From football hero to grey-bearded influencer, how Roy Keane has shaped modern Ireland

Influencer is a derogatory term, usually applied to somebody from Gen Z who hasn’t achieved anything very much except figuring out how best to deploy modern technology to create mindless content, usually centred around a faux-glamorous lifestyle.

Possessing some talent for generating clicks and attracting followers, the best of them earn fortunes from ancillary sponsorship and shilling for brands. And those of us of a certain age look down our noses, tut-tutting at this trite ridiculousness.

Witness how, in another of his Sky Mobile commercial outings, Roy Keane’s pretend trailer had a sign on it declaring: “No TikTokers, Influencers or Clowns beyond this point.” Which was kind of ironic.

Even if his original fame were organic, the product of a professional career of astonishing achievement stretching across a decade-and-a-half, there is a sense he has now become the ultimate influencer. And blue-chip corporations know as much.

In 1997 the journalist James Brown took over as editor of GQ magazine in London, then one of the most prestigious gigs in publishing. A football fan who had made his name shaking up the industry by founding Loaded, the lads’ mag, his plans to shake up the first edition of GQ under his stewardship included an interview with Keane.

GQ was rather a staid publication at that point in its existence, so Brown was going to make the glossy mag livelier and more populist. When he ran through the list of features at an editorial meeting, a long-serving section editor at the publication piped up, saying “Who’s Roy Keane?” Brown later cited this person not knowing the captain of Manchester United and one of the best players in the Premier League as evidence of how culturally stagnant the mag had become.

A quarter of a century down the line, every fashionista knows Keane’s name. In 2023 Adidas hired the long-superannuated version of Keane to front its Spezial range of leisure wear, replete with a classic photo shoot that might have graced the pages of GQ in its heyday. Adidas also produced a moody video of him wearing combinations from the collection as he walked his dog and drove a pleasure craft around a body of water in England’s Lake District.

The casual jackets, combat pants and samba sneakers he donned are, of course, the uniform for many 50-something Irishmen attending gigs, usually featuring the greying, balding bands of their youth. In middle age, our fathers wore Farah trousers in battleship grey and round-neck sweaters with collared shirts under them. But we are still desperately vying for some semblance of cool as we age less gracefully, even though some of us, like Keane, sport salt-and-pepper beards and are now grandfathers.

Adidas happened upon the perfect pitchman almost by accident. Gary Aspden, the curator of the Spezial collection, was a good friend of the late Terry Hall of The Specials and Fun Boy Three. When Aspden took part in a BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme about Hall, he was WhatsApping back and forth with the singer’s PR guy, whose profile picture happened to be of a mysterious hooded, tanned man. Aspden figured it must be some Hollywood actor and only realised when he zoomed in closer that the photograph was of Keane. That’s when the idea to invite him to front a clothing brand was born.

“It felt a bit leftfield as Roy is not known for doing anything like this, but I felt that could be the beauty of it,” Aspden said.

“I called Nick Griffiths [commercial director] and said I want to approach Roy Keane about being in our next film. Nick was immediately enthusiastic – he is a Gooner [Arsenal supporter], but is a fan of Roy’s.

“Nick said it would be brilliant if we could get him to do it, but wasn’t holding his breath, as Roy rarely endorses anything. We knew immediately that it felt right and hoped Roy would consider it, as he is aware of the range and has worn it in the past.

“It turned out that Roy really liked the film we did in Iceland with [the actor] Stephen Graham, so when he agreed to do this we were made up. Roy is a decent man who has real presence. He is a voice of truth in a sea of bull**** and, he loves Bob Dylan and New Order.”

In his playing pomp, Keane had only ever been seriously associated with one sports brand, becoming synonymous with Diadora, whose black and yellow Brasil boots he wore for much of his career. The Italian sportswear manufacturer gave him the largest endorsement contract in company history in 2000, worth a reported £1 million per season.

They knew what they were buying. One of their classic ads from the period showed a figurine of Keane with the ball at his feet and the broken body parts of an opponent strewn on the field around him. Another promo featured an action figure of a character called “Keano” in Diadora training gear alongside the slogan: “Touch my legs and hear me growl.” There was even a poster produced in which the whites of his eyes were painted red as the company proudly announced: “We sold our soul to the devil.”

