One of football’s greats who played for Liverpool, Newcastle and England, later going on to manage the national side
The apotheosis of Kevin Keegan, who has died aged 75 of cancer, came in the minutes after his final appearance as a professional footballer, while wearing the black and white stripes of Newcastle United, the club of his heart.
On 17 May 1984, at the end of a friendly against Liverpool, with whom he had achieved his early fame, a helicopter landed on the pitch at St James’ Park and carried him away, still in his full kit, borne aloft by the cheering of 36,000 home fans, many of them moved to tears by his departure.
Such displays of emotion were seldom far away during a playing career that took the son of a Yorkshire coalminer from an apprenticeship at Scunthorpe United to Liverpool, Hamburger SV, Southampton, Newcastle and England, or during his periods as a manager with Newcastle, Fulham, England and Manchester City.
Usually those displays came in the celebration of triumphs such as Liverpool’s three league titles and a first European Cup victory or his two European footballer of the year awards – the Ballon d’Or – while playing for Hamburg. In management, he was applauded for taking Newcastle into Europe for the first time in 20 years and for securing the promotions that reinvigorated Fulham and Manchester City.
At 5ft 8in, as a player he was a bundle of energy with a predator’s opportunism and enough strength to fend off uncompromising defenders, although he was realistic about his skills. He was not indulging in false modesty when, in his autobiography, My Life in Football (2018), he summed up his playing career: “I was the mongrel who made it to Crufts, and that was fine by me.” Early on in his career, senior players complained that his appetite for training made them look bad. Sheer hard work and application had turned him into a great player.
An average of just over a goal every three games at all levels between 1968 and 1984 did not make him one of football’s most prolific strikers, but he thrived in partnership with forwards of complementary gifts, whether the tall John Toshack at Liverpool, the powerful Horst Hrubesch at Hamburg, the wily Mick Channon at Southampton, the superbly skilful Peter Beardsley at Newcastle or the silky Trevor Brooking with England.
For one who wore his heart on his sleeve, however, sudden drama was always lying in wait. A televised fistfight with Leeds United’s Billy Bremner during the 1974 Charity Shield at Wembley led to them both being sent off, although Keegan, having been slyly provoked by Bremner’s teammate John Giles, received the shorter suspension.
He fell out with Lawrie McMenemy, his manager at Southampton; with Bobby Robson, the England manager, when he learned from the media that he had been dropped from the squad; and with Mike Ashley, the owner of Newcastle, during his unhappy second spell as manager on Tyneside.
Most famously, he lost his self-control during a live television interview as the 1995-96 Premier League title race neared its climax. When asked about the erosion of Newcastle’s 12-point lead over Manchester United, whose own manager, Alex Ferguson, had been indulging in psychological warfare, Keegan exploded. “I tell you, honestly,” he said, “I would love it if we beat them! Love it!” His team promptly blew the remains of their advantage as United snatched the title.
Keegan’s tenure as England manager lasted less than two years. It included a failure to get through the group stage at the Euro 2000 finals and his famous resignation was announced to an executive of the Football Association in the dressing room toilets under Wembley stadium in the immediate aftermath of a dismal 1-0 defeat by Germany, when he confessed that he had “come up short”.
He had swept into the job on a wave of public enthusiasm, following the FA’s decision to sack Glenn Hoddle over his belief, stated in an newspaper interview, that disabled people were being punished for their sins in their previous lives. In the view of Terry Venables, another predecessor whose reign had ended in controversy, public sentiment lay behind Keegan’s appointment. “The fans got him the job,” Venables said. “He said the fans wanted him to take it. You do get caught up in these things. Sometimes you don’t make the right decision.”
Born in Armthorpe, near Doncaster, Kevin was the second of the three children of Doris (nee Watts), a former factory worker who made rag-rugs to sell from home, and Joe Keegan, a miner at Markham Main colliery.
His paternal grandfather, Frank Keegan, had moved from Ireland to settle on Tyneside, where he helped save lives in the West Stanley pit explosion of 1909, in which 168 men and boys died.
