Coventry City number one Ben Wilson and former England stopper Ben Foster reckon football manufacturers have deliberately designed slippery balls to make it harder for goalkeepers to catch and therefore make mistakes, leading to more goals being scored.
Some custodians have long advocated putting Vaseline on their gloves to improve their grip, but the Sky Blues star refuses to go down that route, insisting he won’t allow himself to do it. A guest on retired Leamington-born Foster’s Fozcast podcast, the pair jokingly offered up a conspiracy theory that ‘everyone is a goalie hater because they just want to see goals’.
“Even the guy who designs these Puma balls that we work with hates goalkeepers because, honestly… they are just so bad for grip,” claimed Wilson. “We have got Simon (Moore) and Brad (Collins) who wear Sells gloves – the best grip, expensive gloves – and then I wear GK Monte gloves that cost twenty quid, but the Puma balls…”Foster, who started his career at Racing Club Warwick and went on to play for Manchester United, Birmingham, West Brom, Watford and, more latterly, Wrexham, said: “But they want it to be like that. I guarantee that Puma would have got all the goalkeeper glove brands and looked at all the latex that they use and said, ‘Right, what’s the slippiest coating we can put on this football to make it so that no goalie can catch a ball? We want goals sliding through hands and mistakes right, left and centre.”
Wilson added: Honestly, you can practise all you like being a goalkeeper and catching a ball but you’re going into games now thinking, ‘I’m not catching anything today.’ And now a lot of goalkeepers are wearing Vaseline on their gloves, but I’ll not let myself do it.”
Foster joked: “This is goalkeeper geekery. I’m sorry, but explain the Vaseline thing. I remember the first person I saw do that was Joe Hart in the Brazil 2014 World Cup and he said, ‘Honestly Fozzy, it’s a game changer.’ And I said, ‘there’s no way on this earth
Wilson said: “There’s no way I will allow myself to put it on my gloves, no matter how wet or damaged they are. Luckily Simon (Moore) puts it on his, so there’s always a little bit on the ball, and the difference…
“I worked with Martyn Margetson at Cardiff and he used to tell me to put Vaseline on my gloves. It was chucking it down and I thought there’s no way, if the rain gets on that it will just slip through. But I think one of the lads did it then and I was thinking ‘this is incredible’. I don’t know how it works because I don’t know science.”
Foster insisted: “I could tell you in a training session who has Vaseline on their gloves and who doesn’t because as soon as I grab it, it does make it grippier.”
