Lee Jobber was the big, bare-chested, drum-banging Leicester City fan who everyone knew at the King Power stadium. Behind the facade, however, was a sensitive man slowly falling apart. Hanzala Fayaz tells his story.
It was Tuesday, April 11, 2023. 5.15pm. Lee Jobber remembers the time and the day. It was the day he’d chosen to end it all.
He did this by throwing himself off a bridge near the M1 in Leicestershire. He remembers the feeling of falling through the air, the sound of his bones breaking as he hit the floor, the screech and smell of burning rubber as the oncoming lorry swerved to miss his body. The noise he remembers most of all was the sound of scissors cutting through his blood-stained clothes.
It was the aftermath of a severe mental health crisis that nearly cost Lee Jobber his life. For a long time, Lee had been struggling in silence, feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. “I didn’t see a way forward,” he says. “But looking back now, I’m grateful to still be here, because the man who was rescued that night isn’t the one speaking to you today.”
Born and raised in Leicester, Lee – now 46 – was just four when his father left for work one morning and never came home. “He just went,” he recalls. “My mum was left with financial problems and a kid to raise.” His mother, Margaret, a nurse, worked long hours to make ends meet. “She did the best she could,” he says. “But I had a lot of rejection early on, from my dad, from my mum’s new partner. I didn’t feel loved.”
At 13, he started drinking, raiding his mum’s stash of Gold Label beers. “She’d drink a few and leave some,” says Lee. “So I’d finish them. It was strong stuff, 10 percent barley wine. But it made me feel warm. Normal.” It was the start of an addiction that would shape his life for decades.
Football, though, gave him something else. Belonging. Validation. A sense of comaradery. A neighbour first took him to Leicester City matches. “Football became my anchor,” Lee says. “Every Saturday, I knew exactly where I’d be.” The club became his family, the stands his home.
By his 30s, Lee had become a familiar face at Leicester City, the tattooed shirtless superfan, the man behind the drum in the raucous L1 stand. “They even built me my own drumming platform,” he remembers. “32,000 people watching, and for once, I felt I belonged.”
His enthusiasm brought him media attention and a new credibility. There were documentaries, photo shoots, and in 2016, a personal thank you from Leicester’s late owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who flew Lee first-class to Thailand. For a week, he was treated like a prince. “I cried in my hotel room,” says Lee. “I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I was just a council estate kid who got lucky.”
But the public spotlight masked something darker. Behind his public persona, he was a man drinking two litres of vodka a day. “People would buy me drinks at matches,” he says. “They didn’t know they were feeding my addiction. I wanted people to like me. Validation was my drug as much as alcohol.”
By 2019, his body was failing. Years of drinking had destroyed his liver and kidneys. Lee had surgery in order to lose weight which left him with only part of a stomach. Still, he drank. He life was a mess and he was wrapped up, suffocating, in a lie he couldn’t stop telling.
The final collapse came when everything else did, his job as a van driver, his relationship, his sense of self. “I planned it for months,” he says. “I’d turn everyone against me. I wanted them to hate me, so it’d be easier when I was gone.”
Telling my story: Lee Jobber tells his story to the DMU Journalism students in October, 2025.
On April 11, 2023, he kissed his mum goodbye, told her he was going shopping and drove to the bridge near Fosse Park.
The next thing he remembers are those scissors. Then the coma. Two weeks in intensive care. A shattered pelvis. “They told me I wouldn’t walk again,” Lee says.
Lee “died” twice during his recovery. “Both times it was peaceful,” he remembers. “Life floating through pink clouds. Same sound, a gate creaking behind me.” When he finally woke, his was mum was there, her face broken. “That’s when I knew, I couldn’t put her through it again.”
But addiction wasn’t done with him yet. His mother suffered a heart attack. “She was being worked on in the leaving room, and I started drinking in the kitchen,” he says quietly. “That was my real rock bottom – but it was how I thought I could cope.”
Finally, he quite literally threw the towel in. “I went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and hurled it across the room,” he says. “That was me saying, ‘Enough.’”
The grim withdrawal lasted 19 days. Alone, shaking, vomiting, hallucinating. “My body should’ve shut down,” admits Lee. “It didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was meant to be here to tell this story.”
Today, Lee has lost more than 20 stone and rebuilt his life around recovery and service. He volunteers across Leicester with the Stairway Project and at a local mental health café, helping men who, like him, once saw no way out.
Lee Jobber Never Quits
He runs sessions through the Modern Men Movement, encouraging honesty and vulnerability. “We started with 12 people, now there are over hundred. It’s powerful,” Lee says.
How does he feel today? “I’m blessed,” he says. “Blessed to be here to share a mess that might save someone else.”
As for the man on that tarmac in April 2023, Lee pauses. He doesn’t know that man today. “He’s gone,” he says.
What remains today is a survivor, a volunteer and a voice for others who have stood where he once was. “My mess is someone else’s message.”
