Hats and caps were a normal and unremarkable part of football goalkeepers’ kits in the mid- to late-20th century. Today, they are practically extinct. Why is that?

Maximo Banguera. Photo: Wikipedia / Barcelona-Deportivo Cuenca / November 2014

I have to preface this text by explaining that, yes, goalkeepers in football are - and always were - allowed to wear caps and hats. This is so extraordinarily rare in modern football that it might seem to be against the rules - but it isn’t. FIFA equipment regulations from 2021 explicitly say that “goalkeepers … may wear caps on the field of play,” although field players are not allowed to do so. There’s also a lot of specific details about the design and look of the cap provided by the FIFA regulations book, but I will explain these more in the second part of the text (more on that later).

The decline of the goalkeeper hat as a part of the football kit is connected to changes in both football fashion, as well as in the larger world of men’s fashion. How come the popularity of goalkeeper hats declined so much that if in 1963 the best player in the world wearing a hat was unremarkable, yet in 2024 a C-tier goalkeeper in a cap is a news story? To understand this phenomenon it has to be situated in the larger trend of the decline of men’s hats.

Workers at Murray's Cooperage, Craigmillar. Photo: David Bain / EdinPhoto / Early 1930s

Hats were popular accessories among men since way before the 20th century, but their widespread use started to decline in the 1930s-40s, with the downward trend intensifying by the 1960s. So, between the beginning of the century and the 1960s, hats were serving two main purposes: as signifiers of social class, and as protection from weather and falling objects. By the middle of the century, the need to solve both these problems disappeared.

Before the Second World War, it was customary for men from lower social classes to wear flat caps, and for people of higher status - top hats. Post-WW2, however, things have changed. Firstly, new hat designs gained popularity (fedora in 1930s-50s, trilby in 1960s), and they were more affordable than top hats, for example. Secondly, notions of social classes started to dissolve, or, at least, differences became harder to identify and less apparent. Thus, the tradition of wearing specific clothing - especially hats - to signify yourself as part of a distinct group has become largely extinct.

Similarly, the need to protect your head from weather and falling objects disappeared, too. Technological progress in indoor climate control has massively improved over the last 100 years. Moreover, we spend less and less time traveling by public transport, and more and more - by car. And this is the most significant factor in the demise of hats.

Over the 20th century, people shifted from trains, metro, buses, and trams to automobiles. In public transport, you have a lot of space between your head and the ceiling; in cars - headspace has shrunk to minimal. Since the 1920s, headroom in cars has been steadily decreasing. This explains both the shift from top hats to soft hats (like fedora and trilby), and further disappearance of hats completely.

And why would you need a hat in a car anyway? You don’t need the protection from weather and falling elements - you have the car roof. Decline in use of public transport has finished this slow death. If you have a lot of room over your head in a metro car, you have very little space below the ceiling of the automobile. You physically can’t fit your hat into the car, so why wear it?

This tectonic shift in the men’s fashion partly explains the decline of hats in the world of goalkeepers. However, not fully. Baseball caps, for example, came to prominence about the same time as the last surviving hats were dying out. They are everywhere even today. So, why didn’t goalkeepers just switch from flat caps to baseball caps somewhere in the 1970s? Well, actually, they did. For a while, at least.

John Burridge. Photo: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo / May 1995

Playing in flat caps was common among goalkeepers up to the 1970s. Some of the best players of the 1950s-60s used to play in hats. For example, Harry Gregg, who played for Manchester United and Northern Ireland, and the best goalkeeper of the 1958 World Cup:

Or Lev Yashin, who played for the USSR national team, as well as Dinamo Moscow. He is considered one of the greatest players of all time in his position, and to this day is the only goalkeeper to win the Ballon d’Or (in 1963).

Lev Yashin. Photo: Popperfoto / Getty Images / 1958

Yashin is actually famous for wearing his cloth flat cap of burnt-brick color. He’s worn it for a significant part of his career. According to an urban legend, it was stolen during the 1960 EUROs, and after that he started playing without it. Both Yashin and Gregg were from working-class backgrounds, so perhaps that in part caused them to wear the flat cap. The main reason, however, was the need to cover their eyes from the sun.

As men’s fashion progressed past the 1960s and flat caps were replaced by baseball hats, goalkeepers switched too. Such players as Ray Clemence, Bruce Grobbelaar, and Jim Leighton used to wear baseball - and even tennis - caps to cover their eyes.

Jim Leighton. Photo: Colorsport / June 1986

Since the 1980s, however, the popularity of caps among goalkeepers has been gradually declining. Development of technology and architecture involved in stadium construction has taken away the need for sun and weather protection. Most modern stadiums just block out sunlight. Instances when goalkeepers require sun protection slowly got rarer and rarer.

Oliver Kahn. Photo: Allstar Picture Library Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo / 7 June 2003

Today a goalkeeper hat is an anachronism, a relic of a bygone era. A nice tribute to the history of the sport and to its legends. Almost no one wears them, except on extremely rare occasions. Any time somebody does - it becomes a news story:

Jordan Pickford. Photo: NBC Sports / July 2020

Frankly, modern goalkeeper caps look bland and boring. Just some apathetic black or dark-blue abomination that totally mismatches with the uniform.

However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. Perhaps, goalkeeper caps can be changed, and become a part of the team’s merchandise, the most affordable way to show support for your team. This is why, in the second part of this text I will try to imagine what goalkeeper caps could look like today.

Death of the Goalkeeper Cap, Part 1

All Creatures Great and Small

Zeus on the Loose