Why don’t goalkeepers wear caps anymore? – Blogging Sole

Brad and Charlie Hart are Spurs season ticket holders. Father and son, they always sit near the tunnel at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and at full time, after every match, 10-year-old Charlie will rush over to try to catch the players’ attention as they leave the pitch.

But earlier this month, after Tottenham had beaten West Ham United 4-1, Charlie realized he had forgotten his trusty marker for those autographs he coveted so much. He didn’t know that he would leave the stadium this Saturday afternoon not with a few ink stains on his jersey or a program but with a real collector’s item.

During the match, the Spurs goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicar had put on a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the midday sun, a moment celebrated by nostalgic football purists as a welcome return of a once important piece of goalkeeping equipment. “Old school vibe,” one fan said on social media.

Those were the days: a goalkeeper wearing a cap or maybe sweatpants, putting comfort ahead of fashion, looking more appropriately dressed to wash the car or walk the dog on Sunday morning than to play in the best national football league in the world. If it was common in the 1990s and early 2000s to see a goalkeeper with a cap – Oliver Kahn for Germany and Bayern Munich comes to mind – it’s a more unusual sight now. The era of goalkeepers wearing flat caps, like the greats Lev Yashin.

“Vicario went out with the goalkeeping coach (Rob Burch), who was holding the cap,” says Charlie, from Harpenden, a suburb north of London. Athletics. “He (Burch) just looked me in the eye and said, ‘Catch,’ and then he threw the cap. I grabbed it in one hand because my dad’s phone was in the other, even though I would have happily dropped my dad’s phone to secure the grip.

Unlike his father, who remembers goalkeepers with caps as a more familiar sight, this was the first time outside of YouTube videos that Charlie had seen a goalkeeper wearing one during a match.

In recent years, England internationals Dean Henderson and Jordan Pickford have worn caps for their clubs, Crystal Palace and Everton, but they are in the minority.

So why has the hat-wearing goalie become so rare?

International Football Association Board (IFAB) rules for the 2024-25 season state that goalkeeper caps are permitted, as are “sports glasses” and tracksuit bottoms. There are also specific rules regarding player headwear, including the need for it to be black or the same primary color as the jersey, but the same guidelines do not apply to baseball-style caps worn by goalkeepers beginning. If the rules haven’t changed, what has?

Ancient Liverpool goalkeeper Chris Kirkland became synonymous with wearing a cap during his professional career, which began in the late 1990s. When people meet him now, the 43-year-old says it’s still something that makes him a memory.

Kirkland, who won selection for Englandstarted wearing a cap in training as a young player City of Coventryafter seeing the senior team’s first choice goalkeeper, Steve Ogrizovic, use one. Kirkland found this helpful in increasing concentration levels, as well as keeping the sun’s glare out of his eyes.

“I always wore one in training because I’m not good in the sun,” said Kirkland, who joined Liverpool in 2001 aged 20 in a deal that made him the most expensive goalkeeper in Britain. Athletics.

“I burn, so I wore caps to protect myself from the sun. But I got used to it and it helped me have better vision. It used to block other things and I found myself able to focus more because it blocked out distractions. I sometimes wore it even when the weather wasn’t nice, which gave me some strange looks.

GO DEEPER

Chris Kirkland: “I was taking 2,500 mg of Tramadol a day. I had it in my goalie bag on the field’

“A cap can block the sun from certain angles, which I found useful. I am surprised that the goalkeepers no longer wear them because we see them (facing the sun). They put their arm in the air and their hand over their eyes, which is obviously a distraction in itself.

The fans came to the rescue of the goalkeepers who were cross-eyed on numerous occasions. When Leeds United goalkeeper Felix Wiedwald was battling the sun at Barnsley in 2017, a supporter emerged from outside to heroically abandon his cap. A year later, a West Ham fan threw one onto the pitch for England number 1 Joe Hart to carry in an FA Cup third round match against Shrewsbury Town.

