In theory, a big part of the appeal of football as a game is its simplicity. All you really need to play is a ball (or something that can stand in for a ball) and, where possible, something that can be used as a goal. One doesn’t have to look very far, however, before the paraphernalia of football becomes apparent. Boots, Shin-pads. And for the Goalkeepers amongst us, perhaps most significantly, there are gloves.

There is, perhaps, a conversation to be held over the extent to which goalkeepers should even be allowed to wear gloves, if it could be demonstrate that they improve performance that much. The science behind boots that improve shooting or passing accuracy, such as Adidas Predators, only tells part of a story, but Goalkeepers Gloves have a clear and noticeable effect on those wearing them and it is practically unthinkable to imagine that goalkeeper wouldn’t wear them these days. Yet it isn’t – and never has been – compulsory for goalkeepers to wear them, and there remained a significant minority who didn’t until at least the middle of the 1970s.

For all that we think of goalkeepers gloves being a creation from a relatively modern era, though, the wish to protect the hands of those whose hands were regularly coming into contact with the ball itself goes back a surprisingly long way. In 1885, a British football manufacturer by the name of William Sykes was granted a patent for a pair of “leather gloves or gauntlets used in football playing.” Sykes’ design incorporated a layer of India rubber to help protect and cushion the keeper’s hands but for reasons lost in time, he decided not follow through on his original idea and shelved his design rather than go into mass production.

None of this is to say that goalkeepers didn’t continue to experiment with gloves. Leigh Richmond Roose, the eccentric Welsh goalkeeper who plied his trade in England with Stoke, Everton and Sunderland and was widely recognised as one of the finest goalkeepers of his era, wore white gloves, but only when it was raining. By 1909, however, he was well-known enough for wearing them to be depicted in them for a cigarette card. The period between the two world wars was also a period of experimentation for other goalkeepers. Some wore bandages around their hands, but more commonplace were heavy, woollen gloves, which were worn in FA Cup finals in the 1920s, and even at the World Cup finals in 1934, at which the Sweden goalkeeper Anders Lydberg wore a pair for his team’s match against Argentina.

By the 1950s, however, attitudes were starting to change somewhat. The leather and woollen gloves of the pre-war years were starting to fall from fashion – neither offered particularly good grip, whilst leather made the fingers less flexible and cold, wet woollen gloves could have a similar effect, rendering the fingers numb – and were starting to be replaced by cotton gloves of the type that were starting to be found in people’s sheds as gardening became a more widespread pastime. Others, meanwhile, chose more inventive solutions to the issue of getting a ball to stick to the hands, perhaps most notably the Arsenal goalkeeper Jack Kelsey, who experimented with rubbing chewing gum into his hands before matches in order to increase their adhesive qualities.

Developments in manufacturing, however, started to move glove design on by the start of the 1970s. One of their more enthusiastic proponents was the England goalkeeper Gordon Banks, who wore them for the 1966 World Cup final, and by the time of the 1970 World Cup finals his gloves were covered in pimpled rubber, and it was this sort that started to find their way into sports shops for us mere mortals to try out. By the end of the 1970s, manufacturers were routinely experimenting with other materials, such as sponge, towelling, pimpled rubber, plain rubber and grooved rubber, in order to improve performance across a wider range of conditions. By this time, the manufacture of goalkeepers gloves was a commercial venture and the days of players themselves trying out various different methods was most definitely a thing of the past. And by this time, the market in the United Kingdom was dominated by three manufacturers – Reusch, Uhlsport, and Sondico.

The oldest of these three companies was formed by Karl Reusch in Reutlingen, Germany, in 1934. Reusch spent most of the next four decades making gloves for alpine sports, but in 1972 the company teamed up with the West German goalkeeper Sepp Maier to produce arguably the first specialised, professional goalkeepers glove of the modern era. Reusch’s entry into this market was justified a couple of years later, when Maier won the World Cup with his national team.

Elsewhere in Germany, Uhlsport came into being in 1948 in the city of Balingan. First producing leather studs for boots, the company then moved into the production of soles and later components for sports shoes before making their first goalkeepers gloves in 1968. The company made the decision to focus on football equipment in 1980, concentrating mostly on goalkeeping apparel. Their red, white and black 034 glove, which was one of the first to feature an elasticated wrist, was perhaps the most iconic goalkeepers glove of the era. Finally, there was Sondico. Originally founded in India, the company relocated to Oldham in Lancashire in the early 1960s and, whilst it was diverse enough to manufacture goods across a wide range of different sports, the company was probably best known for its goalkeepers gloves. They were involved with one of the first major goalkeepers gloves sponsorship deals when they produced a personalised range for the then Chelsea and occasional England goalkeeper Peter Bonetti.

