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 of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and full time, after every match, 10-year-old Charlie rushes to try to get the players’ attention as they walk off the pitch.

But earlier this month, after Tottenham beat West Ham United 4-1, Charlie realized he had forgotten his trusty highlighter for the autographs he craves. Little did he know that he would leave the stadium that Saturday afternoon not with a few drops of ink on his shirt or a program, but with a true collector’s item.

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

Those were the days: a ‘nanny’ in a cap or perhaps sweatpants, who prioritized comfort over fashion, looking more suitably dressed to wash the car or take the dog for a Sunday morning walk than to play in the world’s highest national football league to play. While it was common in the 1990s and early 2000s to see a goalkeeper wearing a cap (think Oliver Kahn for Germany and Bayern Munich), it is now a more unusual sight. Long gone are the days when goalkeepers wore flat caps, like the great Lev Yashin.

“Vicario came out with the goalkeeping coach (Rob Burch) holding the cap,” says Charlie from Harpenden, a commuter town north of London. The Athletics. “He (Burch) just looked me in the eye and said, ‘Catch,’ and then he threw the cap. I caught 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 catch.

Guglielmo Vicario took fans down memory lane as he wore a cap against West Ham (Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)

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

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

Why has the hat-wearing goalkeeper become so rare?

The International Football Association Board (IFAB) rules for the 2024-2025 season stipulate that goalkeeper caps are allowed, as well as ‘sports glasses’ and training pants. There are also specific rules for headgear for players, including the need for it to be black or the same main color as the jersey, but the same guidelines do not apply to baseball-style caps worn by goalies. If the rules haven’t changed, what has?

Former 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 he’s 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 goalkeeper, Steve Ogrizovic, using one. Kirkland found it helpful to increase concentration levels, but also to keep the sun’s glare out of his eyes.

Lev Yashin wearing a flat cap while playing for the Soviet Union against England during the 1958 World Cup (Pressens Bild/AFP)

“I always wore one in training because I’m not very good in the sun,” says Kirkland, who joined Liverpool in 2001 at the age of 20 in a contract that made him Britain’s most expensive goalkeeper. The Athletics.

“I get sunburned, so I always wore caps to keep the sun off my face. But I got used to it and it helped me get a better view. It used to block out other things and I noticed I could concentrate better because it blocked out distractions. I even wore it sometimes when it wasn’t sunny, which gave me some strange looks.

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“A cap can block the sun at certain angles, which I always found useful. I’m surprised caregivers don’t wear them anymore because you see them (when you look at the sun). They hold their arm up and their hand over their eyes, which is obviously a distraction.”

Fans have often come to the rescue of squinting goalkeepers. When Leeds United goalkeeper Felix Wiedwald struggled with the sun at Barnsley in 2017, an away supporter emerged and heroically tipped his cap. A year later, a West Ham fan threw one onto the pitch for England No. 1 Joe Hart to wear during an FA Cup third round tie against Shrewsbury Town.

Kirkland played for Coventry, Liverpool and Wigan Athletic (David Davies/PA Images via Getty Images)

“I stuck with the same hat for years,” Kirkland adds. “It was a navy blue Nike one and eventually the Nike tick fell off because I wore it so much. I did well in the first game and stuck with it. The only time I would wear one again was if I took it out of my bag to wash it. It was rotten towards the end, but I kept it for years until the wife made me get rid of it. She said, ‘That’s absolutely honking and needs to go!’.”

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

“I have a bit more of an association with caps because I used to go on Dragons’ Den (a British corporate game show) 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, explains The Athletics.

“Wearing a cap was good when the sun was out of 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 is shining on you. So I would prefer to have the sun there all the time and you knew where it was.”

Style could be another reason why goalkeepers refrain from wearing caps. It could just be a fashion choice.

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

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Elite goalkeepers who choose not to wear caps also influence the next generation. “The youngsters will copy what the current Premier League goalkeepers are doing,” says Lee. “You also see it less and less in younger age groups.”

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 soft contact lenses that resemble sunglasses. They were bright orange and when you put them in they looked a bit ‘Halloween’,” says Brown-Finnis The Athletics. “They were by far the most effective. I hated wearing caps because they were fine when the ball was on the ground, but as soon as the ball came into the air you had to tilt your angle and vision – you were looking into the sun.”

Brown-Finnis said sunshine is an issue for goalkeepers and increases the importance of the pre-match coin toss for an afternoon match. A goalkeeper, she said, would want his counterpart to face the sun in the first half, hoping that the power of the sun’s rays would diminish in the second half.

“It is clear that it is seen as an advantage for your team not to be in the sun for the first half, but this does have consequences for the goalkeeper and the players. It’s interesting that there’s no standard intervention for that,” she said.

Derby County’s Jacob Widell Zetterstrom, in the second Championship, is one of the few goalkeepers in the professional game in England to wear headgear. The Swedish international wears a protective scrum cap, something like that The Athleticswhich goalkeeping analyst Matt Pyzdrowski is familiar with.

Derby’s Zetterstrom during a match in August (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

During the last seven years of his career, playing in Sweden, where he still resides as head of the academy for his former club Angelholms, Pyzdrowski wore a protective headguard, similar to that popularized 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 of time,” Pyzdrowski said. “I remember the specialist I met saying to me, “Matt, you have to be careful because we don’t know how much of an impact this is going to have on 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 thought, ‘I have to wear a helmet.’ I wore a rugby helmet for the rest of my career. Every training, every match it became part of my outfit.

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

Charlie Hart received a memorable souvenir during Spurs’ home game against West Ham this month (Brad Hart)

Pyzdrowski said protective headgear is becoming more common in Sweden, with some top 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 the safety of the goalkeepers, it should really become a priority,” he says.

As for Charlie, after bringing Vicario’s cap to school to show his classmates, he hopes to have it signed by the player himself at one of Tottenham’s upcoming home games. It will then be placed in a display case, a reminder of the special family day that caused a nostalgic stir in the football world.

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