Will Ireland's greatest goalscorer ever go home? Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
The swathes of fans in black and green behind the goal as Ferencváros attacked in the first half had started noisy and got noisier. A win was needed to secure their spot in the Europa League play-offs, and by halftime they already led AZ Alkmaar 3-0. Amid the jubilation, and the red-pink flares that filled the stadium with the smell of cordite, a few supporters braved the Budapest chill and took off their tops. Down in the dugout, their manager kept his shirt on — but Robbie Keane could hardly have dreamed of a better start to his first home game as manager of the Hungarian champions.
The match that night at the Groupama Aréna ended well — Keane’s side beat their Dutch rivals 4-3 — but the shift into management hasn’t always been so straightforward for Ferencváros’s boss. Ireland’s all-time leading goalscorer is a pariah back home, and is unlikely to find success in his native land again. The former Tottenham striker’s crime? Managing Maccabi Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest club, a job that saw him assailed as a “Zionist rat” and “blood money Robbie”.
Ugly language, and a vivid testament to the attitudes of many in Ireland to the conflict in the Middle East. Yet more than that, Keane’s story hints at a broader lesson, of how politics and football are inevitably linked, and how trying to steer clear of geopolitical controversy is doomed always to fail.
In the summer of 2023, when Keane was offered the Maccabi Tel Aviv gig, he was keen to see the positives. He has always been keen, as he puts it, to experience “other countries and cultures” — and is dismissive of those who have refused to leave their “comfort zones”. Until recently, it’s a philosophy that served him well. Leaving Ireland at 17, and playing everywhere from Italy to India, the striker has enjoyed a far more varied career than many of his contemporaries, struggling with drab managerial jobs at second- and third-flight English clubs.
This time, though, things would be different. Even before the October 7 massacre, Ireland was firmly pro-Palestinian. That stems largely from a general anti-colonial feeling, but it’s also true the IRA long enjoyed close links with the PLO. Stadiums have often been the stage for protest and demonstration, but this issue has a particular prominence because those who follow the Ireland national team are disproportionately drawn from that Left-wing, anti-colonial constituency.
More recently, Ireland supported South Africa’s legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a move that in December saw the Jewish state shutter its embassy in Dublin. Worse was to follow: Gideon Sarr, the Israeli foreign minister, last week accused Ireland’s president of “a cheap despicable provocation” when he referenced the war in Gaza during a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. These global tensions have often played out on home turf. When Ireland played Greece in Dublin six days after Hamas’s attack, the stand behind one goal was dotted with Palestinian flags.
Keane has, perhaps naively, tried to stay neutral. As manager at one of Israel’s most popular sides, the Irishman was widely expected to support his hosts — especially after their retaliatory assault on Gaza. Yet Keane was quiet, doggedly refusing to engage in anything beyond football. But merely by remaining in Israel, many in Ireland felt he was tacitly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
When he presented caps to players at an Ireland national team get-together last November, Keane was duly subjected to a barrage of online abuse. Israelis, for their part, have criticised him for his reluctance to speak out from the other direction. Nor is he the only one to have suffered. His wife Claudine, who still lives in Ireland with their two sons, has spoken publicly of feeling unsafe. Involved in a series of social media flare-ups, she even requested a meeting with Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, after a former TD accused Robbie of “sportswashing apartheid and genocidal Israel”.
In a sense, none of this is surprising. The October 7 slaughter, and the bombing of Gaza that followed, has turned football into a battleground. Quite aside from Palestinian flags in the Dublin stands, that was clear last November, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam. Maccabi fans targeted Palestinians and other Arabs, while the visitors and local Jews faced antisemitic violence, leading to 71 arrests. Keane himself had resigned five months earlier, walking away from the final two years of a lucrative contract, saying it would have been unfair on the staff he had taken with him to leave sooner.
“Was it tough?” Keane asked last week during a press conference in Budapest. “Unfortunately I can’t control what people say. It is what it is. I’m sensitive to the situation and hopefully, please God, everybody can move on peacefully and I can get on with what I do best and that’s being involved in football. I get it’s a complicated situation.”
