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.

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

“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. 

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

“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.”

More on the world of sport and fashion…

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.

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

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.”

Charlie Hart received a memorable memento at Spurs’ home match against West Ham this month (Brad Hart)

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)

Turns out Jerod Mayo wasn’t completely wrong when he made his much-analyzed comment about the New England Patriots being “soft.” It’s just that he directed his Insta-slam post at the wrong people: If only he had aimed it at Patriots legends instead of Patriots players, Mayo would be getting saluted in every port of call in Football America.

The Patriots legends of whom we speak are Robert Kraft, the no-doubt-about-it savior of the franchise whose vision and business acumen are why the NFL has a team called the “New England Patriots” and not a team called the “St. Louis Stallions” or whatever they would have been called if only the late James Busch Orthwein had had his way.

The other legend is Bill Belichick, the no-doubt-about-it greatest coach in NFL history whose two decades of point/counterpoint with Tom Brady produced six Super Bowl victories. (And if you’re in the Belichick-is-overrated-because-drool-he-never-won-anything-without-Brady camp, please sell your crazy somewhere else. I’ve explained the lunacy of that take a million times and lack the patience to do so again today.)

But two things can be true at once. Yes, Belichick is a sure-as-shootin’ Hall of Fame coach, and, yes, Kraft should have received his Canton kiss years ago, but in recent weeks these two fellas have been presenting themselves as a couple of needy, insecure old men.

Caught in the middle of all this Kraft-Belichick whining and caterwauling is Mayo, whose focus is the 2024 Patriots. As opposed to the 83-year-old Kraft and the 72-year-old Belichick, who can’t move on from the 2019 through 2023 Patriots.

It begins with Kraft, who wants to take his share of credit for the good things that have happened with the 21st-century Patriots while also making it sound like he was in the other room whenever the bad stuff happened.

But Kraft was definitely out to lunch when he went on “The Breakfast Club” and said, “Our record the last three to four years wasn’t what I wanted. And I had given him (Belichick) so much power. He had full control over everything. And shame on me, I should’ve had some checks and balances better.”

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Nobody needed a secret decoder ring to translate what Kraft was saying, which is that Belichick screwed everything up when the owner had his back turned.

These words from Kraft provided a hold-my-beer moment for Belichick, who proved he could be even needier and more insecure than his former boss.

“I’m kind of hurt for those guys,” Belichick said during his appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show.”

“To call them soft — they’re not soft. They were the best team in the league last year against the run, and those guys went out there and did it even though we couldn’t score many points offensively.”

“The Patriots led the league in rushing defense last year and they still have a lot of those players..

I’m hurt for those guys because they’re not soft..

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I feel bad for the defensive players because they’re all tough players” ~ Bill Belichick #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/wVN9ufcNMg

— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) October 21, 2024

Again, you don’t need a secret decoder ring. Belichick was nominally speaking about Mayo, but he was really speaking to Kraft, essentially saying, “That’s what you get for firing me.”

Belichick was also speaking to former players of his when he said, “I feel bad for the defensive players on that one because that’s a tough group. Jon Jones, (Davon) Godchaux, Jennings, Josh Uche. Those are all tough players.”

Secret decoder ring: You guys miss me, right?

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Belichick is being paid handsomely to be opinionated and provocative. He throws in the neediness and score-settling for free. As for Kraft, I can’t help but feel everything he says is designed to bolster his Hall of Fame candidacy, except that the attempts come across as needless and clunky. Kraft should be judged on his record, not his reminders.

Besides, if Kraft truly believes it was a missing system of checks and balances that doomed the Patriots in the last years of the Belichick era, he’d have made sure to help out his new coach, Mayo, with some of those checks and balances. Years ago when the Red Sox hired 28-year-old Theo Epstein to be their general manager, they brought in the late Bill Lajoie, a seasoned baseball man who helped build a World Series winner in Detroit, as a “special assistant.” Alex Cora, in his first year as manager of the Red Sox, brought in Ron Roenicke as his bench coach. Roenicke had managed the Milwaukee Brewers for four-plus seasons, as well as managing the Dodgers’ Double-A San Antonio club in 1997 when 21-year-old Alex Cora was his shortstop.

