years that he first set foot on the Costa del Sol.

Marbella felt like coming home

Something clicked the day he watched a UEFA Cup Malaga CF match against Leeds United when Malaga beat leads away Elland Road. After years of airports, hotels and stadiums, the South coast of Spain felt different, like coming home before he even knew he was looking for one. Twenty-five years later, Lee has finally made his home in Marbella. He sat down with our publication name and spoke quietly about the place that helped heal him.

It was during his 3-day stay at the Puente Romano hotel in Marbella for that UEFA cup match in 2002 that left an everlasting impression, with the lights of the port glittering and the warm air on his skin, Lee knew. He and his family had to move here. The life of a football agent never stopped, with fifty or so players on his books, constant flights, meetings with lawyers and club officials. But in Marbella his wife and children could put down roots while he was away. They could flourish.

'I don't want to use the word 'magical', but it's a very special place for me. Marbella can chew you up and spit you out, everything is available in Marbella good and bad I have witnessed both sides, but there's something about this place, that everything in the world is put right as soon as I get back here.' He smiled, almost embarrassed by his own emotion. 'Marbella was always a place to come and find sanctuary. I feel the sun, I see the blue sky, I feel the air and appreciate the beauty of all the he flowers its such a colourful place. I think you have a microclimate here, there's a difference between here and anywhere else in the world. And I always found, I actually found peace.'

Chance encounter changes Lee's life

He has seen the world. He knows there is no comparison. 'People often talk about random acts of crime in Marbella but believe me I think the local police do a great job, I used to live in Rio de Janeiro, and this is nothing compared to there. In Brazil, the narcos control everything. They carry bazookas, rocket launchers, so coming back here, there's no comparison. Here, you can walk around safely at night.'

Lee paused, then told the story that changed everything. He leaned forward, eyes distant. 'I was living in the interior, in an authentic Brazilian town away from the tourism. I was buying some home grown tropical fruit from an elderly woman when I noticed a picture of a beautiful young girl, who looked very similar to my own daughter. When I asked about the picture, the woman said the girl was with Jesus now.' His voice softened. 'Four months before, the girl had been killed when someone attacked the motorbike she was riding on.' As a father, Lee was stunned, not just by the loss, but by the way the woman spoke. She was calm. At peace. 'She had such an outpouring of love.' The quiet dignity of that mother, only four months after burying her eleven-year-old daughter, something shifted that day inside him. 'I asked God, on the way home, please give me that kind of peace and my faith began to grow from that day forward on another level.'

That encounter stayed with him on every flight home. When he finally moved his family to Marbella, the peace he had glimpsed in that Brazilian woman settled over him too. The mountains behind the town, the sea in front, the easy rhythm of daily life, they wrapped around him like a promise kept. The place has its faults, he knows that. Yet its beauty always wins and his two daughters Larissa and Gabrielle spent the best part of their childhood growing up in Marbella.

Nowhere else in the world Payne would live

Today, he shares his life with Sonia Marquez, his new wife, a fashion designer with her own brand I AM based in Marbella, whose perspective on the world and on life on the Costa del Sol matches his completely. Together they have no doubt there is no other place in the world to live.

For Lee Payne, Marbella is more than a postcode. It is the sanctuary he searched for across continents, the place where a retired footballer and football agent finally found rest, and the home where everything in the world is put right the moment he steps off the plane.

His journey and reflections are also captured in his book The Football Agent Who Found Grace, written in Marbella and available on Amazon.