Will Irish football ever welcome back Robbie Keane?
The Ferencváros manager and Ireland great may have done irredeemable damage if he holds any hope of one day becoming national team manager.
On the 5th of October 2023, Maccabi Tel Aviv sank to a 2-nil defeat away to Gent in the second game of their UEFA Europa League group stage. An even match up on paper, the Israeli side were somewhat unlucky not to get something from the tie, with a late Tarik Tissoudali penalty putting the game to bed for the Belgian side.
Two days later, Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups launched coordinated armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into the Gaza Envelope of southern Israel, with over 1,000 people getting killed in the attack, several hundred getting injured and over 250 Israeli civilians were taken as hostages back into the Gaza Strip.
Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed in a television broadcast that “we are at war”, as the Israeli army set out on an immediate counterattack on Palestine, bombing the Gaza Strip in the early moments of what has become a relentless barrage of attack that continues to this day. Per the United Nations, by the end of 2024, over 45,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza.
As the attacks unfolded in Israel, Robbie Keane, the then-manager of Maccabi Tel Aviv, was seeking shelter in a panic room, before fleeing Israel for safety in nearby Greece. It would put a stop to football in Israel for over a month.
The event would draw a worldwide microscope onto the region, and in the comparably unimportant world of football, a focus on Keane, his reputation in Ireland and his hopes and aspirations of ever managing the Irish national team.
Robbie Keane was a nomadic player, to say the least. So much so that it became a meme-worthy notion that every club he joined had been his “boyhood club”, something he claimed at both Liverpool and Celtic. Surrounding his most successful spell at Tottenham, Keane ventured as far as the Serie A with Inter Milan at just 20-years-old having starting prosperously at Wolves and Coventry, before bookending a very impressive career with a productive spell at LA Galaxy in Major League Soccer, and finally calling it a day as a player turned manager at Indian side ATK Football Club.
In terms of his contemporaries in English football, he’s more travelled than most. Testing the waters so young in Italian football was a brave move that ultimately didn’t work out for the Dubliner, but it showed a desire to acquit himself wherever the road would take him.
Even his most high profile move, a forgetful six-month spell at Liverpool, was risky but he embraced the challenge and wasn’t too humble to accept a swift return to Spurs when the writing was on the wall that it wasn’t going to work at Anfield. He took on loan spells at Celtic and West Ham, and even gave Aston Villa two months of his time during the MLS off-season.
That fearlessness in terms of leaving his comfort zone is something that has followed him into coaching and management.
Keane had his first turn at a coaching role with the Republic of Ireland when the FAI added him to Mick McCarthy’s coaching ticket in 2018, awarding him with a lucrative four-year deal. The thing is, McCarthy’s time was called short in 2020 when COVID-19 hit, leading to the pre-ordained switch to U-21 manager Stephen Kenny who decided not to retain Keane’s services.
Keane continued to draw down the contract of €250,000 a year, something that became a major bone of contention for fans who directed their grievances at both the FAI for handing out such an unwarranted deal, and Keane who continued to accept money from the financially crippled organisation without having any role whatsoever in the national setup.
Although he’s never outright claimed to want to manage the Irish national team, he has been fervent in his desire to become a coach. In a 2020 piece with The Coaches Voice, he said “I want to keep on learning to become the best coach I can be – and then see where that takes me”. He’s remained steadfast in that desire, signaling from early on that a post-playing career in coaching awaited, and that he had taken learnings from the likes of Marcello Lippi, Giovanni Trapattoni and Mick McCarthy.
The failed Irish gig was damaging to his reputation in Ireland, no doubt. Support saw a wealthy ex-player drawing a large cheque for no return, but in fairness to Keane, nobody forced the FAI and John Delaney to draw up such a lucrative deal for a coach. It stank of Ireland’s football overlords wanting to tie their most capped and goal-laden player to a deal that almost superseded the manager’s role itself, independent of who would actually be leading the team. In the end the idea failed, as did John Delaney’s time as Chief Executive, and the FAI’s misdeeds and idiocy didn’t start or stop at just Robbie Keane.
It was a setback to his reputation amongst Irish supporters, but that’s one that was never truly rosy to begin with. Despite being Ireland’s most decorated goalscorer with 68 goals in 146 games, a record that stands above most in world football, he often struggled to draw too much acclaim from his home nation. Perhaps there was an element of underappreciation throughout his playing career, but in conversations of best ever Irish players, he would never break into a top three that would more popularly bandy names like Liam Brady, Roy Keane and Paul McGrath.
When it came to listing the greatest ever sportspeople to emerge out of Ireland, Robbie was never really in that conversation. His international statistics rivaled the best in world football — he has more international goals than Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Olivier Giroud, Samuel Eto’o and Wayne Rooney just to name a few — and is the 18th highest goalscorer in Premier League history. But the Irish sports fan can be a stubborn bunch, a hard nut to crack. Statistics are one thing but personality, like in most areas of life, is a determining trait in how we feel about a person. We love underdogs and mavericks, Keane was usually neither.
