Management, coaching and media work provide the traditional career paths for footballers wishing to remain involved in the game after they retire, but Robert Green has never been one to follow the crowd. Forget dugouts, training grounds and TV studios, the QPR goalkeeper sees his long-term future in the boardroom. “Eventually I’d like to have some sort of role like a chief executive in a football club,” Green says.

With that in mind, and conscious that his 35th birthday is only a couple of months away, Green enrolled on an Open University degree course last month. It is a three-year BA (hons) in business management (sport and football) – and means that in between making more saves than any other goalkeeper in the Premier League this season, Green is burying his head in books.

While the administrative side of football would hold little appeal for the vast majority of footballers, Green views it as a logical next step. “The speed of how football changes is so fast that to finish playing and still to be able to relate to 18-, 19-, 20-year-old lads, enough for them to like you, to run around for you, is probably beyond my limitations as a person,” he says. “I think if I want to stay in football then this would be the path that I need to take rather than the coaching side.”

Green smiles as he recalls the first course workshop, when the students had to get into pairs, find out all they could about the other person – he was with a Canary Wharf security guard – and then give the rest of the group the lowdown. Previously Green had introduced himself online as someone who “worked in football since leaving school”, which was slightly underplaying a career that includes 12 England caps and more than 550 appearances for Norwich, West Ham and QPR.

For Green, the degree has already confirmed just how “different football is from any other business” and, in the process, strengthened his own conviction that the knowledge he has picked up as a player could be invaluable. “I sat down at the workshop with the tutor and six or seven other lads who are all football fans and I thought: ‘Hold on a minute, I’ve got half a chance here because I know the outside view is so different to what is going on on the inside.’

“I think to be a fan and take over a football club would be great but you’re going to lose your money and you’re going to have a rollercoaster of a ride doing it. So to have someone [working for you] who’s been in that rollercoaster all their life and realises how good clubs operate …

“A great model for me is West Brom. When I first started playing at Norwich, West Brom were in the Championship, got promoted, got relegated, got promoted, got relegated, and all the time they were building until they eventually stayed up. The dangerous point is when you try and make those steps like Leeds did by buying all those players in the late 90s and early 2000s, living beyond their means, and that’s when the problems occur.”

Another case study is closer to home. QPR posted pre-tax losses of £65.4m in the year ending 2013, when they were relegated from the Premier League after a calamitous spending spree that saw the wage bill go through the roof. “It was probably trying to go three rungs up the ladder in one step,” says Green, who arrived at Loftus Road at the start of that campaign. “It’s kind of … what gives you the right to automatically make that step because you’ve made wholesale changes on the pitch? It’s not that simple, as we found out.”

Two years on and although QPR again find themselves at the wrong end of the table, Green highlights “the marked improvement in recent performances” and paints a picture of Loftus Road being a much happier place to be. “We didn’t win for the first 17 games of that [last Premier League] season, so that’s quite a different proposition,” he says. “There’s a completely different feel to the club now, a different manager and a different attitude in the sense that everyone who’s there wants to be there. We’ve got a core group who genuinely want to do well for the club.”

Green must be the smartest among them (even if Joey Barton would probably take issue with that suggestion). He left school to join Norwich at the age of 16 with 10 GCSEs to his name – “I’m not sure that constitutes being bright,” Green laughs – enjoys writing and loves cricket, so much so that he fancies reporting on the sport. As for football, Green is totally dedicated to his profession but refuses to allow the game to consume him.

“I think it’s a self-preservation thing more than anything. I think as a youngster I took myself far too seriously. Now, with experience maybe, having good times, bad times, you think: ’Are you prepared physically and mentally for a game? Yes. Have I done everything I can this week to make myself as good as I can be for this game? Yes. Am I going to try my utmost in this game? Yes.’ Right, that’s all you can do. Could I stop Oscar’s shot in the game at Stamford Bridge? No, because I’d need a four metre extension on my arm.’ It’s managing your own expectations.”

Having two young children, as well as remaining in touch with his roots, helps. “If you walked into my house there wouldn’t be one thing to do with football in there. You see people with a room full of their career achievements. Brilliant. Well done. That’s just not something I do. They’re in a bin bag in my mum and dad’s loft. And if I go out, I’ve got the same mates from the Sunday football team when I was a kid. That doesn’t change. They probably hammer me as much as anybody, saying: ‘He’s an oddball.’”

During an hour in his company, Green comes across as a likeable bloke. He is down-to-earth, to the extent that he has never quite grasped why he has status in some people’s eyes. “People see you in the street, especially fans of your club, and because you’re on the pitch and they see you every week, they think you’re their mate. To me it is a stranger in the street. I’ve been playing football for 18 years and it still surprises me when people come and speak to me. My mates have said I’ll come across as rude and arrogant. It’s not like that. But it’s that initial: ‘Oh, Christ, what do you want me to say?’”

Inside the stadium, Green has learned that there are times when actions, rather than words, are the best response. Opposition supporters still taunt him about his infamous mistake against USA in England’s first match at the 2010 World Cup finals, when Clint Dempsey’s shot slipped from his grasp. “I just turn around and give them a yawn sign,” he says. “It’s something that happened two tournaments ago. We drew the game. We didn’t lose the opening game of the World Cup.”

It does feel at times as if Green’s career will, quite unfairly, be defined by that moment in Rustenburg and that a red marker pen has been taken to everything else he has achieved. “If that happens, fair enough,” Green says. “You can’t argue with apathy. People can say what they want, do what they want, realistically it’s not something that’s going to affect my life.

“I actually think it’s going to be good for my children. They are going to ask me one day about it, because some kid is going to Google it and hammer them at school. So it’s a great lesson that you can put everything you can into something for all your life and it’s not always beautiful at the end of it.”

Not that his football career has reached the end. Green is still thoroughly enjoying life as a Premier League goalkeeper and, if all goes to plan with the degree, we may see him sat behind a desk as a chief executive one day. “I look at it and think it’s something I can do,” he says. “You have an idea and how do you go about it? You can’t sit on your arse. The course is about putting your head in the book and reading, and when it’s something that you’re interested in, then it’s not really work.”