When the broadcast match cut to Andre Onana shortly after he made a save against Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai this month, the camera captured the Manchester United goalkeeper with a jar of Vaseline in his hands. He enlarged it as he spread the contents of the container on his gloves, the commenters laughed and wondered why he would use the product.
Before the camera moved away, I picked up my phone, took a photo of Onana holding the jar of Vaseline and sent a message to Robin Streifert, goalkeeper of my club Angelholms FF in the Swedish third division, with the caption: ” It seems that Onana “It’s in the secret.”
“Yes, I talked to him about it last week!” I joked.
I vividly remember when Robin started using Vaseline on his gloves like it was yesterday. It was our first training session after the summer break last year when she brought a jar of Vaseline with her onto the training pitch. I initially thought he was going to smear some on his elbows and knees to cushion his fall during the dive, but when he opened the jar and started smearing it on the goal post, then on his gloves, I couldn’t help but laugh. .
“What the hell are you doing? You want to catch the ball, right?” I asked him smiling.
He looked at me with a smirk and replied: “You laugh, but believe me, it works! “My grip has never been better.”
He told me how Bordeaux’s Swedish goalkeeper Karl-Johan Johnsson (or “Kalle” for short) introduced him to him during a training session they did together over the holidays.
Robin said he was initially skeptical like me and that he “expected the ball to slip out of my hands like a bar of soap.” But after transferring some of the Vaseline to his gloves via the ball during the session, he noticed the effect it had on his grip and knew he had to try it for himself. After smearing some on his gloves, he was hooked.
“I couldn’t believe how much my grip had improved,” he recalls. “I’m sure some of it was mental, especially when you try something new, but I really felt like there was an advantage.”
When the ball started hitting his gloves a little harder than I remembered before the summer break, I got curious and knew that at the end of practice I would have to try it myself.
At the end of the session, I ran into the locker room, grabbed a pair of gloves from my locker and went back onto the pitch. I took a drop of Vaseline, spread it on my gloves and jumped into the goal. When Robin and our second goalie, Lukas Bornandersson, started peppering me with shots, I immediately noticed the difference and the impact the Vaseline had on my grip.
My gloves were quite old and hadn’t been used in a while, but Vaseline suddenly gave them new life. The only downside I found was that I occasionally had to reapply a new coating to the gloves when the effect wore off. This is where the Vaseline on the posts came in handy. If I needed to reapply quickly, I simply had to go over the post, take off a piece, and wipe it on my gloves.
Onana rises high to claim a cross (Andrew Kearns – CameraSport via Getty Images)
But I couldn’t understand why it worked. Vaseline was a lubricant, why didn’t it make the ball slide between my fingers?
Over the next few months, I did some research and learned the intricacies of why it is effective. What I realized is that latex is a porous material, so over time, when the palm of the glove breaks down, it allows dirt and water to flood into the latex and you end up losing grip. What Vaseline does is hydrate the latex of the gloves and at the same time act as a repellent to the water and dirt that coats the glove, allowing the latex to do the job it was designed to do: catch the ball.
After seeing Onana use it and having time to reflect on my experiences with it, I knew I had to go further up the chain and talk to Kalle directly. I messaged him on Instagram to ask if he had some time to talk about Vaseline. He responded almost immediately.
When we answered a call a few hours later, there was an excited tone in his voice, almost like that of a small child who had been let in on a secret and couldn’t wait to tell someone. Before I could even ask my first question, he eagerly asked, “So, have you tried it?”
I started laughing.
Even though Kalle and I have known each other casually for over a decade throughout our playing careers, we have only spoken a few times, but this time when we spoke, it felt like two old friends catching up.
“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked. His excitement and curiosity about what I thought was genuine.
“I know it might not be for everyone, but it made a huge difference for me,” she explained.
When I asked him how he first came across Vaseline, he couldn’t remember exactly who introduced it to him, but one thing he knew for sure was that it was during a Swedish national team training camp in the 2015-16 season.