Other than Ben McAdoo and his two seasons as head coach of the New York Giants, there’s not much in the way of seasoned perspective on the 2024 Patriots. Some of that is on Mayo. Mostly it’s on ownership, which oversaw a rebuild of the front office and coaching staff.

As for Belichick, his cute little dog-whistling fools nobody. In calling out Mayo, he’s exposing his own softness.

The referendum on Jerod Mayo’s tenure as head coach of the Patriots will likely continue for what’s left of this season and into the offseason. But, really, it’s pointless. It behooves the Patriots to see what Mayo can accomplish with a year’s worth of head-coaching acumen on his resume. It behooves the Patriots to work with Mayo and executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf to add some been-there-done-that to the coaching staff and front office.

And it would behoove Mayo to a) improve his messaging, and b) while I have everyone’s attention, perhaps try being a little more aggressive with the play calling. You know, surprise us now and then.

Lastly, it would behoove Kraft and Belichick to take their little squabble out to the schoolyard and stop dragging Mayo into it. He has in-the-moment, grown-up things to do.

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(Photo of Bill Belichick, Jerod Mayo and DeMarcus Covington: Perry Knotts / Getty Images)

Brett Harrison felt like making chicken and pasta for a pregame meal, which makes him like most professional hockey players.

But the first-year pro had a problem. 

Mason Lohrei, Harrison’s roommate at the time early last season with the AHL Providence Bruins, was watching TV on the couch. Harrison told Lohrei about his plan. Lohrei approved.

Then the 20-year-old Harrison had a question.

“How do I make the pasta?” Harrison asked his roommate.

“Boil the water,” Lohrei answered. “Put it in the water.”

“How,” Harrison responded, “do I boil the water?”

Crawling to walking

NHL teams are paying attention to nutrition. The Minnesota Wild have an oatmeal bar where players can customize their bowls with berries, honey and nuts. Bruins players eat lunch at their practice rink after the morning skate and leave with takeout containers for post-nap feeding.

In particular, young players, whose caloric needs are often higher than those of veterans, cannot do without good and regular fueling. It can mean the difference between making it to the NHL or not.

“It’s a huge part for every team now,” Florida Panthers general manager Bill Zito said of proper nutrition for up-and-comers. “How and when and where you fuel the body is vital.”

In some ways, the transition from amateur to pro hockey is seamless. Players play games, practice, train and sleep the same way for the New York Rangers, for example, as they did when they were in college or junior.

But when it comes to cooking, players can feel like they’ve been chucked into the deep end of the pool. Even though teams provide pre- and post-skate spreads, players are on their own when they leave the rink — sometimes for the first time in their lives.

Consider that Harrison, a 2021 third-round pick of the Boston Bruins from London, Ontario, played in the OHL for parts of three seasons. Harrison lived with billet families when he played for the Oshawa Generals and Windsor Spitfires.

“Pretty much cooking me three meals a day,” Harrison said. “I didn’t have to do too much there.”

Fellow Bruins prospect Trevor Kuntar played at Boston College for three seasons. Kuntar, a 2020 third-round pick, was known in the BC dining halls as the guy who ate chicken and rice every day.

But unlike Harrison, Kuntar grew up as a regular cook under the watch of his father, Les. Now, as a second-year pro, Kuntar is practically on kitchen autopilot: eggs or overnight oats for breakfast, burritos for lunch, chicken and rice or salmon and mashed sweet potatoes for dinner.

Kuntar is proof that it can be done. But players who never bought groceries, prepped ingredients and cooked meals as teenagers can feel like fish out of water as first-year pros. There are only so many times you can hit Chipotle.

“A lot of young guys, it’s immaturity,” said the Panthers’ A.J. Greer. “You just have to put the effort in to cook. Because it’s easy to go pick up something and keep eating out. Some guys do it.”

“Like Jake DeBrusk,” Greer continued, busting his ex-teammate’s chops. “I don’t even know how old he is — 29, 30? I don’t know if he’s cooked a homemade meal in the last 10 years.”

With the ease of services such as DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats, it’s never been simpler for players to order their favorite meals. But eating out is pricey, and it’s hard to tell what’s in food you don’t make yourself.

Consider the following ingredients: potassium lactate, sodium diacetate, tapioca dextrin and potassium sorbate, which are listed on the box of a chicken nugget meal kit. The product is made by a brand that Bruins nutritionist Julie Nicoletti once learned was a staple of a former prospect’s rotation: Lunchables.

