Sammy Lee spent 11 years at Liverpool as a player and 14 as assistant on the staff of various managers but went on to have a five-and-a-half-month spell at Everton.
A woman once told Sammy Lee’s eight-year-old granddaughter that her grandfather was a traitor after taking a job at Everton.
Lee, 65, spent less than six months as Sam Allardyce’s assistant manager at Goodison Park during the second half of the 2017/18 season before both left at the end of that campaign. His time at Anfield was over seven years earlier after re-joining the club under Rafa Benitez and remaining with Roy Hodgson and Sir Kenny Dalglish.
Graeme Souness was the first manager Lee worked under after joining the coaching staff soon after retiring in 1993. He stayed for 11 years, including under Roy Evans and Gerard Houllier, before eventually leaving to make a part-time role with Sven-Goran Eriksson’s England permanent.
Lee first took up the opportunity two years after retiring from playing, a career predominantly spent at Anfield. The midfielder made almost 300 appearances for his boyhood club, coming through the academy after initially joining as an apprentice.
After such a long association with the club, Lee anticipated and was not affected by the criticism that came his way. But as he first recalled exclusively to the ECHO in October last year, people also made their feelings known to his family members.
“Someone said to my granddaughter, who was maybe only eight at the time, ‘Your pops is a traitor’,” Lee told the ECHO. The long-time coach has since retold the story to This Is Anfield.
“My actual granddaughter was in junior school, and one of the mothers actually came up to her and said ‘your Pops is a traitor’. So that was a little bit hurtful.
But as Lee told the ECHO, he has no regrets. “I knew the problems that were going to come,” Lee recalled. “I knew the criticism that was going to come.
He explained: ”The way I look at it, I have a number of passions in my life: my family is the main one, football, and the city. I have just been fortunate to pursue my passion at the club I love, which is Liverpool Football Club, both as a player and a coach.
“But when that passion is gone, you have to move on and go somewhere else. I jumped at the chance to join Everton because one of my other passions is the city, and when we went to Everton, they were 16th in the table.
“We got to eighth. I was very, very proud of that because, in my humble opinion, you need the two teams in the city in the Premiership.”
