“There is absolutely nothing I miss about the UK,” says Richard Keys.

The presenter is speaking from his new apartment — appropriately situated just a two-minute walk away from where his long-time television partner Andy Gray lives — on a man-made island in a luxurious part of the Qatari capital, Doha.

The Middle East, where they front English language coverage of live Premier League action for Qatar’s ubiquitous broadcaster beIN Sports, has been the pair’s home since 2013. By the time their current contracts ends, Keys and Gray will have been in Doha for a decade.

On a typical weekend, Keys and Gray are found in the studio every Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Despite being more than 4,000 miles away from the action, their shows feel a lot closer to home. They have a noticeably chummy, ex-pro feel. Recent guests have included Tim Sherwood, Roberto Di Matteo and David Moyes.

The programmes are broadcast across the Middle East and North Africa region, and as far away as Australia. Keys regularly tweets that his and Gray’s shows are “the biggest football programme on the planet”, together with the hashtag, #simplythebest

“We don’t get watched at the weekend by tens of thousands of people, we get watched by tens of millions of people. This is a far bigger job than the one I had at Sky, far bigger,” says Keys pointedly. “Talking to far more people now, in a far more influential part of the world now. If people think we’ve scuttled off to some Middle Eastern backwater, think again.”

A typical week for Keys and Gray involves plenty of time at the nearby Doha Golf Club. “Yeah, we play a lot,” says Gray. “Three or four of us play golf on a Tuesday and a Thursday.” Among those regularly making up a three or four-ball is Nigel de Jong, the Holland midfielder who somehow stayed on the pitch in the 2010 World Cup final and now plays for Al-Shahania, a club from a part of Qatar famed for its camel racetrack.

When they are not working or golfing, Gray can be found in the “wonderful restaurants in Qatar” and Keys devouring newspapers or watching current affairs’ programmes for up to three hours a day, as well as blogging or tweeting, usually about things such as VAR and the ownership of Newcastle United.

“I am James Milner. I am dull and I don’t do a lot,” he says.

The pair seem inseparable both professionally and personally, a sort of desert Ant and Dec. “We aren’t in each other’s pocket but if one’s out at an event, so too the other,” adds Keys, before adding they had dinner with Arsene Wenger the night before we spoke. “It’s a small place. It’s a glorious, glorious lifestyle.”

But despite being a seven-hour flight from the UK and out of the country for six years, Keys and Gray cannot escape their past, in Britain at least. It is almost exactly nine years ago that the pair, then working for Sky, provoked a firestorm of fury with sexist remarks about match official, Sian Massey-Ellis.

On January 22, 2011, Massey-Ellis was officiating just her second Premier League match, between relegation-threatened Wolverhampton Wanderers and mid-table Liverpool. The match was destined to be remembered for more than providing Kenny Dalglish with his first victory in his second coming as Liverpool boss as Fernando Torres scored twice and Raul Meireles netted a stunning 25-yard volley.

In the studio, but not on air, Keys and Gray discussed her appointment with a conversation that sounded as if it had been lifted from a 1970s sitcom.

“Can you believe that? A female linesman… Women don’t know the offside rule,” blustered Gray.

“Course they don’t,” responded Keys, before they speculated that Dalglish would go “potty” at an inevitable bad decision Massey-Ellis would make later that afternoon. She didn’t, but they had.

Audio of the conversation leaked to the public prompting widespread anger.

Despite the outrage, the pair initially clung on to their jobs, but not for long. Within days of the remarks about Massey-Ellis, fresh leaked off-air footage emerged of an incident from the previous month of Gray asking fellow Sky presenter Charlotte Jackson to “tuck this down here for me” as he adjusted his microphone pack.

And yet another off-air clip surfaced, perhaps the most damning of all, this time of Keys, alongside Graeme Souness and Ruud Gullit at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, asking Jamie Redknapp if he “smashed it” when talking about a former girlfriend of the ex-Tottenham Hotspur star, before adding: “You’d have gone round there any night and found Redknapp hanging out the back of it.” Redknapp does not look impressed.

Gray was soon sacked. Keys avoided the chop but resigned and was escorted off the premises at Sky’s headquarters in west London, he says, by two security guards.

The pair had dominated football on TV in the 1990s and early 2000s as coverage of the game was utterly transformed. If there was a big match in that period, Keys would be the chief presenter and Gray the go-to pundit, full of pumped-up, Sky over-excitement with lines such as: “Ohhhh, you beauty! What a hit son… what a hit!” and “Take a bow!”

But within days of the scandal erupting, they were gone and have remained off of British TV screens pretty much ever since, although Gray did some FA Cup commentary for BT Sport in 2014. The pair worked at talkSPORT radio immediately after leaving Sky, before heading to Doha followed by descriptions including “shamed”,“disgraced”, and “slunk off to work in the Middle East”.

Approaching the pair to talk about their new lives in Qatar and the sexism scandal came with a warning that both were unlikely to talk about the past. Gray, agreed colleagues past and present, was likelier to be the friendlier of the two.

The Athletic spoke to both by phone at their homes in Doha, Gray first, then Keys. Both were polite. The former Aston Villa, Wolves and Everton striker though noticeably bristled at mention of the Massey-Ellis incident.