If they were shamelessly exploiting his hard-man persona on the field to flog boots, then he never complained about it. Apart from amplifying his legend, he always appreciated how Diadora stood by him after he did his cruciate and lost the guts of a full season in 1997.

Loyalty has always been something he cherished. Before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, he did an obviously ridiculous ad for Eircom dressed up in full samurai regalia for a paltry fee because it was part of the Irish squad’s commercial deal with the FAI sponsor.

During the build-up to the tournament, he also fronted a television commercial for 7Up, although some billboards accompanying that campaign were later spectacularly defaced by aggrieved fans in the days following Saipan.

“I turned down a lot of money over the years,” Keane said in 2001, “but I think I’m getting the rewards now.”

There were a couple of lucrative years around that point of his career. A commercial with Pepsi where he was a foosball player alongside United team-mates against Juventus.

The mortifying Walkers Crisps St Patrick’s Day debacle alongside Gary Lineker that doesn’t get any better with age. He claimed later to have signed on for that without knowing it would require him to dress up and prance around the streets of Dublin as a mischievous leprechaun with the number 16 on his back.

Arguably the most graphic illustration of his drawing power during those peak years was the £1.4 million he was reportedly paid for his first autobiography with Eamon Dunphy.

To put all those deals in some context, David Beckham, a far less essential player on that United team, earned an estimated £6 million a season just from endorsements in those days.

In comparison to the ubiquitous Beckham and others in the English game then, there may have been a sense Keane never cashed in like he should. That’s not strictly true. He always knew his worth. Witness the size of his contracts at United and the fact he was savvy enough to listen to Michael Kennedy, his solicitor and long-time adviser, when it came to insisting on shares in the club as part of one of those deals.

The only constant endorsement throughout his career of course was his decades-long, unpaid commitment to using his celebrity to further the work of the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind charity. There’s no greater measure of his dedication to that cause than the fact that, as part of one promotional campaign on their behalf, he agreed to be interviewed on live radio by Gift Grub’s Mario Rosenstock playing Roy Keane.

In terms of commercial outings, Keane merely picked and chose when he wanted to be out there as a shill for something. Until now. Lately, he’s picked and chosen far more than before and his brand has grown accordingly. With strange consequences.

No Irish athlete has endured public ownership on the scale of Keane. In the beginning it was against his will, the prurient intrusion of tabloids as he rose to prominence in a sport undergoing a post-Italia ’90 explosion in popularity.

But in later years, he has been a willing participant in the public square, putting himself out there on a weekly basis on The Overlap in particular, allowing us to see all the foibles, the moods, the microaggressions, the biting wit, the lingering resentments.

No matter that some argue it’s all for show, there is plenty of his authentic self on display all the time in that revelatory format, in a way that might have been considered impossible to conceive early in his professional life.

When we made our television documentary about Keane in 1997, we were allowed to talk to former team-mates and coaches but were warned his parents and his siblings were off-limits, which was perfectly understandable. Back then he was fiercely protective of them and indeed his own growing family.

In his current role, as somebody who posts on Instagram, however, he shares far more about himself, even when sitting around with Ian Wright, Gary Neville, Jill Scott and Jamie Carragher. See, for example, The Overlap footage of him tearing up as he looked at a photo of his parents outside Wembley at a Cup final in the 1990s. Or whipping out some of his old contracts and revealing in granular detail the exact financial terms of his deals with United.

Given that he’s been a professional media operator for a long time, one presumes he does all of this willingly and wittingly. He knows the numbers that the show gets and must be acutely aware that he, more than any of his colleagues around that table, possesses the ability to turn the most banal exchange into a viral moment.

It’s a strange place for him to inhabit, mostly because it seems to be the antithesis of everything he once represented. The frivolities and the fripperies of the game were never for him. For somebody who acted like bonhomie might as well have been an infection he was hoping to avoid getting, joshing with rivals was a no-no. He was a purist. The game. The game. Only and always. The game.

Now, well, an entire generation know him as something else altogether. Every clip of his jocular punditry, each out-take of a straight-faced comic rejoinder that does the rounds edges out another highlight reel in the collective public imagination of his goals, passes and tackles.

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