Not that Keane’s departure for Hungary is likely to restore his reputation. If he were to set foot on the Dublin pitch now, he’d almost certainly be booed. For the first Irish manager to win a foreign league title since 1935, that’s remarkable — even if it speaks, once more, to the impossibility of keeping football and politics apart. That’s just as true in Hungary as it was in Israel. Ferencváros’s president is Gábor Kubatov, a vice-president of the ruling Fidesz party. Even the Groupama Aréna, the site of Keane’s maiden home win, is a result of the Orbán government’s generous investments in sporting infrastructure.
More to the point, Keane’s tenure in Tel Aviv influenced where he ended up next. Orbán is a close ally of Netanyahu, and at the very least Hungary is one of the few places in Europe where Keane’s last job wouldn’t be an issue. Before the match last week, Hungarian fans were baffled by questions about Israel and Palestine, far more interested in whether Keane had won the Israeli league because Maccabi were good: or because Hapoel Haifa, their main rivals, collapsed.
All the while, Keane seems as anxious as ever to focus on the sport. As the players performed a lap of honour following their victory against Alkmaar, taking a salute from the ultras behind the goal, Keane stood by, watching on beaming. He had been relaxed and uncharacteristically chatty even before the match. When a packed stadium is celebrating his victory, he may wonder if he really needs Ireland. Listening to Keane talk warmly about his new apartment, and the local restaurant scene, he seemed to be revelling in his new Hungarian future.
In footballing terms, Keane’s next task is to win a seventh league title in a row, although Sunday’s 0-0 draw with MTK represented a slightly flat start. Yet here, once more, politics threatens to encroach onto the pitch. At the moment, Ferencváros are second in the standings. Ahead of them are Puskás Akadémia — an Orbán brainchild based in his home village of Felcsút. Given every top-flight club has some relationship with Fidesz, and it becomes very hard to look at the Hungarian league and argue that politics and football can truly be separated.
Keane last week compared himself with Roy Hodgson, who pursued an itinerant career before coming back to manage England. Although he implied he would ultimately like a job in the Premier League, he also spoke of a 20-year managerial career and being in no rush. Politics, though, might already have scuppered any dream of going home to manage Ireland.
Jonathan Wilson is a columnist for the Guardian, the editor of the Blizzard, the co-host of the podcast It Was What It Was and author of 12 books on football history and one novel.
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SubscribeI don’t understand, did Keane join in oct 7th? Or is it just these people that don’t like him are anti Israeli?
Well said. The response of fans is absurd. The culture of grievance in Ireland is poisonous and this manifestation of anger for a former player’s employment choices is disgraceful. Are Irish people allowed to have Jewish friends?
I fear that bigotry is very acceptable in the Celtic nations; least so in my own country Wales and worst in Ireland.
My father tells that he visited Ireland in the 50s, met a pretty girls on a train and chatted. When they said goodbye she told him that, being Welsh, he was okay and then shocked him with a stream of vile anti-English bigotry.
Most of the anti-english sentiment I saw in Wales was over rugby and while I recall some teasing, I rarely saw anything vicious; a few ridiculous nationalists. It seems that hatred of the English, not particular historical figure with whom there might be cause for resentment but the English as individuals is acceptable in Ireland. Probably a minority of people but not shut down as similar views would be elsewhere. It can’t be difficult to add the Jews as a target for their hostility.
Being Anti right wing fascistic Israel government is not hatred of Jews.
This line of argument still has legs?
There is a large contingent of Jews – and Israelis – who are also vehemently angry and critical of Israeli actions.
Are they part of the “grievance” culture too? And if so, let’s hear you rattle off some more anecdotes from the 50’s about ur great uncle meeting a few Jews on a bus in Hartlepool or something.
