Why don’t goalkeepers wear caps anymore?

Brad and Charlie Hart are season-ticket holders at Spurs. Father and son, they always sit near the tunnel at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and at full time, after every game, 10-year-old Charlie will rush to try to get the attention of the players as they walk off the pitch.

But earlier this month, after Tottenham had beaten West Ham United 4-1, Charlie realised he had forgotten his trusted marker pen for those autographs he covets so much. Little did he know that he would leave the stadium that Saturday afternoon not with a few squiggles of ink on his shirt or a programme but with a true collector’s item.

During the match, Spurs’ goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario had put on a baseball cap to keep the lunchtime sun from his eyes, a moment celebrated by nostalgic football purists as a welcome return of a once-prominent piece of goalkeeper kit. “Old school vibes,” said one fan on social media.

Those were the days: a ’keeper in a cap or maybe jogging pants, putting comfort before fashion, looking more suitably dressed to wash the car or take the dog for a Sunday morning walk than play in the world’s top domestic football league. While it was commonplace in the 1990s and early 2000s to see a goalkeeper in a cap — Oliver Kahn for Germany and Bayern Munich springs to mind — it is a more unusual sight now. Long gone are the days of goalkeepers wearing flat caps, like the great Lev Yashin.

“Vicario came out with the goalkeeper coach (Rob Burch), who was holding the cap,” Charlie, from Harpenden, a commuter town north of London, tells The Athletic. “He (Burch) just looked in my eyes and said, ‘Catch’, and then he threw the cap. I caught it in one hand because my dad’s phone was in the other, although I would have happily dropped my dad’s phone to secure the catch.”

Unlike his father, who remembers goalkeepers in caps as a more familiar sight, it was the first time outside YouTube videos that Charlie had seen a ’keeper wearing one in a game.

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 goalkeeper become so rare?

International Football Association Board (IFAB) rules for the 2024-25 season state that caps for goalkeepers are permitted, as are “sports spectacles” and tracksuit bottoms. There are also specific rules on head covers for players, including the need for them to be black or the same main colour as the shirt, but the same directives do not apply to baseball-style caps worn by goalkeepers. If the rules haven’t changed, what has?

Former Liverpool goalkeeper Chris Kirkland became synonymous with cap-wearing during his pro career, which began in the late 1990s. When people meet him now, the 43-year-old says it is still something he is remembered for.

Kirkland, who won one cap for England, started wearing a cap in training when he was a young player at Coventry City’s academy after seeing the senior team’s first-choice goalkeeper, Steve Ogrizovic, use one. Kirkland found it helpful for boosting concentration levels, as much as for keeping the sun’s glare out of his eyes.

“I always used to wear one in training because I’m not great in the sun,” Kirkland, who joined Liverpool in 2001 aged 20 in a deal that made him the most expensive goalkeeper in Britain, tells The Athletic. 

“I burn, so I used to wear caps to keep the sun off my face. But I got used to it and it helped give me better vision. It used to block other things out and I found myself being able to concentrate more because it blocked out distractions. I used to wear it sometimes even when it wasn’t sunny, which I used to get a few strange looks for.

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“A cap can block the sun out at certain angles, which I used to find helpful. I’m surprised ‘keepers don’t wear them anymore because you see them (when facing the sun). They put their arm up and their hand over their eyes, which is obviously a distraction itself.”

Fans have come to the rescue of squinting goalkeepers plenty of times. When Leeds United goalkeeper Felix Wiedwald was struggling with the sunshine away at Barnsley in 2017, a supporter emerged from the away end to heroically give up his cap. A year later, a West Ham fan threw one onto the pitch for England’s No 1 Joe Hart to wear during an FA Cup third-round tie against Shrewsbury Town. 

“I stuck with the same cap for years,” Kirkland adds. “It was a navy blue Nike one, and the Nike tick eventually fell off because I wore it that much. I did well in the first game and stuck with it. The only time I would wear another is if I had taken it out of my kit bag to wash it. It was rotten by the end, but I kept it for years until the missus made me get rid. She was like, ‘That is absolutely honking and has got to go!’.”

Richard Lee is a former Watford and Brentford goalkeeper known for his caps — but not because he used to wear one.

“I’ve got a bit more of an association with caps because I went on Dragons’ Den (a British business-based 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 goalkeeper clients, tells The Athletic. 

“Wearing a cap was good when the sun is out of your eyes, but the moment 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’d almost prefer to have the sun there the whole time and you knew where it was.”

Style could be another reason for goalkeepers opting out of wearing caps. It could simply be a fashion choice.

“You look at the goalkeepers now and they realise they’ve got a certain brand and look, and that does play a part,” Lee adds. “When you go out (onto the pitch) you want to feel a certain way and present yourself a certain way, whether that’s to the fans, the scouts or your team-mates.”

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Elite goalkeepers choosing not to wear caps influences the next generation, too. “The younger ones will copy what the current Premier League goalkeepers are doing,” Lee says. “You’re seeing it less and less at younger age groups too.”

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

“For a while, Nike produced sunglasses-like soft contact lenses. They were bright orange and when you put them in they looked a bit ‘Halloween’,” Brown-Finnis tells The Athletic. “They were by far the most effective thing. I hated wearing caps because they were fine if the ball was on the ground, but as soon as the ball came up in the air, you had to tilt your angle and vision — you were looking into the sun.”

Brown-Finnis said sunshine is a problem for goalkeepers and increases the importance of the pre-game coin toss for an afternoon game. A goalkeeper, she said, would want their counterpart to be facing the sun in the first half in the hope the strength of the sun’s rays died down in the second.

“Clearly that being seen as an advantage for your team to not be in the sun in the first half, it does affect the goalkeeper and players. It’s interesting that there’s not a standard intervention for that,” she said.

Jacob Widell Zetterstrom of Derby County, in the second-tier Championship, is one of the few goalkeepers across the professional game in England who wears headgear. The Sweden international wears a protective scrum cap, something The Athletic’s goalkeeping analyst Matt Pyzdrowski is familiar with.

During the final seven years of his career, spent playing in Sweden, where he still resides as head of academy for his former club Angelholms, Pyzdrowski wore a protective head guard, similar to the one popularised by former Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, who returned to the sport wearing the rugby-style cap in January 2007, three months after a collision with Reading’s Stephen Hunt fractured his skull.

“It was too many concussions in a short period,” Pyzdrowski says. “I remember the specialist I met told me, ‘Matt, you have got 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) playing and 2) protecting yourself’.

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

“It took some time to get used to heading the ball, as well as learning how to control it, but the big benefit was how it made me feel secure. When you come back from a head injury, you become timid, even if you were an aggressive goalkeeper before that. It took me a while to feel safe again, even when I had the helmet.”

Pyzdrowski said protective headgear is becoming more prevalent in Sweden, with a few top-flight goalkeepers wearing them. “As a goalkeeper, you are very vulnerable. You have to be brave and put yourself in very difficult and unsafe situations. When I think about it, and about the safety of goalkeepers, it really should become a priority,” he says. 

As for Charlie, after taking Vicario’s cap to school to show his classmates, he is hoping to get it signed by the player himself at one of Tottenham’s upcoming home games. It will then be put in a display case — a reminder of the special family day that sparked a nostalgic outpouring within the football world.

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