Another is the familiar, barrel-chested man who lives near Glasgow now, and cheerfully admits to watching England games and English football hardly at all. "I can't have watched more than two games in the last World Cup, " he says.

We'll come later to the reasons for Kevin Keegan's move to Scotland, but first let's talk England. His record after seven games in charge was about the same as McClaren's at the same stage, unimpressive, not that there is the slightest chance of McClaren ever resigning as Keegan did, confessing that he simply isn't up to the job.

Whether or not his fellowYorkshireman is likely to prove better-equipped and more durable than he was, Keegan is not saying. He does assert, however, that his immediate successor Sven Goran Eriksson was unfairly maligned. 'I think he did quite a good job. It's perceived otherwise, but he had quite a good ratio of winning games.

What is a good job, anyway, in the view of the media? Winning the World Cup?' Keegan gives a sardonic little chuckle, even though sardonic is not really his style. He is a manifestly decent and engaging man, although he does not pass up many opportunities to knock the media, and perhaps he is entitled, for it seems unfair that the emotional honesty with which he operated throughout his career should have been used by some journalists as a stick with which to beat him.

Does he think, had he stuck at it, that he could have done no worse than steer England to the quarter-finals of the 2006 World Cup, and possibly rather better? 'I've never thought about it all. The job wasn't enjoyable any more, and I knew it wasn't for me the minute I didn't get a buzz about turning up at Burnham Beeches or wherever. I didn't feel like I was taking us anywhere, so I resigned. I could have gone to Finland (after the 1-0 defeat by Germany at Wembley), drawn 00, got the sack and taken home two million quid, but I didn't want to do that. The job just wasn't for me. I found it soulless and Steve McClaren will have the same problem.

'Also, I remember sitting with (the France manager) Aime Jacquet at Highbury once. Chelsea were playing Arsenal, but he had nine players on the pitch and bench, and I had one. I thought 'wow'. This was an English Premiership match. And it wasn't as though I could go to Paris St Germain v Monaco.

There wouldn't be an Englishman in sight there, either.

That underlines how difficult the job is. I had to keep finding matches to watch to feel as though I was doing my job properly, but I didn't need to watch Steven Gerrard to know that he was a very good player and that I was going to play him in the next England team.'

A rueful smile flits across Keegan's face. 'When I played in Germany (for Hamburg) between 1977 and 1980, each team was only allowed two foreign players, maximum, so they had to be top-notch.

But then the EC rules changed, which might be fantastic in life, but they hit football badly.'

Does he agree, then, that international football should be considered the purest form of the game?

'Yeah, it should be the be all and end all, but it's not. You hear journalists saying 'it's a big week this week, it's the Champions League'. They're the big weeks of the year. As for international football being pure, even at that level it's still all about money. Why are there so many meaningless friendlies? Because they've got 18 chances a year to sell out at Wembley or Old Trafford. That idea about taking England matches around country suddenly stopped as soon as Old Trafford got 70,000 seats, because it's 18 times �5m or whatever of TV money and sponsorship.'

This sounds awfully like disillusion from a man once practically synonymous with enthusiasm?

'No, I just see football for what it is, which is all about money. I find it incredible that a doctor can train for eight years to earn in a year half of what a footballer earns in a week. And the more they earn, the more remote they get. I didn't close football clubs, I opened them up.

These days, training grounds are like prison camps. At Man City I let the fans in to watch.

They're the fans, they have the right. At the stadium, the players rush straight in from the bus and when they come out they're straight back on.

That's wrong. Supporters should have the chance to get an autograph, and when they've travelled two or three hours and seen you play badly they should have the right to have a go at you, too.'

'Only two Premiership teams, Manchester United and Chelsea, can win the title next year, let alone this year.

I took Newcastle up (to the Premier League, in 1993) and we played our way to third, second and second. That will never happen again in your lifetime. Clubs bring on good young players, then the big clubs buy them and knock your house back down again.

'Reading will lose their best player at the end of this season if (Steve) Sidwell doesn't sign. And Shaun WrightPhillips, who was an outstanding player for City, hardly plays a game now at Chelsea. With their new investment, Liverpool will cement their place in the top four and make it even harder for other clubs to break into the so-called elite. It's out of reach for almost everyone .' A sigh. 'I think that's a pity.'

Keegan is sitting in the cafe at Soccer Circus, a vast aircraft hangar of a building abutting a shopping mall near Glasgow Airport. It houses a series of interactive football games costing �1m each to build and all conceived by Keegan himself. All his old ebullience returns as he demonstrates one of them.

A team of dummies rise from the floor, and the object is to kick footballs at them;

when they are hit they sink back into the floor. It's like a football version of 10-pin bowling, although that hardly does it justice. There is simulated crowd noise to give it the feel of a proper stadium, and scores are recorded so that kids can measure themselves against the likes of Dundee United, or Celtic's youth team, who've all visited.

Keegan has a go himself, and unerringly hits every target.

'Still got it, ' he mutters.

The concept started evolving in his mind 23 years ago, around the time he hung up his boots.

'For the last 10 years I've been putting my earnings to one side, paying people to work full time on research and development. It's a way of improving kids' football skills, but it's fun. I don't see why football practice should be all about wet fields and dark nights and poor facilities.'

Once he has rolled out a few more Soccer Circuses, though, might he not be lured back to management?

'I don't think so. I never saw myself managing in the first place. I never applied for a job, and that includes the England job. And Hearts, Newcastle, even Doncaster Rovers, have only been mentioned because the press have mentioned them. None of those stories had anything to do with reality. But that's the way the media work. Let's just write it, and we'd better not check it up because that might kill a good story.'

Another fiction, he says, is that the Newcastle team with whom he almost won the Premiership a decade ago was inept at the back.

'Do you realise that we had the second-best defensive record in the league? People still say to me, 'you got beat 43 five or six times'. I say 'no, twice'. It's funny. I was European Footballer of the Year twice, record transfer, players' player of the year, top scorer at clubs, England captain, but the one thing people talk to me about is that Newcastle team.'

Who was the best England manager he ever served?

'Well, I played under Alf.

And I liked Don Revie very much. He was honest with me, and I liked him more the older he got. But the media clobbered him. That's the rule. Everyone gets clobbered in the end. Ron Greenwood was a lovely man, but they got him too. You know, I caught some of Jimmy Hill's show the other day, and there was a journalist on there with almost hatred of McClaren in his voice.'

Keegan laughs, but humourlessly. 'That wasn't for me, ' he says.