No matter where you stand, such is the depth to Keane’s charisma – the deadpan stare, the acerbic wit, those wicked one-liners – that we simply can’t look away.

Keane turned 50 this year and, 15 years on from the end of his playing career, he’s successfully navigated the void left behind and reinvented himself again and again. These days he’s the A-list star of football punditry – his analysis and style straying far from that of his contemporaries.

“He’s TV gold,” says Colm Higgins, who runs the Dublin branch of Manchester United Supporters Club Ireland. “He’s the one pundit you’d go out of your way to listen to. He talks an awful lot of common sense and he really has the football club in his blood. Everybody really looks forward to what he has to say.”

What does Keane provide that others don’t?

“Honesty,” says Higgins. “He’s interesting, entertaining and he comes up with some absolutely cracking lines.”

Clips of those swirl around social media each weekend, racking up millions of engagements, an obvious attraction for broadcasters to put Keane on their payroll. In his playing days, no one hit harder on the pitch. Nowadays, no one hits harder in the studio.

Take his comments on Harry Maguire after the England defender scored against Albania last month, which Maguire celebrated by putting his hands to his ears. “That’s embarrassing,” said Keane. “He’s been a disgrace the last few months for Man United and he thinks if he scores he shuts his critics up. Embarrassing.”

Or his comments when United went 1-0 down to Tottenham last year, Keane saying he was “sick to death” of goalkeeper David De Gea and that if he was the manager he’d be “fighting him” at half-time, “swinging punches at that guy.”

“Maguire and De Gea, I wouldn’t even let them on the bus after the match,” he said. “Get a taxi back to Manchester.”

Passion is one thing, so too is anger, but what makes Keane so compelling is that it’s so often laced with humour. Tommy Martin, presenter of Virgin Media’s football broadcasts, has interviewed Keane many times and knows he has something innate that can’t be manufactured.

“He’s got brilliant comic timing, understands how to play an audience and he’s unbelievably self-aware about who he is, how the audience view him – he plays up to that,” says Martin “His tongue is also dipped in poison; he’s got that vicious ability to find a weakness and absolutely go for it. What that means in punditry: when he sees a team struggling, he’s able to find the point of greatest impact with his delivery.

“He was a great player and famous for the crispness of his passing and strength of the tackle, but his verbal delivery was always just as sharp and that is the one thing that hasn’t deserted him: his ability to deliver lines that sting and amuse. The best-known pundits deliver lines that stick with you forever.”

Ahead of England’s recent clash with Albania, Keane delivered one such line as he urged Harry Kane to put recent defeats behind him: “Listen, he plays for Spurs, he should be used to disappointment.”

Then there was his take on England manager Gareth Southgate bringing an unfit Jordan Henderson to the Euros. “I’ve heard people say they want him around the place. For what? Does he do card tricks? Does he have a sing-song? What does he do?”

In an age of polished performers on our screens, rife with ex-players trying not to make enemies, Keane is unashamedly blunt, unflinchingly honest.

And yet as close as he sails to the line of acceptable language, Keane doesn’t step over. For 10 years he’s been cutting stars down in ruthless fashion but without succumbing to cancel culture, which has made his kind of punditry increasingly rare.

His detractors argue, with some justification, that his analysis lacks detail and that he doesn’t have an adequate understanding of how the game has evolved.

“He sees football as a man-to-man struggle you have win first before any tactical systems come into it,” says Martin. “But that’s his strength as well as a pundit: he cuts right to that emotional part of the argument and that really appeals to audience. You wouldn’t use him like Sky use Jamie Carragher or Gary Neville – doing a six-minute analysis piece on Everton’s pressing system. He doesn’t do that granular-level analysis, but what he has is the charisma, presence and he also has the performance side of it down.”

Martin has sat opposite many of the best-loved pundits from Graeme Souness to Brian Kerr and he believes there are three key things needed to succeed in the field: “You have to have something to say and be articulate enough to be able to say it. The third thing is the on-screen presence or charisma, to be something of a performer. If you look at all the great pundits, they have that presence on screen and Roy is the same.”

Others appreciate Keane’s ability to be concrete in his convictions, no matter what’s argued elsewhere. “He’s real,” says Rob Heffernan, a fellow sporting icon from Cork, who has known Keane for several years. “He isn’t bound by PC rules and he calls it as he sees it. He’s his own man, whether he’s right or wrong.”

But as content as Keane appears in TV studios, it’s clear he wants to get back in the game. He spent two and a half seasons as Sunderland manager between 2006 and 2008, helping secure promotion to the Premier League, and close to two years at Ipswich, which came to a dispiriting end when they dropped to 19th in the Championship table. After five years as assistant to Martin O’Neill with Ireland, he spent a brief spell as assistant at Nottingham Forest in 2019 but hasn’t got back into management since.

His current TV deals will come to an end next year and in an interview with The Sunday Times last month, Keane admitted that if he signs on for another year he will “give up on that dream of being a manager.” When asked recently whether he’d accept the United job, Keane shot back that “they were never going to call” him.

“I’d have no problem going into any dressing room,” he said. “People tend to forget I have managed before, and I’ve done OK in the Premier League with Sunderland.”

Many Man United fans would love to see him back, as unlikely as it seems. “A lot of people suggested it’d be the nuclear button to appoint him but I’d be in favour of giving him a shot,” says Higgins. “I’d love to see him get back in there in some role.”

Away from the high-pressured world of management, Keane has allowed a softer side to his personality shine through in recent years, one exemplified by his Instagram account where he shares pictures of his family with quirky, sarcastic captions.

“My granddaughter idolises me,” says one. “I told her to join the queue.”

It’s a line that could be mistaken for arrogance were it not for its self-aware author who has, whether by accident or design, forged as successful a path off the pitch as he has on it. It’s been an unexpected rise, given Keane said in 2008 that he’d “rather go to the dentist” than become a TV pundit. “My advice to anyone is: don’t listen to the pundits,” he said. “Just watch the game and gather your own opinions.”

But perhaps that’s the key to what he’s achieved in his TV career: Keane identifying a lack of outright honesty and offering it to us like a man several pints deep in a bar-room debate, his opinions hitting home with absorbing impact.

“He’s delivering like he delivered for Fergie all those years,” says Martin. “Week after week after week.”