Midfielder, manager, meme: The many faces of Roy Keane

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

ONCE upon a time in Cork, a baby was born who would grow up to terrify not just opposition midfielders, but also his own teammates, his managers, and presumably the postman if he happened to take pause and congratulate himself on doing an honest day's work (It's his job!!).
His name was Roy Keane. It's almost impossible to imagine he was once a baby, but a baby he presumably was. Once.
That Roy Keane was the embodiment of a certain kind of '90s masculinity: The clenched jaw, the permanent scowl, the gait of a man who has just discovered his pint is off. He wore his rage like a birthmark. And woe betide anyone who crossed him.
Patrick Vieira learned this the hard way in the Highbury tunnel, in a scene that resembled less a pre-match meet-and-greet and more the opening of a particularly gritty Scorsese movie. This Roy Keane was small in stature but had the presence of a colossus.
In a glorious era for midfielders, he was — to my mind at least — the best. In his pomp, he was a joy to watch, but like nitroglycerine to handle. You worried for him the way you worried for a prodigal son.
Roy Keane as a Sky Sports pundit. Picture: Naomi Baker/Getty
A late-night phone call could mean many things: A man-of-the-match performance at the San Siro; a reverse-charges SoS from a police station in Salford; a request for 20 quid to be posted over to Manchester. Believing in Keane the footballer was easy. Trusting Keane, the young man, was much harder, mostly because we had no clue who he was.
For years, Keane's aura was that of a man who might physically disintegrate if he so much as smiled. It simply wasn't done. Smiling was for the soft. If you wanted warmth, you could go sit by a radiator.
Keane was here to win football matches — and possibly the moral high ground — by any means necessary.
There is one clip from the evening he won the PFA Footballer of the Year award for the 1999/2000 season where, with literally no other options available to him, the shape of his mouth betrays him, and his face contorts into what would be ruled by any credible court of body language a human smile.
That's my only recollection of him ever doing it outside of the act of a teammate scoring a goal.
But time, that great equaliser, eventually gets even the fiercest of midfield generals. And so, here we are in 2025, looking at Roy Keane — still with the beard, still with the occasional glint of menace — but now one of the most beloved figures in sports media.
A man who has, almost accidentally, become a sort of national treasure. And not just a national treasure at home here in Ireland, but, weirdly, in a transcendent nod to improved Anglo-Irish relations, the UK, too.
How did this happen? What alchemy transformed Keane from the most combustible footballer of his generation to the man whose every withering remark on Sky Sports is immediately clipped, shared, and immortalised on TikTok by teenagers too young to remember him two-footing Alf-Inge Haaland into next month?
To understand Keane, we must first understand ourselves. And since that's never going to happen, best sit back, relax, and happily join me in the surface-level deconstruction of the most fascinating Irish public figure since — you've guessed it — Michael Collins.
Roy Keane, the Midfield Magician
Roy Keane was never content to play football in the same way the rest of us played: As a hobby, a lark, or a means of justifying a curry afterwards.
No, Keane treated every match as a moral referendum. Either you were up to the standard, or you were a disgrace to the shirt, the city, and possibly humanity itself.
It was this intensity that powered Manchester United through the greatest years of their modern era. You think Keane was happy to win? No.
Happiness was for people who didn't want to win the next game. Satisfaction was weakness. He was, in his own way, a sort of footballing monk — celibate not in the usual sense, but from joy itself.
Roy Keane as Manchester United in 1999. Picture: INPHO/ALLSPORT
There were signs that it was not ever thus. In the early years for Nottingham Forest, Ireland, and United, there were moments when the mask slipped, and the Mayfield kid was exposed. The over-the-top-of-the-shoulders celebration was a surrender to momentary joy, which lasted seconds. The rest was fury.
Alex Ferguson, no stranger to darkness himself, eventually found Keane's relentless standards too much to endure. Their split was less amicable divorce and more Sid and Nancy. And Roy, naturally, saw nothing strange about this.
He expected the same from everyone else that he demanded of himself: Total commitment and, ideally, no smiling.
Both his exits — from Saipan, and later from United — were 'Where were you when' moments of tragic history. I recall leaving a college exam early to use a phone box in order to call a friend and confirm the news.
I had no credit. That would've disgusted Keane. 'No credit? Give me a break.'
Everyone remembers the night in Turin. For those of us who were really paying attention though, there were equally impressive nights in Bolton, Stoke, Newcastle, and Leeds. Roy Keane did not discriminate. He was an equal opportunity destroyer.
Roy Keane, the Manager
Having spent years glaring at people for a living, Keane took up managing them, first with Sunderland and then Ipswich. And while his record was respectable, the stories emerging were of a man bewildered by mere mortals who didn't share his evangelical zeal.
One anecdote has it that when a Sunderland player dared to show up late to training, Keane simply turned his car around and drove home. Because if they couldn't be bothered, neither could he. This is known in management circles as 'sending a message,' but in Keane's case, it was likely much less performative in its motive, and just a very practical expression of disgust.
Roy Keane as Republican of Ireland manager in 2017. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire
Another tale recounts Roy sitting in the canteen, glowering into a cup of tea while young professionals crept past like mice in a haunted house.
'Good morning,' they'd squeak, and he'd nod imperceptibly, as if granting them a reprieve from execution.
