Kevin Keegan’s visions of the future
New Statesman / by Jason Cowley / Aug 6, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Kevin Keegan has been part of the national conversation – as player, manager and pundit – since the early 1970s, and yet there is something ultimately unknowable, or as Anthony Quinn would have it in this new book, “strange” about him. Exactly what this strangeness amounts to, Quinn doesn’t quite say, nor does he attempt to find out through interrogating his subject. He has never met Keegan, and he did not try to contact him or those who played with or under him as a manager. He has read Keegan’s three autobiographies, each published two decades apart, and what he offers instead of a biography or fan’s memoir (he reveals little about himself) is a “portrait of Keegan coloured by my own memories, interests, judgements, digressions”. The digressions, which include footnotes, are particularly good, sardonic and erudite.
Quinn, who is 61, a novelist and film critic, suffers from what he calls “Keeganitis”. He cannot stop thinking about his boyhood sporting hero. “Keegan is one of those male stars, like Mick Jagger or Martin Amis, who remain in our mind’s eye full of youthful swagger, all tightened and tuned for maximum efficiency.” During the long, solitary hours at his desk, Quinn often watches YouTube clips from Keegan’s itinerant career as a “world-class player and economy-class manager”; he notably enjoys, as we all do, Keegan’s anti-Alex Ferguson, “I will love it if we beat them” rant on Sky Sports during the 1995-96 season when Newcastle, who Keegan had revitalised, squandered a 12-point lead to gift the Premier League title to Manchester United.
Those of us who are ardent football fans never quite get over the moment that our favourite player departs for another club, and as a young boy in Liverpool, Quinn had cried when Keegan joined Hamburger SV to become the highest-paid player in the Bundesliga. As he says, “Disappointment is something hard wired into everyone who plays or watches sport.”
Keegan was a 1970s superstar, but unlike any other player of the era. He was never a George Best-style lothario – he has been married to the same woman for 50 years – nor a heavy-drinking, hard-gambling showman like Stan Bowles or Frank Worthington. He pioneered the footballer’s perm but was no style icon as David Beckham later was. Several decades before Cristiano Ronaldo, he was obsessed with fitness but was no body narcissist.
He was something altogether different and new: football’s first player-as-entrepreneur. He negotiated his own contracts and was ever alert to the next move, a better deal. He insisted on inserting a clause in his Liverpool contract (long before this became standard practice) that allowed him to leave for a maximum transfer fee of £500,000, below his true market value. He had correctly reasoned that the lower the fee, the more he would be paid at his next club. When he joined Newcastle late in his career, he negotiated a deal that entitled him to 15 per cent of the receipts from gates above 15,000; he knew his arrival would excite the Geordie fans and later conceded to being “embarrassed” about how much he was earning as attendances surged.
My favourite extra-footballing Keegan moment came in 1976 when he was a participant in the BBC’s Superstars, in which notable international sportsmen competed against one another in events that tested their speed, strength and stamina. I loved the prime-time show and remember well the episode in which Keegan had a spectacular fall while competing in a bike race on a cinder track. You can watch footage of the accident and its aftermath on YouTube. Keegan wasn’t wearing a protective helmet when he crashed and afterwards, as he is interviewed by David Vine, you can see that he is shaken, bloodied but determined to get back on the bike. Most enjoyably, he seems to be holding a restorative cup of beer as he reassures Vine that he wants to carry on. Here in microcosm is the world of sport as we encountered it in the 1970s. Never such innocence again.
Keegan joined Liverpool from lowly Scunthorpe and quickly became a fans’ favourite. Short (5ft 7in), quick, determined and relentlessly competitive, he was mentored by Bill Shankly, the great Scottish manager who took Liverpool from the Second Division to the pinnacle of the English game. Shankly was Keegan’s “champion, his press agent, his guru and maybe his surrogate father”. His tactical advice was simple: “Go out there and drop some hand grenades.” Keegan, the son of a Labour-voting South Yorkshire miner, responded as instructed: his all-action style was explosive. As a young apprentice at Scunthorpe, he had “created his own maniacal fitness regime” by holding weights as he ran and up and down the terraces. By the time he arrived at Liverpool, he was “built like a tank”, an asset in the old First Division when the game was uncompromisingly brutal.
At Hamburg, Keegan was twice voted European Player of the Year, but his England career was less successful: England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups and the 1976 European Championship, which meant Keegan never starred at a major international tournament as the greatest players – the two Bobbys, Moore and Charlton, Pelé, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Platini, Maradona, Zidane, Messi – all did. By the time Keegan, now aged 31, played at a World Cup, in 1982 in Spain, he was carrying an injury and managed only a cameo from the bench in England’s final game before elimination.
Throughout his career there was something fundamentally restless and impulsive about Keegan, as if he never quite found what he was searching for or earned what he thought he was worth. He was always threatening to move to another club or later, as a manager, walk out if he didn’t get what he wanted. As England manager, he did not last long and abruptly resigned in October 2000 after losing 1-0 to Germany, in the last game at the old Wembley. “They’ve given me a fair run. There’s nobody to blame but myself. Kevin Keegan has given it his best shot,” he said, speaking about himself as if he were a character in someone else’s drama. His win rate of 38.9 per cent is the lowest of any England manager.
Quinn has a clean, fluent style, and the book has a magical readability, although there is too much readymade formulation, the higher cliché of standard footballese – Keegan has “bigger fish to fry”, his timing was “spot on”, people arrive “in the nick of time”, Newcastle’s popularity was “music to his ears”, and so on. And this is the second sports book I have reviewed in these pages in recent weeks (the other being Christopher Clarey’s The Warrior) in which each short chapter title begins with the definite article; a new template, perhaps, or mere coincidence.
Keegan rose during a period when we had something like a common culture in this country and only three TV channels. One knew back then that your neighbours were watching the same television programmes and reading in the newspapers about the same people as you. They were watching and reading about Kevin Keegan for sure. For this reason, Keegan’s story is deeply familiar to me, and this book is a wonderful exercise in nostalgia, both a celebration of an incomparable footballer and lament for something irretrievably lost.
Keegan: The Man Who Was King
Anthony Quinn
Faber and Faber, 224pp, £14.99
