Stoke City legend lands new job off the beaten track
Good luck to Stoke City old boy Rory Delap as he returns to work on the touchline
A thousand miles from Stoke-on-Trent, Rory Delap and Robbie Keane are going back to work in football.
The Stoke City icon is anticipated to be selected as Keane’s new number two at Ferencvaros, the Hungarian champions, after they previously collaborated at Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel, where there was a lot of turmoil away from football.
On a training camp in Murcia, the coaching staff will join the team. Currently on winter break, the domestic league will return at the end of this month with Ferencvaros in second position, one point behind Puskas Akademia, but with a game still to play. Pascal Jansen left to take over at New York City in the MLS, creating a vacancy.
“We announce the successor to Dutchman Pascal Jansen to lead our 35-time champion and 24-time cup winner team as the 146-time Republic of Ireland national team player Robbie Keane has signed on Monday,” read a statement on the Ferencvaros website. The new head coach will depart on Tuesday to join our team at the training camp in Spain after arriving in Budapest on Sunday night.
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.
