Stoke City legend lands new job off the beaten track
Rory Delap is returning to work in football alongside Robbie Keane a thousand miles from Stoke-on-Trent.
The Stoke City legend is expected to be named as Keane's new number two at Hungarian champions Ferencvaros, having previously worked together amid plenty of drama away from football at Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel.
The coaching staff are joining up with the squad on a training camp in Murcia. The domestic league is currently on a winter break but resumes at the end of this month with Ferencvaros in second place, one point behind Puskas Akademia but with a game in hand. A vacancy was created by Pascal Jansen leaving to take over at New York City in the MLS.
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A statement on the Ferencvaros website said: “We announce the successor to Dutchman Pascal Jansen to lead our 35-time champion and 24-time cup winner team as the 146-time national team player of the Republic of Ireland Robbie Keane has signed on Monday. The new head coach arrived in Budapest on Sunday evening and will leave on Tuesday to join our team at the training camp in Spain.”
Keane has been well travelled as a coach since hanging up his boots. He started as player manager for ATK in India and working as an assistant to Mick McCarthy with Republic of Ireland. He took on a job under Sam Allardyce at Leeds United before becoming boss at Maccabi, where him and Delap won a league and cup double and reached the last 16 of the European Conference League, against a backdrop of war breaking out in the Middle East.
Delap started his coaching career in the youth set-up at Derby County and then returned to Stoke in 2018, working under Gary Rowett, Nathan Jones and Michael O'Neill before leaving during the tenure of Alex Neil in early 2023.
