Robbie Keane
Irish association football player and manager

Robert David Keane (born 8 July 1980) is an Irish professional football coach and former player, who was most recently the head coach of NB I club Ferencváros. Widely considered one of Ireland's greatest ever footballers, Keane played as a striker, and was captain of the Republic of Ireland from March 2006 until his international retirement in August 2016. He is the most capped player and top goalscorer for Ireland.
Keane began his career at Wolverhampton Wanderers, scoring twice on his first-team debut aged 17. The following season, he was the club's leading goalscorer and scored his first international goal for Ireland. He changed club frequently between 1999 and 2002, breaking transfer fee records, but his brief spells at Inter Milan and Leeds United were unexceptional. He joined Tottenham Hotspur in 2002 and played there for seven and a half years over two spells, amassing 306 appearances and 122 goals across all competitions. The 2007–08 season was the most fruitful of his career as he set a career record of 23 goals in a season, including a landmark 100th competitive goal, and won his first senior honour (the League Cup).
Keane moved to Liverpool in July 2008 but he spent only six months at the club before returning to Tottenham, where he was made first team captain. In January 2010, he moved on loan to Scottish Premier League side Celtic for the rest of the season, and spent the second half of the following season loaned to West Ham United.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Robbie Keane” is irish association football player and manager. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Robbie, Keane and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q184612. VIAF identifies the subject as 43768139. The Library of Congress control number is n2008013803. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2006, 2016 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robbie Keane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.