The former England manager may be remembered by many for his ‘I’d love it’ rant in 1996, but that should not obscure the remarkable nature of his football career
Kevin Keegan, who has died aged 75, is the only British player to win the Ballon d’Or twice, was the star of Liverpool’s first European Cup-winning team, a messianic figure at Newcastle United as a player and coach, forging a team so memorable that Fifa’s president wrote to commend him, and was the captain and then manager of the England men’s national team. And yet, as Keegan would ruefully reflect, he will principally be remembered by many for an emotional outburst that precipitated Newcastle’s historic failure in a Premier League title race, a TV interview which presaged the coming era of the modern game.
Keegan’s “I’d love it” rant of April 1996, directed at Alex Ferguson, became a meme before the modern meaning of the word and social media even existed, repeatedly played on Sky Sports and becoming indelibly marked in the minds of multiple generations, many not even born when it occurred. It frequently tops polls as the most memorable moment in Premier League history and foreshadowed an era where digital clips and personality narratives would dominate football coverage.
There is a danger, however, of reducing Keegan’s life to a series of ever-more emotional explosions, of which there were many, such as his punch-up with Leeds United’s Billy Bremner in the 1974 Charity Shield. For that would obscure the extraordinary nature of his achievements and the fact he was arguably the most charismatic modern English footballer; more eloquent than David Beckham and Paul Gascoigne and more passionate than Bobby Moore. He had a rare gift for inspiring players and almost everyone who interacted with him at his best came away uplifted.
Still, Keegan’s meltdown on TV, where he took issue with Ferguson’s supposed “mind games” in suggesting Leeds players would go easy on Newcastle during a tight title run-in with Manchester United, became a defining moment. “Strangers shout ‘love it’ to me from car windows,” wrote Keegan in his autobiography. “Autograph hunters tell me they would ‘love it’ if I could sign their pieces of paper. When I go to charity events I am often asked to sign photographs showing me in that classic pose: headphones on, finger jabbing, blazing eyes. Those pictures tend to be auctioned for a lot more money than the ones where I am playing for England or any of my clubs.”
Keegan claimed to be relaxed about the characterisation, skewed though it was, perhaps because more than any English footballer before he had maximised football’s commercial and media opportunities and accepted the respective bouquets and brickbats that ensued. Even before that meltdown, he would be best remembered by many in the 1970s for his excruciating bike crash on Superstars, a TV show which pitted athletes from different sports against each other in unfamiliar disciplines. Sprawled across the cycle track, Keegan’s bare flesh was ripped red raw by the gravel. Most remember the drama but few recall that, showing characteristic pig-headed determination, he got back on the bike, bloodied and bandaged, for a rematch, which he won before winning the entire contest.
Keegan was born in Armthorpe, Doncaster, to Doris and Joe, a war veteran Durham miner who had migrated south in search of work at Markham colliery. His upbringing echoed Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen sketch, only his memories were authentic, a throwback to a different century. Their terrace house “had a detached outhouse where we washed. Our bath was an old zinc tub and the toilet was at the foot of the garden and we never had electricity until I was 10 and we moved into a council house in Balby.”
Keegan’s ascent to the peak of the game’s elite was unforeseen, few recognising his talent early on, most dismissing him as too small. He always credited Sister Mary Oliver, the nun who ran his Catholic primary school football team and who refereed with a crucifix around her neck, as being as important to him as a mentor as Bill Shankly was. “Kevin’s football must be encouraged,” she wrote in a school report, which gave him immense self-belief.
Doncaster Rovers rejected him and he started work at Peglers Brass Works at 16, playing for their football team but only in the reserves and also for a pub team on Sundays, where he fortuitously played against a Scunthorpe scout, Bob Nellis, who got him a trial at the struggling Third Division club. Keegan referred to himself as a “mongrel” and “weasel” and the “least-talented” Ballon d’Or winner, and despite impressing at Scunthorpe it was still a major shock when Shankly, the man he regarded as a second father and progenitor of his success, took him to Liverpool. Shankly told him: “You’re not just a great player – you’re one of the great players!” It seemed an unlikely boast but Keegan scored on his Liverpool debut and was never dropped thereafter. He would inherit from Shankly comparable motivational skills.
1951 Kevin Keegan is born on 14 February in Armthorpe, near Doncaster.
1968 Begins playing career at Scunthorpe United.
1971 Signed by Bill Shankly for Liverpool at age of 20, initially as a midfielder.
1972 Makes England debut against Wales in November.
1973 Liverpool win the league; Keegan scores twice in Uefa Cup final win over Borussia Mönchengladbach.
1974 Scores twice as Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-0 in the FA Cup final. His first England goal comes against Wales.
1976 Liverpool win the league title and Keegan scores in each leg of Uefa Cup final win against Club Brugge. His celebrity is such he appears on the TV show Superstars, and famously crashes his bike during one of the races.
1977 Another league title for Liverpool, who also win their first European Cup, a 3-1 victory over Mönchengladbach. Keegan moves to Hamburg for £500,000, nearly double the German transfer record.
1978 Wins Ballon d’Or.
1979 Wins Ballon d’Or again as Hamburg secure their first German championship title in 19 years, and first in the Bundesliga era.