Joe, Frank’s son, became a fan of Newcastle United. After moving to find work and start a family in South Yorkshire, he passed on stories of such Geordie heroes as Hughie Gallacher and Jackie Milburn to his elder son. Kevin was educated at St Francis Xavier primary school in Balby Bridge – where a nun named Sister Mary Oliver wrote on the 10-year-old’s report that “Kevin’s football must be encouraged” – and then, after passing his 11-plus exam, St Peter’s high school in Cantley.
Money was scarce but family life was warm and secure, and lit by electricity for the first time once they moved to a council house with an indoor lavatory when he was 10.
His first pair of football boots cost £3second hand and were bought with his father’s winnings on the Grand National. He watched his first professional football at Belle Vue, where Doncaster Rovers played in the old fourth division, but he was turned down by them – “there were 30 or 40 boys in Doncaster who were better than me,” he said later. On leaving school at 15 with O-levels in art and history he went to work as a tea boy at a brass foundry in Balby, while continuing to play for local amateur teams.
“It was football every minute of the day,” he said, and after working on his technique and fitness to overcome his lack of height he was taken on by Scunthorpe United in 1968, aged 16. He joined the other apprentices in painting the stands and cleaning the senior players’ boots. “You’re not here to play football,” the club’s trainer sometimes told them. Scunthorpe were in the fourth division when he was given his first-team debut, in the same year, and they remained there for his three seasons at the Old Showground.
To boost his income during the summer, when his wages went down from £15 to £10, he took jobs in a steelworks and a psychiatric hospital. It was on a visit back to Doncaster in 1970 that he met the 16-year-old Jean Woodhouse on a fairground waltzer. They would be married in 1974.
He had played 124 league games for Scunthorpe, scoring 18 goals, when Liverpool’s scouts watched him in an FA Cup tie and recommended him to their manager, Bill Shankly. He arrived at Anfield for a fee of £33,000, an unknown alongside such established stars as Toshack, Ian Callaghan, Tommy Smith and Emlyn Hughes, having persuaded Shankly, on their first meeting, to raise his offer of £45 a week to £50. “If you do it for me,” Shankly told him, “you’ll never have to ask for a raise again.”
Making his debut in a 3-1 home win against Nottingham Forest in September 1971, Keegan scored the opening goal after 12 minutes – the first of 68 goals in 230 league appearances in Liverpool’s colours. The rapport with the fans was immediate. Later he would reflect that “the only thing I used to fear was missing an open goal in front of the Kop – I think I would have died on the spot”.
The following season he won the first of his league titles with Liverpool and his first European medal with a Uefa Cup final win over Borussia Mönchengladbach. A year later in the FA Cup final he scored twice in the 3-0 win over Newcastle United, his father’s favourites. Another Uefa Cup victory came against FC Bruges in 1974-75.
He reached his highest peak at Liverpool in 1976-77, scoring 20 goals as they took the league title again before travelling to Rome to beat Borussia Mönchengladbach in the final of the European Cup, the first of their victories in the continent’s top club competition. Although Keegan scored none of Liverpool’s three goals, his successful battle against his marker, the German international defender Berti Vogts, was vital to the team’s success.
Already, however, he had announced that he was leaving Anfield at the end of the season, moving to Hamburg for a £500,000 transfer fee, a British record. His newly permed hairstyle would set a trend in football, but a sticky start with his new club was only redeemed when, during an eight-week suspension imposed for punching an opponent who had persistently fouled him, he resolved to use the time to learn German and communicate better with his teammates. His 12 goals that season were enough to secure his first Ballon d’Or. He was only the third Englishman to receive the award, after Stanley Matthews and Bobby Charlton (and only Michael Owen has since won it).
The following year Keegan’s goals helped Hamburg win the Bundesliga for the first time since 1960, and he began attracting offers from Europe’s biggest clubs. While honouring the final year of his contract, he took the German club to the final of the 1980 European Cup, losing 1-0 in Madrid to Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest, the defending champions.
By the start of the next season, to general surprise, he had chosen to move to unfashionable Southampton for a transfer fee of £500,000. In Keegan’s two seasons at the Dell, the club finished sixth and seventh in the old first division, leading the table briefly in April 1982.
