Keegan: The Man Who Was King

From the author of Klopp: My Liverpool Romance, another funny and insightful look at one of Britain’s greatest and strangest soccer figures.

He was stranger than he knew - than any of us knew.

Liverpool legend. England captain. Mercurial competitor. Pop star manqué. The Face of Brut 33. Pioneer of the footballers’ perm. Twice winner of the Ballon d’Or. Kevin Keegan owned the 1970s. We had never seen his like before. There appeared to be nothing he could fail at.

Tracking his career from youth-team player at Scunthorpe to the England manager’s job, by way of Liverpool, Newcastle and Hamburg, Keegan considers the extravagant highs of a football man who touched the game with genius, who was never sacked and who came within an ace of triumph as a manager. A story of almost and maybe, of excellence and of failure, it is a story too, perhaps, of the fans’ quixotic search for a messiah.

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 until 2013 he was the film critic for the Independent. He is the author of nine novels, including The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award; The Streets, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize; Freya, a Radio 2 Book Club choice; and Curtain Call, which was chosen for Waterstones and Mail on Sunday Book Clubs and adapted into the acclaimed film The Critic in 2024.