Robbie Keane is showing typical ambition in management - but his Israel decision has followed him

The new season has kicked off and Robbie Keane has joined the roster of pundits on Match of the Day. We can’t imagine this will be a permanent transfer to a sofa and those standard-issue, white-sole trainers, but merely a diversion on Keane’s coaching journey. It helps, after all, to be in a shop window as nicely-polished as the BBC’s when clubs are looking around for a new manager.

Plus, if Keane wants his next job to be in Britain or Ireland, then it’s in his interest to reintroduce himself to a BBC audience, given his coaching work has so far been done at a significant remove, mapping India (briefly), Israel and Hungary. His next choice will be intriguing.

Keane might already have been the Celtic manager, of course, as he met with the club before Martin O’Neill was given a contract to continue. When reports of these talks emerged, dozens of Celtic supporters clubs signed a statement opposing his possible appointment, citing the club’s solidarity with the Palestinian cause. “Robbie Keane’s decision to manage Maccabi Tel Aviv during the genocide in Gaza is impossible to ignore,” it read.

It’s unclear whether this protest played any role in Keane not getting the job, and news reports subsequently said that O’Neill was always going to retain the job, and that Keane was spoken to in the event O’Neill moved to a different role.

The whole episode was a reminder, however, that Keane’s decision to work in Israel continues to follow him around.

It’s for this reason that it’s difficult to see him being appointed Ireland manager anytime soon. Ordinarily, when a nation’s record goalscorer and record capsholder wins at least one major trophy in each of his first three full seasons in management, the question is not whether he will be that nation’s next manager, but whether he would accept the job.

But should Keane be available, interested and affordable whenever the FAI find themselves looking for a successor to Heimir Hallgrímsson, they will have to weigh up his appointment against the likelihood of a backlash from a section of supporters. The FAI shipped criticism in November 2024, for instance, when Keane was invited into the Irish camp to award international caps. The FAI themselves might find it awkward to reconcile his appointment with their adoption of last year’s motion calling for Israeli teams, Maccabi Tel Aviv among them, to be kicked out of competition.

Keane moved to Israel in 2023 and remained through to the end of the season, after Israel launched war on Gaza in response to the October 7th attacks. His first public justification of his decision to stick out the full season in Israel was made on Rio Ferdinand’s podcast in 2024. Keane condemned the war but stressed he was a football manager and stayed at the club out of a duty of care to his staff and his players.

While it was an unsatisfactory forum on which to break his silence – Ferdinand’s follow-up question was to ask him whether he wore a suit on the touchline – Keane’s is an eminently defensible view. If he were minded to, he could also argue the FAI’s decision to play Israel later this year is proof that Irish football is itself compartmentalising football away from its horrifying broader context.

But equally, any Irish fan who feels he should not have associated himself with Maccabi Tel Aviv is entitled to their opinion, however strongly Keane disagrees with it.

When Fifa were investigating the Palestinian FA’s submission to ban Israel from competition last year, they were highly critical of the Israeli FA’s failure to adequately punish racist and discriminatory chanting by their clubs. Across the season before Keane’s arrival, Maccabi fans were recorded as having the highest number of discriminatory instances (65), second only to Beitar Jerusalem. Research by Kick it Out Israel across 2024-25 found Maccabi fans responsible for 118 of 367 recorded instances of racist chanting, which included chants of “Let the IDF win, f**k the Arabs.”

A significant swathe of Celtic supporters believe Keane had a moral imperative to step away from this club and there are football fans in Ireland who hold the same view.

Separate from this, Keane is entitled to wonder as to why he did not engender a warmer place in the nation’s hearts before ever he moved into management. While his achievements in an Irish jersey were outlandish – his goalscoring record is evolving into the unfathomable with the passage of time – he is generally treated with respect, rather than love.

He has never won the RTÉ Sportsperson of the Year award, and when RTÉ launched a poll to find the island’s greatest sportsperson in 2009, he didn’t figure in the 32-person shortlist. George Best, Roy Keane, Paul McGrath and John Giles were the sole footballers included. Roy and McGrath made the shortlist a year later when RTÉ widened their purview with a poll for Ireland’s greatest person.

Robbie has perhaps suffered for a lack of obvious vulnerability, because we like our heroes to be flawed. We lionised Roy because we could cast him as the outsider whose abrasive asceticism was perhaps driven in reaction to something within rather than without. Robbie’s drive was comparatively frictionless, and so it was dismissed in some quarters as selfishness or greed.

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The decent skin would have simply given Noel Hunt that goal in Bari in 2009, for instance, but Robbie claimed the goal because he was driven by a kind of ruthless, relentless ambition with which Irish football was still a little too unacquainted. That same ambition is propelling his management career. Perhaps it will some day culminate in his leading Ireland, though that day currently feels a long way into the future.

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