Kevin Keegan, Two-Time Ballon d’Or Winner and England Icon, Passes Away at 75

NEWCASTLE — Kevin Keegan, the two-time Ballon d’Or-winning soccer star who captained and coached England’s national team and won the European Cup with Liverpool, has died. He was 75.

Keegan’s death was announced his former club Newcastle, where he had been both a player and coach. Keegan revealed last month that he had stage four cancer .

For a time in the 1970s, Keegan transcended the English game with his celebrity status.

Keegan, one of just four Englishmen to win the Ballon d’Or, wasn’t just a brilliant soccer player who dovetailed nimbleness and an eye for goal with a relentless hunger and work rate stemming from his working-class upbringing in northern England.

He was also a trendsetter off the field, through his haircut — a perm, which other footballers across Europe started to copy — and his move into celebrity culture that saw him release a single, appear in an after-shave ad with heavyweight great Henry Cooper, and go on TV shows.

Keegan was also something of a trailblazer in his sport as one of the first English players to move to a continental team when he left Liverpool, where he’d just won the European Cup, for German club Hamburger SV in 1977.

It was in Hamburg where he won the Ballon d’Or — then called the European footballer of the year — twice (1978 and ’79) and featured in another European Cup final, a 1980 loss to Nottingham Forest.

Keegan scored 21 times in 63 England appearances and played at the 1982 World Cup, his only appearance on soccer’s biggest stage after the country failed to qualify for the 1974 and ’78 tournaments.

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