Kevin Keegan, the Ballon d'Or winner overshadowed by one furious rant

Kevin Keegan died this week at 75, and most people will probably think of him screaming at a camera about Sir Alex Ferguson. That's the thing about him, really. A genuinely exceptional football life gets flattened into one April evening in 1996.

He was the only British player ever to win the Ballon d'Or twice. He lifted the European Cup with Liverpool as their talisman. He arrived at Newcastle and turned them into something so compelling that Fifa's own president felt compelled to write and tell him so. He captained England, managed England. All of that, somehow, gets footnoted.

But that "I'd love it if we beat them" moment—the one where he lost his cool on live TV about Ferguson and Manchester United—became a thing before the internet even knew what things were. Sky replayed it constantly. Kids who weren't born yet grew up watching it. Polls still rank it as the most iconic Premier League memory, which says something bleak about how we remember football now.

The rant happened during Newcastle's 1996 title push. They crumbled after that, Ferguson's United won it, and suddenly one emotional explosion got cemented as the thing that defined Keegan's entire run at St James' Park. Except it shouldn't have. The football he built there was genuinely special—the kind of team people still talk about 30 years on, not because of a meltdown but because they played beautiful, attacking football.

He had this gift for making teams exciting. At Hamburg in the late 1970s, he did the same thing—arrived, transformed the place, won trophies, left them better. Liverpool under him was relentless. And yet somewhere along the way, one unguarded moment on television became his entire legacy in the eyes of millions.

Maybe that's just how it works now. One clip, repeated endlessly, can swallow a whole career. Keegan's achievements were extraordinary—genuinely, objectively extraordinary. He should be remembered as a pioneer, as someone who changed how British footballers were perceived abroad, as a manager who could build something from nothing. Instead, he'll probably end up as a meme in most people's heads, which feels like a genuine waste.