A driven work ethic, by far Ireland’s most prolific and effective top flight player throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, but for some reason his personality never squared too fondly with the Irish support. He turned up and delivered in every international break, scored plenty of important goals, and often carried the team further than they perhaps deserved to go at times.
He could be said to be Ireland’s best ever player, but not their greatest.
In June of 2023, having just left a role with Leeds United alongside Sam Allardyce having tried and failed to keep them in the Premier League, Keane accepted a role with Israeli Premier Division side Maccabi Tel Aviv.
It was immediately criticised, both inside and out of Ireland. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel urged Keane not to take it, issuing a statement highlighting the potential complicity of high profile, non-Israeli sportspeople enabling and legitimising an apartheid regime.
In strengthening their point, PACBI spoke of Omar Qatin, a 24-year-old Palestinian footballer who had been shot dead just a few days before by the IDF as he defended his village in the Occupied West Bank against a mob of armed Israeli settlers.
In Ireland, the reaction from football supporters was overwhelmingly negative. Historically the Irish people has always sided with Palestine, but it’s a support that is more overtly passionate within Irish football spaces — domestic and international games have often brandished support for Palestine, be that through flags or banners, and it is an unrelenting relationship that remains even more steadfast after October 7th.
In May of 2024, the Palestinian women’s football team played Bohemians in a sold-out Dalymount Park, the first game of its kind anywhere in the world. It was a tangible show of support from Ireland’s football people, with funds raised for humanitarian aid in the region.
The Ireland-Palestine solidarity campaign released a statement criticising Keane’s move, saying “there is a Palestinian sporting boycott and call for the expulsion of the Israeli FA from FIFA and UEFA due to apartheid Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, so it is deeply disappointing to see Robbie Keane go to manage Maccabi Tel Aviv”.
And yet, Keane took the role anyway. He cited at his unveiling that he didn’t “want to get into politics” but “you have to start somewhere”. As time developed, that somewhere could have been a bit more strategically selected. As far as Irish supporters were concerned, he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too — this was a death knell for any possible future between Keane and his national support.
In football terms, it turned out to be a very successful one-year spell, winning the league and reaching the Last 16 of the Europa Conference League, somehow flopping a 4-1 lead from the first leg of that game against Olympiakos.
Keane endeavored to stay neutral throughout it all, as a proper “football man”, and only after leaving the club he spoke about his decision to hold tough in Israel, not wanting to let down his players and staff.
“What is happening is terrible and nobody wants to see it. Hopefully it ends very, very soon. But at the end of the day, I’m a football manager and my staff have got people to look after. I have got a duty of care.
As honourable as that may seem, selecting the job in the first place had placed him in an entirely lose-lose position — his reputation at home was in tatters, and it was a spell that would inevitably have to have been cut short given the rising tensions of remaining in Israel.
And to today, where Keane’s latest sojourn across the increasingly geopoliticised world of football takes him to Hungary with Ferencváros. They lie second in the table, two points adrift of leaders Puskás Akadémia.
A second foreign league title is well within his grasps, something that would be unrivaled for an Irish manager abroad. His Israeli title puts him on par with Patrick O’Connell, the last Irish manager to win a league title abroad when he led Real Betis to La Liga back in 1935.
But how much of that spell in Israel influenced his next move? Hungary’s populist and autocratic figurehead Viktor Orbán is a close ally of Netanyahu, as Keane plots success in a league that is outwardly funded by the football-obsessed Orbán in an effort to not just feed his hobby but also sportswash a nation that has seen democracy dissolve before its eyes in recent years.
And yet, two league titles across two separate top flight leagues would still not be enough to wash Robbie Keane’s own reputation and hopes of taking on the mantle of Irish national team manager. He came close, if betting odds are any indicator, when Ireland were desperate to fill the role after Kenny’s departure, as his former boss Harry Redknapp lent a supportive voice to his nomination. But it never came to fruition.
Indeed, it would take a very brave FAI to even countenance hiring Keane and the baggage he has amassed with supporters. The association are subject to enough criticism as it is, with the botching of the departure of women's coach Colin Healy just one recent example.
Football and politics have never been more intertwined. Newcastle celebrate Carabao Cup victory on the backdrop of Saudi Arabian investment, a Qatari World Cup comes and goes amidst a litany of human rights offences, Gianni Infantino puckers up in the Trump Oval Office ahead of a US-based World Cup in 2026 and the Club World Cup this summer.
But for Irish fans, there is a line here that would be not easily crossed. It's hard not to see a major stand being taken if a path is ever laid for Robbie Keane to land the Irish job. Time is a powerful healer — and football fans a fickle bunch — but it’s difficult to see a road where the nomadic Keane is ever welcomed back warmly into Irish football.