“At first I was totally against it and a bit naive,” he said. “I had heard about it before, but I never really believed it. I thought it was just another one of those fads that would disappear from the game as quickly as they appeared, but after a few training sessions and seeing other goalkeepers use it, I thought, “OK, why not?” ‘I’ll try’.”
He went on to tell me that several brands of Vaseline were used during that camp, and while he could see the benefits firsthand, it wasn’t until he tried the “blue top” Vaseline that he was completely sold on the market. idea.
“Initially, I tried one brand for a few training sessions, but once I got to know the other one (the one in the blue shirt), I immediately switched,” he said.
“I still can’t remember if it was Robin (Olsen) or Kristoffer (Nordfeldt) who introduced me to that brand, but it is by far my favorite. I remember buying four or five tubs of the stuff and taking it with me to my club at the time. I still use the same one today.”
At the professional level, the pitch is watered before every practice and match, often making the ball that goalkeepers try to catch incredibly slippery. When it’s raining cats and dogs, it can sometimes seem almost impossible to catch the ball, even with the best latex gloves on the market.
Every goalie is familiar with the feeling of your gloves being drained and struggling to catch the ball cleanly while your hands feel like they weigh fifty pounds. Vaseline’s job is to prevent this from happening.
The biggest difference for Kalle since he started using Vaseline is its mental impact on him, especially when trying to catch the ball in rainy conditions. Kalle admits that he often had problems in the rain because the ball was difficult to grip, but after he started using Vaseline on his gloves, he noticed a huge change in his confidence in catching the ball.
Kalle shows off his gloves covered in Vaseline (Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images)
“The mental part is very important to have a good feeling when you play,” he said. “And having the ability to catch the ball is huge and gives me, as a goalkeeper, a lot more confidence.
“During matches, it’s more natural to be more confident and push or punch the ball away, but now I catch it much more often than before. “Vaseline really made a huge difference for me.”
I was curious to know if anything had changed in his routine since he started using Vaseline and he said without hesitation, “I’ve learned to use it properly.”
“I used to use a lot more than I do now, but now I know how much I need to use it and when I need to use it,” he said.
He admitted it took some time to get the combination right and he learned from trial and error, but he said today his routine has become almost down to a science.
On match days, he first puts water on the gloves, then dries them with a towel, before smearing a small amount of Vaseline on the palm of the gloves. He then puts a small amount of Vaseline on the tape of his shin pads, as well as a larger amount on the goal posts. However, he points out that the Vaseline on the posts is just his backup in case it runs out during the match, which he says doesn’t happen that often anymore.
Kalle said one of the funniest things that happened was that at almost every club he played for, he became known to teammates and fans as the guy who left Vaseline on every goalpost in the country.
“I still get messages from former teammates in Denmark joking that I left something behind when I moved to France,” he said, laughing. “It’s quite funny actually.”
During our conversation it was clear how strongly he believed in using Vaseline, but I needed to know if he thought there were any downsides to using it.
“This doesn’t work when the field is dry,” he said. “But I always have a water bottle with me so I can add water to the gloves if needed. Plus when we play or train there is always water on the pitch.”
As fascinating as all this was, I was still curious if he knew who introduced Robin and Kristoffer to Vaseline.
“I think Robin discovered him in Copenhagen from Danish goalkeeper Stephan Andersen and then he was the one who first brought him into the Swedish national team. That, at least, is what Stephan told me when I moved to Copenhagen in 2019,” he said laughing. “Stephan is very proud of the fact that he was a Dane who introduced Vaseline to the Swedes.”
Kalle concluded our conversation by saying that he has introduced Vaseline to the goalkeepers of every club he has been at: the same thing happens every time.
“They are always very sceptical, just like Robin was when we trained together, but after seeing the results I have achieved in training and how many balls I catch, in the end they always end up taking some Vaseline from the post and putting it on their feet . gloves,” he said. “They always end up loving it.”
(Top photo: Andre Onana; by Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images)