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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SubscribeThese and all the other prescriptions for putting things right in government always miss the central need: leadership which is virtuous, brave (Courage is the name of all the virtues when things come to the pinch), knows where it is going because it has a positive vision for the country, and is willing to make tough choices to bring that about.
Every other nostrum is just an attempt at re-arranging the deckchairs….
There’s a lot of virtuous, brave people who end up dead. The first thing required is to reduce the size of government. Cut it by half. Then there’d be plenty of capacity for proper governance.
“…we need a fully-fledged Prime Minister’s department” do we?
In the 1990s many journaiists, pining for the abolished GLC, were telling us that London needed a fully-fledged city Mayor ““ just like the Americans have.
Now we have a city Mayor with his very own GLA to play with ““ expensive and unnecessary. Yet another layer of administrative control. Yet another place for fully (or partially) fledged apparatchiks to gather and further their ambitions.
Moral: beware of journalists with big plans to change the political landscape.
Perfectly put. The abolition of the GLC was yet another Battle Honour for glorious Lady/Mrs T.
The resuscitation of its putrid corpse in the form of the Mayor and GLA an utter disgrace, saddling Londoners with an expensive, parasitical kindergarten of worthless, wannabe political pygmies, as time has amply shown.
It should be abolished forthwith, as a matter of urgency, and London freed from its pestilential stench for ever.
Indeed, and the same applies to regional devolution. New layers of government attract talentless but venal apparatchiks like flies.
The British system is supposed to work like that. It’s a feature, not a bug. The cabinet sets policy under the control of the Prime Minister. And we muddle through. There’s no equivalent of a presidential executive order. Implementation details are worked out within departments, not commanded from Downing Street.
Where Prime Ministers have tried to run a more presidential office with their own advisors, things can fall apart with spectacular political fall out as PM appointees interfere in roles coveted by elected politicians (think Tony Blair vs Gordon Brown) .
In a presidential system, this doesn’t happen. Everyone is an appointee serving at the president’s pleasure. Rival and allied politicians are kept at arms length, to criticize from afar. By contrast, the prime minister system has more of an all-it-together feel with more focus on teamwork and personal interplay. Historically, both have been show to work in times of crisis. Mixing them up can end up with a lot of sore toes.
This is a good summary and I almost agree. But …..the electorate is changing and they can be in direct touch with people who tweet on a minute to minute basis. They seem to vote more for people than for policies OR they vote for one policy which particularly concerns them. In the historical summary things weren’t like that.
I live in Wales and in the last election thousands of people voted Tory in the old mining communities where nobody voted Tory before. We know why that happened but I think the politicians need to use things like specific issues to woo voters in the future. Trump’s wall is another good example.
It’s as more of a question of implementation than policy choice. A policy is set but then how is the minutiae of actually doing it done? Petty things, like what goes on the form that has to be filled in, what are the selection criteria in edge cases, who arranges front-line delivery and reports back. Stuff you don’t want passing across the PM’s desk.
Does the executive branch run this – as would be the case in a presidential approach? Or do you just let the department run it and delegate oversight to the minister as per the prime-ministerial system? The worst would be having advisors hovering over departmental decisions, usurping ministerial control while not actually being responsible for delivery, just nit-picking – the Blair vs Brown model.
Decades of talk by experts and now the MSM rules everything by sneering and demeaning virtually all issues that might have a faint chance of working. And spineless, odious parasitic politicians bend their knee to avoid the wrong press.
Reminds me of –
Everybody knew there was a job to be done.
Anybody could have done it.
Somebody should have done it.
In the end NOBODY did it.
One solution that seems reasonable. Cut the number of MP’s to 100.
Sack the House of Lords and create an Upper House made up of 100 elected cross section of Science, Education and Business people who served for 5 years. Pay well and give them authority to stop MP’s vanity projects and such like waste of tax payers money.
Cancel 95% of Qango’s and the useless think tanks.
Create a government section that can hire and fire civil servants. This last item is critical to stop the paid unsackable lackeys controlling by mismanagement all issues they disagree with.
Dare I say bring back Cummings?
The question is, how do you do all this from within the system? There are literally thousands (probably not millions because a lot of people don’t have views) of views and you could not listen all of them if you tried.
Your idea could be a good one but how will you get others to talk about it? The media is criticised either because it is too left wing or too right wing. Quite a lot of people get their news from the BBC (everyone says a pit of woke views) or The Daily Mail (a fascist rag?). A lot of items in your post sound good to me but so what?
I agree with all you say Chris. My point is that people know the problems and for me a problem is there to be solved.
I concede by far better people than me, maybe some day?
It’s not the governments job to do things. It’s the government’s job to enable free enterprise to get things done. If everything was privatised there’d be plenty of people in government to make sure things were regulated properly. Then No10 could focus on making sure the departments were regulating their sectors properly.
Doubtless there is a lot of truth in this, especially the media obsession, although that is a two-way street. Whatever, we all know that nothing will ever work, and we have known that for some decades.
We have been living through the weirdest Prime Ministership, and probably it’s failings have been personal. The idea that the cabinet office is not powerful enough is risible.
It has become the expectation that the top man knows everything and is responsible for everything. Just like the celeb culture in fact. At the last election various young people around me said, “I could not vote for Corbyn, he’s weird.” Or, “I would vote for the Lib Dems if the leader was stronger.” Or, “Boris is kinda cuddly.”
An alternative is to become a republic and have a president. Tony Blair would volunteer. Perhaps we could tempt Donald Trump to come over and help out.