“A lot of young kids don’t know how to do it,” said the Bruins’ Hampus Lindholm. “So they go back and order McDonald’s.”

Lindholm, who is from Helsingborg, Sweden, was drafted No. 6 by the Anaheim Ducks in 2012. In 2012-13, an 18-year-old Lindholm played for the Norfolk Admirals, Anaheim’s then-AHL affiliate. When one of his young roommates celebrated a birthday, Lindholm baked a cake.

“They were so mind-blown that I made that from scratch,” Lindholm recalled of his teammates. “It’s so normal where I grew up — cooking and baking.”

What also was normal in Sweden was the small size of the average grocery store chicken breast. When Lindholm went to the poultry section in Norfolk, the breasts were so big the Swede thought they were using different chickens.

Young players, it seems, can learn something new at the supermarket.

Cooking for others

When Harrison, Lohrei and fellow roommate Frédéric Brunet moved in to their Providence apartment last season, one of their first visits was to Target. The first-year pros needed pots, pans, utensils, plates and cups.

After some early turbulence, the roommates settled on a system. Lohrei, who grew up as mother Teri Weiss’ sous chef, was in charge of protein. Brunet assembled salads. Once Harrison mastered how to boil water, he handled pasta and rice.

Tuesday was taco night. The roommates chopped and sautéed onions and peppers, then added chicken or ground turkey to the pan. They customized their dishes with guacamole and sour cream.

Harrison was especially excited when Lohrei made turkey burgers. Harrison insisted on guacamole and peppercorn dressing.

Lohrei liked chicken cutlets and penne in a spicy vodka sauce. He also looked forward to ground turkey bowls with rice, spinach, avocado and Harrison’s favorite peppercorn dressing.

It may have been harder had the players been living alone. But cooking for friends helped Brunet, Harrison and Lohrei gain their kitchen footing.

“Now he’s good,” Lohrei said of Harrison, the formerly clueless cook. “He’s got it down now. He’s making a lot more than just noodles.”

The company of others goes a long way.

A roommate “making a lot more than just noodles” is cause for celebration for Mason Lohrei. (Sam Hodde / Getty Images)

Helping hands

Pavel Zacha was 12 years old when he moved to Liberec, about three hours north of his hometown of Velké Meziříčí in Czechia. His father, also named Pavel, moved with him. While Zacha trained, practiced and played, his dad was busy in the kitchen.

Father and son, however, went their separate ways when Zacha played for the OHL’s Sarnia Sting as a 17-year-old. Zacha’s billet family was Danish. They did not make the meals his father used to cook.

“I wasn’t used to eating burgers three times a week,” Zacha said.

Zacha became close with teammate Patrick White, who lived with the same family. White enjoyed being in the kitchen and eventually became in charge of breakfast.

“He was good. He actually tried to do sometimes healthy,” Zacha said. “He even showed me how to turn on a dishwasher and dryer.”

By the time the New Jersey Devils drafted Zacha at No. 6 in 2015, he was ready to live by himself. Still, the 19-year-old Zacha was no Julia Child.

One night, on mother Ilona’s counsel, Zacha put chicken and potatoes into a glass dish and popped it into his oven. Zacha then went to watch TV.

The next thing he heard was the smoke alarm.

Zacha didn’t know how to turn it off. All he could do was open the windows and wait for the smoke to exit his apartment. The chicken and potatoes could not be saved.

“It was bad. I went for dinner,” Zacha said. “It wasn’t the best. I gave up for like a week of cooking. Then I tried again.”

That season, Zacha had the good fortune of living two floors below teammate Vern Fiddler. By then, the 36-year-old Fiddler had played more than 800 NHL games. The veteran showed the rookie how to shop, cook and clean up, among other things.

“Your first year is the hardest,” Zacha said. “But if you have good influences, it makes it easier.”

Some of the same young players who know exactly where to find the puck are lost in the kitchen. But they cannot afford to be without their bearings for long.

“Definitely an adjustment I had to make and continue to learn,” said 21-year-old Bruins prospect Ryan Mast. “But hockey player or not, you’ve got to learn how to feed yourself.”

(Top photo of prospects in a training session with a nutritionist courtesy of the Bruins, and photo of pasta cooking: Stefano Guidi / Getty Images)