Sickening support for genocidal Hamas and their backer’s avowed destruction of Israel. What these mentally stunted idiots haven’t the capacity to understand is that militant Islam is out to kill them too. With their closed liberal progressive minds they are actually pro-Hamas (not pro Palestinian who are ruled by Hamas terror) because it affirms their grievance ideology. War is not subject to woke DEI, war is a last resort no one wants and is not about ‘level scores’ but elimination of repetition. Israel, for anyone who has capacity to venture further than BBC and MSM anti-semitism, can easily discover the extreme lengths to which their military has targeted only Hamas and whatever the casualties numbers, they are not indicative of an indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Jews and Christians are freely offered as sacrificial lambs by the U.K., Ireland and others who offer lip service at at WW2 extermination camps but fail to recognise their hollow works do not set us
free from their contradictions.
Unhinged. The lengths they have done to only target Hamas? Do you have a phone?
Blowing up universities and hospitals is targeting Hamas? This is pure drivel and denial of reality. It’s a colonisation that’s been going on from before Hamas was a thing. Hamas was an outcome of the failure of – largely secular – and corrupt – PLO. And yes, people who have been through this tend , if they have any empathy and/or principles, to support a people going through it presently.
Robbie will be fine.
I think you will find that areas and buildings usually designated as ‘civilian infrastructure’ in ‘normal’ countries doesn’t quite work in Gaza because, both before the war and during it, Hamas and other genocidal terrorists use them as military bases. That includes schools, mosques, hospitals etc.
Interestingly, the use of civilians as human shields, and human bombs etc, is openly encouraged by Hamas and other Islamic terrorists. it is the ultimate evidence of support to Allah to be a shaheed and to kill as many Jews as you can along the way, plus Christians, Ezidis, Thai farm workers, anyone really.
With your phone you could easily see this if you really wanted to. I rather suspect your phone shows you other things though, right?
Yes Tony, wiring up a university for a few days to blow it up was because Hamas could use it to hide in. All civilian infrastructure was destroyed. Again, reach for that phone. Don’t believe me, listen to the Israelis, especially Galant at the beginning. Are you yelling me that the pictures you see of gaza now are the result of the superior – pin point – AI assisted attacks? From the most moral army in the world? Fine, don’t call it a genocide, but it’s an obvious attempt at ethnic cleansing. Hamas haven’t been destroyed, because you can’t “destroy” a guerilla army too easily; see Vietcong, and well, even the IRA.
There are more Hamas fighters now.
Who saw that coming?
It’s worse than that. The Hamas strategy is to martyr their children. That is the extent of it so being pro Hamas is being promartyrdom of children.
Palestinian flags in the immediate aftermath of 7 October? That is anti-Semitic.
Would it be on Oct 6th?
Pretty much.
Is this “anti-semetic” activity opposition to Jewish people and Jewish religion, or is it opposition to the actions of the Israeli government? I know how people in Ireland view it.
It’s the game Bernard. Same story all over the world. It’s Israel’s joker card, and they are shamelessly cynical in still using it.
It’s a sovereign state, and like all sovereign states, it’s actions are there to be praised it criticised.
“Even before the October 7 massacre, Ireland was firmly pro-Palestinian. That stems largely from a general anti-colonial feeling …”
But it’s the remnants of the Ottoman Empire who are the colonialists! 🙂
All we need is a team of Robbie Keanes
A team of Robbie Keanes
All we need is a team of Robbie Keanes
A team of Robbie Keanes.
( to the tune of Yellow Submarine)
Robbie Keane is not a pariah here. Taking the Maccabi job scarcely raised an eyebrow. I don’t know what Wilson is on about.
The IRA had a long relationship with the PLO, but before that they had a relationship with Irgun, so much so that Menachim Begin’s code name in Irgun was “Michael” after Michael Collins. He received significant support from Robert Briscoe, long serving Fianna Fáil TD and twice Lord Mayor of Dublin, who had been a key ally of de Valera through the War of Independence and the Civil War. He was also a Zionist and saw the British as the common enemy. Following the establishment of Israel the relationship soured greatly.
However, this has little bearing on the relationship between the Irish government and Israel. I have long suggested that the driver here is the presence of Irish troops in South Lebanon since the 1970s, a matter on which very little analysis has been done.