Robbie Keane's forgotten season at Inter Milan

A £13 million gamble

In July 2000, fresh off an impressive debut Premier League season with Coventry City, Keane was sold to Inter Milan for £13 million and signed a five-year contract. It was the kind of move that looked, on paper, like the making of a career: a teenage sensation heading to one of European football's grandest clubs.

The rug pulled away

The dream soured almost immediately. Manager Marcello Lippi, who had sanctioned the signing, was sacked, and his successor Marco Tardelli had no real use for the young Irishman. Keane found himself squeezed out of a side he had barely had the chance to establish himself in.

What the spell actually looked like

In total, Keane made 14 appearances for Inter across all competitions, scoring three goals. One of those strikes came within two minutes of kick-off in the Supercoppa Italiana against Lazio, a rare moment of impact in a stint otherwise defined by frustration. He also found the net against Ruch Chorzów in the UEFA Cup and Lecce in the Coppa Italia. It wasn't a wasted half-season by any means, three goals in 14 games is a perfectly healthy rate, but it was nowhere near enough game time for a player of his ambition, and Tardelli clearly saw him as surplus to requirements.

By December 2000, just five months after arriving, Keane was loaned out to Leeds United, where he actually caught fire, scoring nine goals in 14 starts before David O'Leary made the move permanent the following May. The brevity of the Inter episode, and the fact it led almost directly into a much more productive stretch at Leeds and then Tottenham, means it rarely gets more than a line in retrospectives of his career. Years later, Inter's own owner Massimo Moratti admitted regret at having let Keane go, a telling footnote to a spell that never really got going.

Why it's forgotten

Keane's career afterwards was so dominant in English football, two spells at Tottenham totalling over 300 appearances, a Premier League century of goals, a League Cup winner's medal, then a hugely successful run at LA Galaxy and Ireland's all-time scoring and caps records, that a five-month, 14-game stint in Italy simply gets swallowed up. It doesn't fit the narrative of the great Irish goalscorer any more than it fits the narrative of a wasted talent; it was neither a triumph nor a disaster, just a brief, mismatched chapter sandwiched between bigger ones. But it happened, it was real money and a real move to a genuine European giant, and for those five months Robbie Keane was, technically, an Inter Milan player trying to find a foothold under a manager who didn't want him.