1980 Captains England at Euros but they are knocked out in the group stage. Leaves Hamburg to join Southampton for two seasons.
1982 Transfers to Newcastle in the Second Division. Plays final match for England, after 63 caps (31 as captain) and 21 goals.
1984 Helps Newcastle secure promotion in his second season, then retires from playing. Across his club career, he scores 204 goals in 592 appearances.
1992 Takes first coaching role as manager of struggling Newcastle in February. Danger of relegation to the Third Division is averted.
1993 Leads them to the First Division title and promotion to the Premier League in his first full season in charge.
1994 Newcastle finish third in Premier League.
1996 Newcastle finish second in the Premier League, despite leading for most of campaign – by 12 points at one stage. Season includes famous “I would love it if we beat them” comments when discussing rivals Manchester United on Sky Sports.
1997 Leaves Newcastle and takes over at Fulham for two seasons.
1999 Takes charge of England national team in February.
2000 Coaches England at Euro 2000 where they beat Germany but still go out in the group stage. Resigns in October after a 1–0 loss to Germany in World Cup qualifying.
2001 Takes over at Manchester City.
2008 Returns to Newcastle but lasts eight months after tensions with the board and owner Mike Ashley.
Though reclusive, Keegan also had a streak of extrovertism, embracing every aspect of the game’s growing commercial opportunities, from his famous Brut advert to appearances on Top of the Pops, where his single Head Over Heels in Love reached the top 40. Though he enjoyed standing out, he admitted he would never have got away with his trademark bubble perm in the old-school Liverpool dressing room. His wife, Jean, whom he met on the waltzers at the Doncaster St Leger horse racing meeting when she was 16 and he was 19 and to whom he remained married for life, burst into fits of laughter when she first saw it. He had the last laugh, the hairstyle inspiring alarming copycat versions across the football world.
Keegan remained true to what he considered to be his working-class, mining roots, declaring himself a Labour man, annoyed that a staged photo of him feigning to kiss then prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the cheek was interpreted as support for economic policies which had ravaged heavy industry. He was more at home playing head tennis with a later PM, Tony Blair, to whom he was close enough to host at his home for dinner.
Keegan inherited two mantles from Britain’s greatest players of the 1960s. As George Best, the original footballer sex symbol of the modern era, lapsed into alcoholism and increasing unreliability, Keegan became the more wholesome and dependable commercial face of the superstar footballer in Britain, inundated with deals. For England he effectively became Moore’s successor as captain but at a time when the national team was in decline from his predecessor’s World Cup-winning heights. For Keegan, as the sole outfield world-class player, it was a heavy burden to bear as they missed out on successive World Cup finals.
His first major tournament for his country was the ill-fated 1980 European Championship and his World Cup career amounted to 20 minutes in 1982, a campaign which was disrupted by a back injury and where “my only contribution was a dreadful miss against the host nation to send us home. That moment is probably the only moment of my England career that people remember now.” It would prove to be his last game for England at the age of just 31.
More notable features of Keegan’s England career were his courage in defying IRA death threats to play against Northern Ireland in Belfast, then walking out on the team when Don Revie dropped him shortly afterwards and being arbitrarily beaten up by Yugoslav custom officials prior to a game in Belgrade, a horrific and wholly underserved ordeal that sparked an international incident. His frustration was best summed up in a story he told about the great Dutch player Johnny Rep. Surveying an England team at Wembley in 1977, Rep turned to Keegan and said: “Kevvy, you have problems here: this is the worst England side I have seen.” The Netherlands won 2-0 and, as Keegan recalled, could have scored at will.
Keegan was a pioneering player, negotiating release clauses, unheard of at the time in England, at Liverpool and Hamburg, allowing him to leave if a club met a £500,000 fee, thereby controlling his moves. Leaving Liverpool at what was assumed to be their peak – he had just helped them win their first European Cup in 1977 – to join a team sixth in the Bundesliga was demonstrative of both Keegan’s single-mindedness and capacity to challenge himself. He also quadrupled his salary, reflecting the economic state of English football at the time.
Hamburg was not an initial success. Jealous teammates held meetings to get him kicked out of the club and, according to Keegan, refused to pass to him. His nadir came at Christmas 1977 when, in a festive-season friendly, unhappy at his plight and frustrated with over-physical treatment from the Lübeck defender Erhard Press, Keegan punched him on the jaw and subsequently knocked him out, receiving an eight-week ban as punishment. Yet, a year later, he won his first Ballon d’Or and went on to lead Hamburg to their first Bundesliga title since 1960.
Keegan embraced Germany, learning the language and was nicknamed “Mighty Mouse”, a tribute to his astonishing strength given his diminutive size. His first daughter, Laura, was born there but his finale, a European Cup final that would have sealed Hamburg’s place in history, was a sad one, ending as it did in defeat to Nottingham Forest. Having won three league titles, two Uefa Cups, an FA Cup and European Cup at Liverpool, the Bundesliga title would be the last trophy Keegan ever won. He was just 29 years old.