Asked if he has changed, or whether a similar incident could happen nowadays, Gray insists he had moved on. “The world has changed. The world is a very different place right now to the world I grew up in,” he says. “And I think everyone has to change along with it and I like to think that I have.

“The things you get away with in 1975 when I came to England and the kind of banter, for want of a better word, that you could get away with on a football pitch, in a dressing room, in general, has changed dramatically, so you have to change a lot with it. I’d like to think I have.”

Keys, despite claiming that “I don’t engage with the English press”, was more ready to chat.

“I still don’t know what happened,” he said. “Sian Massey is a friend of mine, she’s a friend of Andy’s. We exchange messages. At the time, we spoke, we laughed. It was her phrase, ‘Banter’.

“‘Oh, come on Richard. It’s just banter. I expected it at Sunderland last week (when she made her debut)’.

“We were in an environment, like you live in, and I am quite sure everybody else has sat, in in their lives, having a chuckle in a manner in which people do. Come on.”

He adds: “When I say we are friends, we are friendly and have been ever since and yes, we exchange messages from time to time. Andy saw her at an airport recently. Sian was never, ever in any way to blame for what happened at Sky. I have no axe to grind with Sian and never have. It’s fantastic that she’s done what she has.”

But surely he could see that what was said was sexist and wrong? “Was it sexist? Looking at it now, yes it was. Was it disrespectful? Yes, it was. Was it said in a public arena? No. Should a mobile phone been recording our studio that day? A studio is like a football dressing room, it’s a boisterous place. No different happened in that studio than did in any dressing room that morning anywhere in the UK.”

Defending his behaviour, Keys says that Sky Sports has since tolerated worse behaviour from star employees than anything he and Gray did, including by their replacements. He pointedly alludes to the case of Jamie Carragher, who was suspended for the rest of last season in March after being filmed spitting at a 14-year-old girl and her father, who taunted him following his former club Liverpool’s loss to arch-rivals Manchester United.

“Look at the things that have happened. I didn’t go downstairs to the dressing room door, knock on it and spit in her face. And yet the guy that committed a criminal offence in a public arena, spitting in the face of a 14-year-old girl, was later welcomed back by Sky as a hero,” says Keys. “Now, come on. Are there any similarities? I don’t think so.”

In the fallout from the scandal, Keys and Gray were often described as dinosaurs and Keys himself in a talkSPORT mea culpa called their conversation “prehistoric banter not acceptable in a modern world”. Now, he says simply: “This perception I am in some ways a dinosaur… by the way, dinosaurs ruled the world for 300 million years, so if that’s what I am, so be it.”

Keys says now of the apology: “That awful talkSPORT interview I was forced into, with the message to say sorry a thousand times… my goodness, give me that hour again and I’ll tell you a very different story.”

He continues: “On the day we left Sky, they’ve got (presenter) Jonathan Ross on the movie channel, promoting movies. Now, what he and his mate Russell (Brand, the comedian) did on air (in 2008, the pair left an explicit message on OAP actor Andrew Sachs’s voicemail about his granddaughter during a BBC radio show; Ross was suspended for 12 weeks without pay by the BBC), I would suggest to you, was a million times more unacceptable. And yet, two years later, Sky were re-employing him.

“At the time, it was nothing more than was said by anybody else on that day all over the UK, including both dressing rooms.”

But what about “Smash it!”? Surely that left a stain on his reputation in the UK which can never be erased?

“I don’t know whether it will ever change within Britain,” says Keys. “I wish I had registered ‘Smash it!’ It wasn’t my phrase. It was a phrase brought to Sky by Jamie Redknapp. I’d never heard it. And the conversation he and I were having that night, in the edited tape from Chelsea, centred more around his contribution to that.”

He then adds: “I said ‘the edited tape’. Think about that. All those tapes that were put out were edited, in order to make me appear to be a dark and sinister individual who didn’t know how to behave.”

Similarly, of the Massey-Ellis incident, he says: “A phone was left in the studio for a purpose.”

Despite their broadcasting dominance, Keys and Gray were far from universally popular with the audience and appeared to make some powerful enemies at Sky.

Keys said it would have cost the company “huge amounts of money” just to let them go after more than 20 years working for the broadcaster.  For his part, Gray, when asked if he could salvage his reputation following the scandal, says: “I don’t know. I couldn’t answer that.”

But did the former Scotland international make a mistake by sticking with Keys after Sky, when a possibly wiser course of action would have been for the pair to have a clean break? “No, I mean, I can’t… I won’t answer that. It’s not something I want to get involved in. We’ve worked together for more years than I care to remember and hopefully, that will continue for at least another three years.”

Since moving to Qatar, Gray has largely lived under the radar, making few headlines, surfacing only with the occasional tabloid sting about his private life or in a bizarre spat with Liverpool’s throw-ins coach, Thomas Gronnemark.

Colleagues talk about Gray being a “conscientious” worker and who, one-on-one, is helpful but “when they (Keys and Gray) get together, run and hide for cover”. The banter remains a factor.

