23/01/2026 - Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn direct a fine dramatisation of footballer Roy Keane’s acrimonious departure from Ireland’s 2002 World Cup squad

Amidst his turn-of-the-millennium pomp, Roy Keane was a footballer who was as prone to collecting trophies as he was to sendings-off and multi-match bans. With his primary club, Manchester United, he found a healthy outlet for all of the above, especially the first. But representing the Republic of Ireland’s national team, with the Japan-South Korea 2002 World Cup in its sights, was more challenging for this principled yet mercurial midfielder. His falling out with its manager, Mick McCarthy, resulting in his departure from their Pacific-island pre-tournament training camp, became an oddly hot-button news story in the British Isles that summer, a can’t-look-away spectacle of public embarrassment.

And so, two decades later, we have Saipan, directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, a sturdy, if thin, dramatisation of the incident, named after the location where it occurred. Garnering an impressive 12 nominations from the IFTA (Irish Film and Television Academy) Awards, it comes out in the UK today through Vertigo Releasing and plays at the Göteborg Film Festival next week, after originally premiering at Toronto last year.

Drama is conflict, as the truism goes, and screenwriter Paul Fraser counter-intuitively conveys more of it through off-pitch affairs, as opposed to 11-vs-11 match days. How do two ostensibly composed professionals that we see in Keane (played here by Éanna Hardwicke) and McCarthy (a focused Steve Coogan) find themselves on a collision course, losing all decorum and dignity, the filmmakers ask? Akin to movies set in the high-stakes political or business worlds, which feel like a key inspiration here, this clash of male egos believing they’re infallible, but are actually very fragile, sets off a chain of destructive yet foreseeable consequences.

Rather than a willing troublemaker and loose cannon, as his harshest critics saw him, Keane is portrayed by Hardwicke as a disciplined and intelligent individual dedicated to meeting the high standards he also imposed on others, whilst being susceptible to self-destructive behavioural patterns. It feels like a characterisation informed by the attention to male mental health in today’s football, which there was no comparable focus on at the time. Barros D’Sa and Leyburn carefully direct Coogan to stave off Alan Partridge-like mannerisms and not further demean McCarthy, a figure of amusement for a generation of fans; instead, he’s only an unremarkable functionary within the underachieving Irish footballing set-up, incapable of subduing a player whose streak of cruelty and entitlement was as wide as his ability.

The film’s most gutting tension comes from a question of authenticity, with both men’s careers thriving in the UK, creating complex feelings of attachment to, and partial betrayal of, their homeland. With Keane showing no remorse about his eventual decision to depart, and the team actually enjoying a respectable showing at the tournament, the filmmakers leave it to us to anoint the symbolic victors of this conflict. Yet this overly modest film is most resonant when embodying Keane’s perspective, not shying away from showing Irish pride and loyalty, whether forced to manifest itself in England or as far east as Saipan.

Saipan is a production by Ireland and the UK, staged by Wild Atlantic Pictures and Fine Point Film. Bankside Films represents its international sales.