When the match broadcast cut to Andre Onana shortly after he had made a save against Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai this month, the camera caught the Manchester United goalkeeper with a tub of Vaseline in his hands. It zoomed in tight on him as he smeared the contents of the container on his gloves, the commentators laughing and questioning why he would be using the product.
Advertisement
Before the camera panned away, I grabbed my phone, took a photo of Onana holding the tub of Vaseline, and sent a text to Robin Streifert, goalkeeper for my club Angelholms FF in the Swedish third division, with the caption, “Looks like Onana is in on the secret.”
“Yeah, I had a talk with him about it last week!” he joked.
I vividly remember when Robin started using Vaseline on his gloves like it was yesterday. It was our first training session after our summer break last year when he brought a jar of Vaseline out with him to the training pitch. I initially thought he might smear some on his elbows and knees to help soften the fall when he dived, but when he opened the jar and started smearing it on the goalpost, then his gloves, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What the hell are you doing? You want to catch the ball, don’t you?” I asked him as I smiled.
He looked at me with a little grin and replied, “You laugh, but trust 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 it during a training session they had together over the holiday.
Elsewhere on The Athletic…
- Man United’s academy. Part one: Recruitment
- Man United’s academy. Part two: Creating players and people
- One of football’s most horrific injuries – as told by those involved
Robin said he was initially skeptical like I was and “expected the ball to slip out of my hands like a bar of soap”. But after getting some of the Vaseline transferred onto his gloves via the ball during their session, he noticed the effect it had on his grip and knew he needed to try it out for himself. After smearing some of it on his gloves, he was hooked.
“I couldn’t believe how much better my grip was,” he recalls. “I’m sure part of it was mental, especially when you try something new, but it really felt like there was a benefit.”
When the ball started smacking into his gloves just a little bit tighter than I remember it doing before our summer break, I became intrigued and knew at the end of training I would have to try it for myself.
Advertisement
After the session finished, I ran into the dressing room, grabbed a pair of gloves I had sitting in my locker and went back out to the pitch. I took a dab of Vaseline, smeared it on my gloves, and hopped in goal. As Robin and our second goalkeeper, Lukas Bornandersson, started to pepper me with shots, I immediately noticed the difference and the impact the Vaseline had on my grip.
My gloves had some age to them and it had been a while since they had been used, but the Vaseline suddenly gave them new life. The only downside I could find was that I needed to occasionally reapply a new coating on my gloves when the effect wore off. That’s where the Vaseline on the posts came in handy. If I needed to reapply quickly, I just had to go over to the post, swipe off a chunk, and wipe it on my gloves.
But I couldn’t wrap my head around why it worked. Vaseline was a lubricant, why didn’t it make the ball slip through my fingers?
In the months since, I’ve done some research and learned the intricacies of why it’s effective. My understanding 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 the latex and you end up losing grip. What Vaseline does is moisturise the latex of the gloves while also acting as a repellent to water and grime from covering the glove, allowing the latex to do the job it’s designed to do: grip the ball.
After seeing Onana use it and having time to reflect on my own experiences with it, I knew I needed to go further up the chain and talk to Kalle directly. I sent him a message on Instagram to ask if he had some time to talk about Vaseline. He replied almost immediately.
When we hopped on a call a few hours later, there was an excited tone in his voice, almost like that of a small child who had been privy to a secret and couldn’t wait to tell someone about it. Before I could even get my first question in, he enthusiastically asked me, “So have you tried it?”
Advertisement
I began to laugh.
Though Kalle and I have casually known each other for over a decade through our playing careers, we’ve only ever talked a few times — but this time when we talked, it felt like two old friends catching up.
“It’s so good, isn’t it?” he asked. His excitement and curiosity about what I thought was genuine.
“I know that it might not be for everyone, but for me, it’s made a huge difference,” he 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 certain is that it was at a Sweden national team camp in the 2015-16 season.
“I was totally against it in the beginning and a bit naive,” he said. “I had heard of it being used before but never really believed in it. I thought it was just another one of those fads that would be out of the game as quickly as it appeared — but after a few training sessions and seeing the other goalkeepers use it, I thought, ‘OK, why not? I’ll give it a go’.”
He went on to tell me there were a few different brands of petroleum jelly being used during that camp and though he could see the benefits directly, it wasn’t until he tried Vaseline with “the blue top” that he was completely sold on the idea.
“Initially, I tried one brand for a few training sessions, but once I got introduced to the other one (the one with the blue top), I switched immediately,” he said.
“I still can’t remember if it was Robin (Olsen) or Kristoffer (Nordfeldt) who introduced me to that brand, but it’s by far my favourite. I remember buying four or five tubs of that stuff and taking it back 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 training session and match, often making the ball that goalkeepers are trying to catch incredibly slippery. When it’s pouring rain on top of that, sometimes it can feel almost like an impossible task to catch the ball, even with the best latex gloves on the market.
Advertisement
Every goalkeeper is familiar with the feeling of your gloves being drenched and struggling to catch the ball cleanly as your hands feel like they weigh a hundred pounds. The job of the Vaseline 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 hard to grip, but after he started using Vaseline on his gloves, he’s seen a huge change in his confidence when catching the ball.
“The mental part is so important to have a good feeling when you’re playing,” he said. “And having the ability to catch the ball is huge and gives me, as a goalkeeper, so much more confidence.
“During matches, it’s more natural to be safer and push or punch the ball away, but now I catch the ball way more than I used to. Vaseline really has made a huge difference for me.”
I was curious if anything had changed in his routine since he started using Vaseline and he said without hesitation, “I’ve learned how to use it properly.”
“I used to use a lot more of it than I do now, but now I know how much I need to use and when I need to use it,” he said.
He admitted it took a while to get the exact combination correct and learnt from trial and error, but said that today, he has his routine down to almost a science.
On matchdays, he first puts water on his gloves, then wipes them off with a towel, before smearing a small amount of Vaseline on the palm of his gloves. He then puts a small amount of Vaseline on the tape of his shin pads, in addition to a larger amount on the goalposts. However, he stresses the Vaseline on the posts is just his backup in case he runs out during the match, which he said doesn’t happen so often anymore.
Advertisement
Kalle said that one of the funnier things that has happened is that at almost every club he’s played for, he’s become known to team-mates and fans as the guy who leaves Vaseline on all the posts around the country.
“I still receive messages from former team-mates in Denmark all the time joking that I left something behind when I moved to France,” he said with a laugh. “It’s quite funny actually.”
It was clear throughout our conversation how strongly he believed in using Vaseline, but I had to know if he thought there were any negatives to using it.
“That it doesn’t work when the pitch is dry,” he said. “But I always have a water bottle with me so I can add water on the gloves if needed. Plus when we play or train there is always water on the pitch.”
As fascinating as all of this was, I was still curious if he knew who introduced Robin and Kristoffer to Vaseline.
“I think Robin was introduced to it while at Copenhagen by Danish goalkeeper Stephan Andersen and then he was the one who first brought it to the Swedish national team. That’s, at least, what Stephan told me when I moved to Copenhagen in 2019,” he said as he laughed. “Stephan takes a lot of pride in that it was a Dane who introduced Vaseline to the Swedes.”
Kalle concluded our conversation by saying that he’s introduced Vaseline to the goalkeepers at every club he’s been to — each time, the same thing happens.
“They are always so sceptical, much like Robin was when we trained together, but after they see the results that I have in training and how many balls I catch, they always eventually end up taking some Vaseline off the post and putting it on their gloves,” he said. “They always end up loving it in the end.”
(Top photo: Andre Onana; by Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images)