If anything though, Keys has become an even bigger hate figure for tabloids because of allegations that he left wife Julia for a friend of his daughter Jemma’s, while Julia was fighting cancer. Keys though denies these claims. Unprompted, he says: “I’ll mention the unmentionable for you. Did I leave my wife fighting cancer? No. I don’t know what happened,

“I don’t know why our marriage ended the way it did, but my wife was fighting cancer for seven years before I left her and she had been in remission for seven years. She and I went to London every day of her fight, prior to a ground-breaking operation that saw her in a period of recovery.

“Julia had been in remission for seven years. I know how hard it was for her when things went wrong. I wasn’t going to start engaging in a tit-for-tat, he-said, she-said, respond to everything that was said about me.

“If people believe that I walked away with my wife fighting cancer with a friend of my daughter’s, I can’t change that now. Tell a lie twice and it becomes the truth. Tell it on social media and it haunts you forever.

“I didn’t fall in love with a friend of my daughter’s. I am aghast at the standard of journalism in the UK now.”

Their choice of relocating to 2022 World Cup host Qatar has hardly appeased critics either. Since being awarded the tournament, the country has been swamped by multiple allegations of corruption and human rights abuses.

Qatar has been portrayed as a country of badly-treated foreign workers, of labourers toiling in suffocating desert heat, or desperately surviving without pay for months and, ultimately, the many who never even make it home as the oil and gas-rich state puts in place stadiums and infrastructure for football’s biggest tournament at a reported cost of $500 million a week.

Where Keys and Gray live — an area known as The Pearl, where thousands of tax-free ex-pats and locals live and a two-bedroom home, complete with a concierge, swimming pool, jacuzzi and gym, costs around £2,500 a month — is a short drive from the offices of the International Labour Organisation, which has just announced the imminent end of Qatar’s hated “kafala” system, which ties workers to their employers and requires them to get permission from their boss to leave the country.

It is a place of huge contrast, but both insist it will host a good World Cup.

“It gets a lot of bad press, Qatar — particularly in Britain,” says Gray. “I have no idea why. Most of the people who hammer it have never been here and I think they’ll put on an amazing World Cup.”

Keys is more vociferous. “This country, had it not been for the World Cup, would probably still be living in an era that the rest of the world would say was unacceptable,” he says. “But the fact they have shined a spotlight on it, meant things had to change and they have. Things haven’t changed quickly enough, but they are.

“This country (Qatar) is 50 years old. It takes time and I think they have done remarkable work, a remarkable job and I think people here should be proud of what they have done. And I don’t understand why it is that there shouldn’t be an Arab World Cup, the first one ever. I have said many times, ‘It’s not the England Cup, it’s the World Cup’. Football does not belong to England, it belongs to the world.”

Keys’ vocal defence of the Gulf state has led him to being labelled as the “Lord Haw-Haw of Qatar” by The Guardian, the nickname applied to William Joyce who infamously broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK from Germany during World War II. He insists he is thick-skinned and does not worry about the huge amount of abuse he receives in the press and online, but it is clear this does rankle with him.



“I like reading The Guardian, but they don’t seem to understand the irony of it,” he says. “Here’s a newspaper that purports to be the voice of everybody and reason, and they are engaging in that backstreet, downmarket name-calling.

“Lord Haw-Haw was a vile, destructive individual who got what he should have had post-Second World War. He was hung. For people to think it is acceptable to call me Lord Haw-Haw, when I sit here…” he trails off before adding it’s “not the way to conduct yourself”.

It may sting a little more because, perhaps surprisingly to some who may not equate Keys with progressive thinking, The Guardian is a newspaper which fits his political outlook. The 62-year-old says he is a Remainer and a Labour supporter.

“I am a great Remainer,” he says. “One of the great ironies of me is that I am more embracing, more joined-up, including feminism.

“Brexit? I am with (former Speaker of the House of Commons) John Bercow. It would be the worst decision that the UK has made since the end of the Second World War. I don’t understand it all. I don’t understand Little England and that mentality. In a modern world, you have to be joined-up.”

He adds that he wants a second European Union referendum but that he should not have a vote if it happens. “I am not sure that anybody over 60 should be allowed a vote if they get a second referendum, because it is not our world. It is for the youth of the UK to have a final say on their destiny. It shouldn’t be those of us of my generation that our dictating.

“I would be happier to see Brexit binned but I have been an ardent advocate of another referendum, that we have the truth, rather than a big bus touring the length and breadth of the UK telling lies.”

What happens after Qatar is, for now, unknown. Gray will be 68 in November 2023 and despite offers says “UK broadcasting and I have had our time together”.

“The youth of today have taken over. I’ll be quite an old man when I get back from Qatar. I still feel fairly young and vibrant but I haven’t given it a thought,” he says, a little unconvincingly. “If I went back to the UK, I don’t plan to sit about if I’ve still got as much health as I’ve got now. I don’t want to sit about and twiddle my thumbs if I go back in 2023, whether I work there or not might not be up to me.”

Keys says he will definitely write a new autobiography. “At some point, I will share. Absolutely, absolutely and yes, I think it is possible that Andy and I will write a book at some point.”

It certainly won’t be dull.