But even Roy must have sensed he was not built for the modern game's mood enhancers and sports psychologists. So, he drifted away from the dugout and into something altogether less obvious: punditry.
Roy Keane, the Accidental Comedian
The early signs were unpromising. Here was a man so famously laconic he once made Ryan Giggs look like Graham Norton. Surely, he'd be a disaster in front of the cameras.
And yet somehow it worked.
Because, in an age of bland punditry, Keane was refreshingly honest. He didn't do hyperbole. He didn't do platitudes. He'd watch a half-hearted back-pass, scowl, and pronounce it 'shocking'.
Or he'd hear the suggestion that a player needed an arm around the shoulder and look as though he was about to call security.
Soon enough, Sky Sports realised they'd struck gold. Keane didn't just provide analysis — he provided theatre. Stick him next to Micah Richards, the permanently giddy labrador of the studio, and you had the perfect double act:
Micah cackling, Roy sighing with existential despair. It was like watching an old married couple — if one half of the couple believed the other should be dropped from the squad.
One particularly telling moment came when Richards declared that he 'loved football'. Keane responded with an arched eyebrow and the words, 'You love football, yeah? I love winning.' It was the most Keane sentence ever uttered.
And yet, paradoxically, the more unimpressed he appeared, the more we loved him for it.
Roy Keane, The Redemption
In any other sphere of life, this would be called a 'rebrand'. But Keane is too sincere, too committed to his principles to consciously rebrand. What's happened instead is a sort of collective reappraisal. We've all decided that he was right all along, even if we'd never survive 10 minutes in his company.
Because the modern footballer — cocooned, pampered, massaged — stands in such contrast to Keane's old-school values that watching him skewer them has become such a cathartic respite from a reality spent surfing LinkedIn, seeing the worst of everybody.
He is anti-performative. A Beckettian masterpiece. He doesn't scream 'Look at me/Don't look at me' like so many public-facing narcissistic men often do, instead he says, 'What the fuck are you looking at?' On prime-time TV.
In doing so, the man once synonymous with football's darker impulses — rage, spite, retribution — has become the game's conscience. He is the last link to a time when men drank pints after training and tackled as if their mortgage depended on it. He has become, dare I say it, a role model. Just one you cannot turn your back to.
Roy Keane, the Meme
If you'd told a younger Roy Keane that one day he'd be immortalised in memes, he'd have looked at you with the same expression he reserved for a young Gary Neville.
But memes are the currency of modern fame, and, accidentally or otherwise, Roy is minted.
There he is, his face contorted in disgust, captioned: 'When someone says they 'gave it 110%.'' Or sitting with his arms folded, the unspoken louder than a vuvuzela: 'Just do your bloody job.'
Teenagers who never saw him play nowadays know him only as The Angry Bearded Man. And in a way, that's a triumph. Because if there's one thing Roy would appreciate, it's consistency.
Whether he's breaking up play or breaking the nose of a lippy pseudo-hard man in a Cheshire pub, he's never pretended to be anything he's not.
Authenticity, that's his superpower.
Roy Keane, The Softening
You might be tempted to believe, watching Roy gently chuckle at Ian Wright's gags, that he's mellowed. But I suspect he's just found a new outlet. Once, his rage-fuelled tackles. Now, it fuels soundbites and viral clips.
And occasionally — only occasionally — he lets the mask slip. You see him talk about Cork, about family, about his dogs. About the things he genuinely hates, like smiling, parties, fireworks, and leaf blowers.
Murdo McLeod's 2002 portrait of Roy Keane is one of the artworks featured in the Crawford Art Gallery's 'Now You See It...' exhibition. Picture used with permission from the Crawford Art Gallery
And for a fleeting moment, you glimpse a gentler Roy, the man behind the scowl. Then someone suggests a player 'had a good game despite losing 3-0', and the eyebrow shoots back up, the voice goes higher than a Jordan Pickford clearance, and you remember he is a man of standards.
He is, and always will be, Roy Keane. Less a pundit than an elemental force, reminding us that standards matter, that excuses are for losers, and that nobody should ever, ever smile when they're 2-0 down.
Roy Keane, the (reluctant) National Treasure
There's a temptation to assume Roy secretly enjoys all this adulation. The podcasts. The live appearances. An upcoming movie.
But it seems more likely that he endures it in the same way he endured team-building exercises: With stoic resignation. And that, really, is the secret of his charm.
He hasn't changed as much as the world around him has. We've softened. So has he, but not much. And in our cosseted modernity, he's the last authentic holdout, grumbling from the sofa, refusing to tolerate mediocrity.
It's what makes him special. It's why a generation who never watched him harangue the otherwise untouchable Eric Cantona now hang on his every word. And it's why — though he'd scoff at the idea — he has become something well beyond beloved. He is essential.
And finally…Roy Keane, the Metaphor
Roy Keane's evolution is proof of two things. That time does funny things to a man's reputation and that we love truth tellers in hindsight. From a safe distance. Preferably behind a screen, or on a stage, where our own insecurities are hidden, safe from prosecution.
But if Roy has taught us anything (other than the fact that he's ultimately right about everything), it's that sometimes the truth hurts. And sometimes the truth comes with a Cork accent, a magnificent beard, and a look that says: 'I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed.'
Which, if you know Roy Keane, is roughly the same thing.
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