A Campaign Has Been Launched To Get Robbie Keane Into The Guinness Book Of Records

James Fenton

Robbie Keane’s legendary status is universally accepted on these shores (as well as the UK, the US and anywhere else the Tallaght lad has plied his trade) and now attempts are being made to award his goalscoring exploits with recognition from The Guinness Book of Records.

Irish football statistics site ‘Irish Abroad’ feel that Robbie’s achievement of scoring an international goal every year for 19 consecutive years (1998-2016) is a world record and they are determined to get his feat officially recognised on the pages of the famous annual.

We’re trying to get Robbie Keane’s record of scoring in 19 consecutive years for @FAIreland recognised by @GWR as a World Record #COYBIG pic.twitter.com/9pYcx7gZhQ

— Irish Abroad (@irish_abroad) January 23, 2017

We got in touch with the Joseph McCarthy of Irish Abroad to talk about his efforts. Here’s what he had to say:

“It started when I was at the Oman game last year, and the radio commentator mentioned that Robbie’s goal meant that he had scored in 19 consecutive years at international level.

I thought it might be difficult to prove, but I’ve done a lot of work in large datasets, both in my professional career as a computer programmer, and in personal projects so I set about doing some research in my spare time.

Using two Wikipedia pages – “List of footballers with 100 or more caps” and “List of men’s association football players with 50 or more international goals” I was able to eliminate a lot of the players I expected to have the record (Pele, Ali Daei, Muller, etc)

Of the players not listed on those two pages, i.e. players with less than 50 international goals and also less than 100 caps, I could only find Hungarian Imre Schlosser-Lakatos, who scored in 16 consecutive years between 1906-1921, so I submitted the application to Guinness a week ago and now we have to wait and see.”

Some amount of dedication and we hope Robbie appreciates it. So how is the application going?

“There’s not a lot to report at the moment. We’ve submitted the application to Guinness, and we’re waiting on them to do their due diligence. I just checked earlier and the application status is still ‘pending’.”

The Guinness Book of Records is one of our favourite stocking fillers so let’s hope Robbie’s name is it when we open our copy this Christmas.

You can follow Joseph’s progress over at @irish_abroad.