As kit design changed throughout the mid to late 1970s, a cottage industry sprang up to service the growing number of people who wanted a higher quality of sports equipment. Perhaps the best known of these was Sukan Sports, whose advertisements were a regular staple of World Soccer, Shoot and Match magazines throughout the 1980s. Founded in 1979 by a businessman by the name of Dave Holmes with the West Ham United goalkeeper Phil Parkes, Sukan Sports was set up as a mail order supplier of goalkeeping equipment, which they supplemented by manufacturing their own gloves, before going on to work on behalf of Uhlsport for the years between 1987 and 1991. The company ceased trading in 1995.

By the 1990s, however, the market was starting to change. All three of the aforementioned manufacturers are still with us as brand names (although Sondico is, like several other older sportswear brands, now little more than a sub-division of Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct, but the bigger companies were starting to take a greater interest in goalkeeping equipment. The biggest manufacturers of goalkeepers gloves in the twenty-first century are now Adidas and Nike, but bemoaning the fact that the most popular brands now are those with the deepest advertising pockets does overlook one of the biggest innovations in the history of goalkeeping: the “Fingersave” .

The early 1990s were an innovative time for Adidas, perhaps most notably with the creation of the Predator boot. It probably isn’t overstating the case to make a case for describing Adidas Fingersaves as the Predators of goalkeeping gloves. With fingers fitted with reinforced plastic, they proved popular among many Premier League goalkeepers upon release, but this popularity was far from universal. While most agreed they helped when it came to tipping shots around the post, not to mention preventing finger breaks, some goalkeepers struggled with the early versions when it came to catching the ball, complaining about a lack of flexibility. The following year’s Fingertips replaced the plastic with metal, and both are still made to this day.

During those early days of the closing of the relationship between the game and sportswear manufacturers, it was not uncommon for goalkeepers to sign endorsement contracts with manufacturers to wear entire kits that weren’t made by clubs’ main suppliers. Aston Villa’s Jimmy Rimmer, for example, signed a contract which meant that he wore a Uhlsport shirt and gloves, regardless of what the rest of his team was wearing. Possibly the best known proponent of this was the England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, who frequently wore a different brand to the rest of his team. With the contracts becoming increasingly valuable, however, this would become increasingly rare over time, to the extent that, in 2004, Germany’s Jens Lehmann was warned that he may be dropped from the national side if he continued to wear Nike goalkeeper gloves instead of the pair supplied by Adidas after a friendly match against Iran.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, meanwhile, the gloveless goalkeeper became an increasingly rare phenomenon. Whereas it had once been commonplace to describe any goalkeeper that did wear gloves as somehow “soft”, by the 1978 World Cup finals only Scotland’s Alan Rough opted to play without them – and both Rough and Scotland’s overall performance in that finals may have hinted at the folly of that particular decision – and it’s commonly assented that the last goalkeeper to regularly go gloveless was Simon Farnworth, who played for Preston North End and Wigan Athletic, and may have become the last gloveless goalkeeper in a Wembley final when he kept goal for Bolton Wanderers in their three-nil defeat at the hands of Bristol City in the 1986 Associate Members Cup (now the EFL Trophy) final. If anything, though, the idea of the goalkeeper without gloves on retains its double-hard bastard reputation. When England played out a penalty shoot-out against Portugal at the 2006 World Cup finals, the Portuguese goalkeeper Ricardo took his off before Darius Vassell took a kick for England with the score tied at five-all. Vassell’s tame shot was saved by the goalkeeper, who then stepped up himself to score and put his team through to the semi-finals of the competition.

Football is not always the most sartorially elegant of sports, but there is something about the sleekness of the goalkeepers glove that will arouse the interest of a certain type of football supporter. Why this might be is probably still open to debate. Perhaps there is an element of mystery about them that comes about because most supporters, even those that play or have played the game, are relatively unfamiliar with them. Perhaps its because the design usually ends up making their wearers look as though they have hands twice their actual size. Almost all of us have worn football boots at some point in our lives, but goalkeepers gloves? It seems inconceivable that this as many have, and this feeling of otherness might be compounded by the fact that there are manufacturers such as Sondico, Reusch or Uhlsport, who are probably known primarily for their gloves. They’re exotic, and in a way that a humble football shirt never can be.

And all of this taps into an idea that has permeated through the game over a period of decades, that “goalkeepers are different”. On the one hand, it can be a little annoying to hear team-mates talking about your position as though it doesn’t quite make you a proper footballer, and the “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps” persona cultivated by the likes of John Burridge during the 1970s always grated amongst those who might have liked to be taken seriously. Stretching back to the nineteenth century, the goalkeepers glove has long been a visible signifier of a fundamental difference between that particular position and the rest of the team.