“I wore the same hat for years,” Kirkland adds. “It was a navy blue Nike, and the Nike check mark ended up falling off because I wore it a lot. I played well in the first match and held on. The only time I would wear another one is if I took it out of my bag to wash it. It was rotten in the end, but I kept it for years until my wife made me get rid of it. She told me, “It’s absolutely honking and you have to go!”

Richard Lee is a former Watford And Brentford goalkeeper known for his caps – but not because he wore one.

“I’m a bit more associated with caps because I was on Dragons’ Den (a British business game show) back in the day and it was for a cap company, but I never wore one in a game, “Lee, now a football agent with a long list of goalkeeping clientstell Athletics.

“It was nice to wear a cap when the sun’s not in your eyes, but as soon as a cross comes in or a ball is played over the top, and you get that sudden glare, you look up and the sun hits you So I would almost prefer to have the sun all the time and know where it is.

Style could be another reason why goalkeepers choose not to wear caps. It could just be a fashion choice.

“You look at goalkeepers now and they realize they have a certain brand and a certain look, and that plays a role,” adds Lee. “When you go out (on the field), you want to feel a certain way and present yourself a certain way, whether it’s in front of the fans, the scouts or your teammates.”

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Elite goalkeepers choosing not to wear caps are also influencing the next generation. “The youngest will copy what the current Premier League goalies do it,” Lee says. “We see it less and less in younger age groups.”

Towards the end of his former career Everton and England goalkeeper Rachel Brown-Finnis found “a better alternative” to wearing a cap.

“For a while, Nike produced soft contact lenses similar to sunglasses. They were bright orange and when you put them in, they looked a little bit like “Halloween,” Brown-Finnis said. Athletics. “It was by far the most effective solution. I hated wearing caps because they were fine if the ball was on the ground, but as soon as the ball went up in the air you had to tilt your angle and your vision – you looked towards the sun.

Brown-Finnis said the sun is a problem for goalkeepers and increases the importance of the pre-match draw for an afternoon game. A goalkeeper, she said, would want his counterpart to face the sun in the first half in the hope that the force of the sun’s rays would subside in the second half.

“Obviously being seen as an advantage for your team to not be in the sun in the first half, it affects the goalkeeper and the players. Interestingly, there is no standard intervention for this,” she said.

Jacob Widell Zetterstrom of Derby Countyin the Second Division Championship, is one of the few goalkeepers in professional football in England to wear headgear. THE Suede international wears a protective cap, something AthleticsGoaltending analyst Matt Pyzdrowski knows him well.

During the last seven years of his career, spent playing in Sweden, where he still resides as academy director of his former club Angelholms, Pyzdrowski wore a protective helmet, similar to that popularized by former Angelholms club. Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, who returned to the sport with the rugby-style cap in January 2007, three months after a collision with While readingStephen Hunt fractured his skull.

“There were too many concussions in a short period of time,” Pyzdrowski said. “I remember the specialist I met with said, “Matt, you need to be careful because we don’t know how much this is going to impact you.” If you want to have a good life in the future, you need to start thinking about the risk versus reward of 1) gambling and 2) protecting yourself.

“When you put it into perspective, I was like, ‘I have to wear a helmet.’ For the rest of my career, I wore a rugby helmet. Every training session, every match, it became part of my outfit.

“It took me a while to get used to heading the ball and learning how to control it, but the big advantage was how safe it made me feel. When you come back from a head injury, you become shy, even if you were an aggressive goalkeeper before that. It took me a while to feel safe again, even with the helmet.

Pyzdrowski said protective helmets are becoming more common in Sweden, and some top goalkeepers are wearing them. “As a goalkeeper you are very vulnerable. You have to be courageous and put yourself in very difficult and dangerous situations. When I think about it, and goalie safety, it really should become a priority,” he says.

As for Charlie, after bringing Vicario’s cap to school to show off to his classmates, he hopes to have it signed by the player himself at one of Tottenham’s upcoming home matches. It will then be displayed in a window, in memory of the special family day which sparked a wave of nostalgia throughout the world of football.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)