After disagreements with McMenemy, he moved that summer to Newcastle for a fee of £100,000, taking the chance to represent his father’s club, even though they were floundering in the old second division. As with Liverpool, he was embraced by a passionate set of fans and scored 21 goals in his first season, the team finishing fifth in the table.
A year later they won promotion, only for Keegan to decide that, at 33, his speed had gone and he would no longer be up to the challenge. Having announced his retirement, at the end of the season he moved to Marbella with his family, dismissing rumours that he intended to move into football management.
He had made his full international debut with England in 1972, under Sir Alf Ramsey. In 1976 Don Revie made him captain, a role he fulfilled in 31 of his 63 appearances, which yielded 21 goals. Bitterly disappointed by the failure to reach the 1978 World Cup finals, he led England at the 1980 European championships in Italy, under Ron Greenwood, when they failed to progress beyond the group stage.
Two years later he made his only appearance at the World Cup finals, returning from treatment for a back injury to come on as a substitute in the 64th minute of the final match of the second group phase against Spain. He missed a clear chance from six yards – “the sort of header I’d scored all my life” – as Greenwood’s side drew 0-0 in Madrid and were eliminated.
When Robson took over from Greenwood, he announced that “Keegan is very much a part of my plans” before omitting him from his first squad without explanation. An angry Keegan responded by scoring four goals in his next match for Newcastle, but his international playing career was over.
His sojourn in Spain, where he brought his golf handicap down to four, lasted seven years before he and his wife decided to return to England for the sake of their two daughters’ education. But after leaving Dover docks in a car laden with family possessions on the way to join his family in Southampton, he felt drowsy and stopped for a nap in a pub car park. While he dozed, the car was attacked by thugs with baseball bats and intent on ransacking the vehicle. After taking a beating, Keegan counted himself lucky to need only eight stitches in his scalp.
With his daughters settled at school, he was concentrating on a plan to set up his Soccer Circus theme parks when Newcastle, bottom of the old second division with 16 games to go in the 1991-92 season, invited him to return as manager, on a rescue mission. A new owner, Sir John Hall, developer of Gateshead’s Metro Centre, offered him £60,000 to keep the club up. When that had been achieved, Hall secured Keegan’s signature on a formal contract and listened to his demands for improvements in the training facilities and investment in the squad.
In 1993-94 they finished third in the Premier League. Over the next couple of seasons, with such flamboyant players as David Ginola, Les Ferdinand and Faustino Asprilla, they flirted with winning the title. In the summer of 1996 Keegan broke the British transfer record to sign Alan Shearer, a boyhood Newcastle fan, from Blackburn Rovers for a world record fee of £15m.
Six months later, with the team again well placed, but tired of boardroom politics and refusing to sign a 10-year contract to help with an imminent stock market flotation, Keegan suddenly announced his resignation. Later he received a £1m bonus for the flotation, a reward for restoring the club’s fortunes on the field. Eight months after leaving St James’ Park he accepted Mohamed Al Fayed’s invitation to lift Fulham out of the third tier. In the middle of his second season the team was doing so well that he was invited to replace the sacked Hoddle as England manager. He combined the roles until promotion had been secured and then left a grateful Craven Cottage.
When the England adventure ended unhappily, he was soon back to take over the newly relegated Manchester City, guiding them back to the top tier at the first opportunity, finishing ninth and 16th in his two completed Premier League campaigns before once again leaving midway through a season, telling the club that he intended to retire from football.
Just under three years later he swept back into St James’ Park, charged by Ashley, the new owner, with avoiding a relegation battle. Although he succeeded, a power struggle with the club’s director of football, Dennis Wise, over transfer policy led to his resignation on the eve of the 2008-09 season, to the dismay of the club’s fans. A year later a tribunal awarded him compensation of around £2m for constructive dismissal.
When Ashley sold the club to Saudi investors in 2021, Keegan lost no time in expressing his delight, although there would be no return. Instead much of his time was spent addressing corporate gatherings, delighting audiences not just with his stories of exploits on the pitch but with the evergreen tale of how he once lost his temper with Alex Ferguson. In 1982 he was appointed OBE.
He is survived by Jean and their daughters, Laura and Sarah.
Joseph Kevin Keegan, footballer and manager, born 14 February 1951; died 20 July 2026