Keegan made a typically unconventional choice in joining Southampton, a promising yet small-market team under a talented, persuasive manager in Lawrie McMenemy. Keegan propelled them to a top-six finish and qualification for Europe, but they faded to seventh in the second season and Keegan, disillusioned, made a decision that would define the second half of his professional life.
Newcastle were in one of their periodic financial and footballing crises and in the old Second Division when, with money from brewers Scottish & Newcastle, they persuaded him to join in 1982. His father’s links to the north-east and reverence for Newcastle players such as Jackie Milburn were an emotional pull on Keegan, but one that cost him his England career. The manager, Bobby Robson, didn’t feel it appropriate to pick a second-tier player for England and Keegan, still captain and by far the most iconic national team player, learned from the press he had been “dumped”. He felt “betrayed, hurt and humiliated”.
Crowds doubled at St James’ Park with Keegan’s arrival and Newcastle were promoted as champions in Keegan’s second season, 1983-84, by which point he had already decided to quit playing at the age of 33. Typically impulsive, it was when Mark Lawrenson outsprinted Keegan to dispossess him during an FA Cup tie at Liverpool that he decided he would finish his career at the end of the season.
Keegan and family, which now included his second daughter, Sarah, born in 1982, decamped to his Marbella villa and, other than periodic business deals and discussions about a long-held dream to launch a Soccer Circus, he embraced retirement. Yet endless rounds of golf failed to satisfy. The family had moved back to his Hampshire home when Sir John Hall, a dynamic north-east businessman, called in 1992, begging Keegan to help Newcastle avoid relegation to the third tier and potential liquidation. Despite having watched no football for years, Keegan accepted. He threatened to quit after a few games but stayed to keep Newcastle up and promptly announced that he wanted to build a dynasty to rival Liverpool and challenge for the Premier League title.
Most considered that quixotic and yet Newcastle won promotion to the Premier League as champions and with judicious youthful signings such as Andy Cole and Rob Lee, and veteran players such as Peter Beardsley, they came third and sixth in the top flight. So great was his authority, Keegan could even placate angry fans on the steps of St James’ Park when the club sold Cole to Manchester United.
With that money the club signed David Ginola and Les Ferdinand and won nine of their first 10 games in 1995-96, often in thrilling fashion, establishing a seemingly unassailable 12-point lead by January. But a crucial defeat at home to Ferguson’s United in March 1996 and the Scot’s repeated use of psychological barbs seemed to weigh heavy on Keegan as his team’s form disintegrated. A dramatic yet debilitating 4-3 defeat at Liverpool led Sepp Blatter to write to Keegan but the sight of him slumped over advertising hoardings as Liverpool scored a last-minute winner suggested the toll was too much.
Keegan eventually cracked, denouncing Ferguson in his famous TV interview. “You can tell him now, we’re still fighting for this title and I’ll tell you, honestly, I will love it if we beat them. Love it!” United won the title with four points to spare.
Keegan initially seemed determined to rebuild as the club signed Alan Shearer for a world-record £15m and they beat United 5-0 at St James’ Park that autumn, but Keegan quit soon after, outraged that a city banker preparing the club for flotation had issued him an ultimatum to sign a contract. Football’s new era seemed untethered from the idealistic foundational values imbued in him by Shankly.
Keegan seemed done with football until the now-disgraced Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed used speculative talks about his much-vaunted Soccer Circus to persuade him to become chief operating officer and eventually manager of Fulham in the third tier. He almost seemed at his happiest as the club accelerated to promotion, but his time was interrupted by a national crisis when Glenn Hoddle was sacked as England manager for making offensive comments about disabled people. The clamour for Keegan to take over was indicative of his popularity with ordinary fans. However, it proved a decision he came to greatly regret, taking in a humiliating Euro 2000 group-stage exit and ending with him resigning in the toilets after an ignominious defeat against Germany in England’s last game at the old Wembley Stadium. It was, he conceded, a job beyond his abilities.
That said, Keegan was happy to take on Manchester City in the old First Division, getting them promoted to the Premier League as champions with 99 points. He remained at the club for four years, an almost unprecedented period of stability at the club at that time. When he finally left City he seemed to be done with coaching and finally launched his Soccer Circus in Glasgow, though it closed after a few years. Yet there was to be one last comeback at Newcastle under the ill-starred ownership of Mike Ashley, which proved a disaster and lasted just eight months.
The idea that a high-minded, old-fashioned football manager schooled by Shankly could coexist with a modern businessman as ruthless as Ashley and his cast of minions running the club always seemed improbable. When he walked away from the job, eventually winning a lengthy and bitter constructive dismissal claim, it was to be Keegan’s last act in football. So acrimonious was the departure that he was only able to return in disguise to attend a function at the club.
The current regime made clear Keegan was always welcome back at St James’ Park. That was after his stage four cancer had been revealed in a series of speaking engagements in May 2026, one of which in Newcastle was, in retrospect, a heartfelt farewell to the fans to whom he had always felt closest. After that draining but exhilarating evening Keegan’s associates reported that he was in high spirits, energised by the reconnection with the fans who loved him most.
It was to prove Keegan’s final goodbye. Football, as he observed, had given him everything except for a happy ending.
