When Andre Onana made a save on Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai this month, shortly after the match was broadcast on him, the Manchester United goalkeeper was caught on camera holding a bucket of Vaseline. The cameras followed him as he applied the contents of the container to his gloves, and commentators laughed as they questioned why he was using the product.
Before the camera moved away, I grabbed my phone, took a picture of Onana holding a bucket of Vaseline, and sent it to Robin Streifter, the goalkeeper of my team, Angelholms FF in the Swedish third tier. Robin Streifert) sent a text message with the title: “Looking like Onana is the secret.”
“Yeah, I talked to him about it last week!” he said jokingly.
I distinctly remember Robin starting using Vaseline on his gloves like it was yesterday. It was our first training session after the summer break last year and he came to the training ground with a can of Vaseline. I initially thought he might smear some on his elbows and knees to help mitigate his falls when diving, but when he opened the can and started smearing it on the goalposts and 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 with a smile.
He looked at me with a smile and replied, “You’re laughing, but trust me, it works! My grip has never been better.
He told me how Bordeaux’s Swedish goalkeeper Karl-Johan Johnsson (“Kalle” for short) introduced him to the technique while we were training together over the holidays.
Robin said he shared my initial skepticism and “expected the ball to slip out of my hands like a bar of soap.” But after applying some Vaseline to his glove through the ball during training, he noticed the effect it had on his grip and knew he needed to try it for himself. After he put some on his gloves, he was hooked.
“I couldn’t believe how good my grip was,” he recalls. “I’m sure part of it is mental, especially when you try new things, but it definitely feels good.”
As the ball started hitting his glove, a little tighter than I remembered from before the summer break, I became interested and knew I had to try it for myself by the end of practice.
After practice, I ran into the locker room, grabbed a pair of gloves that were in my locker, and went back to the court. I took a little Vaseline, put it on my gloves and jumped in the goal. When Robin and our second goalkeeper Lukas Bonandsson started shooting at me, I immediately noticed the difference and the effect the Vaseline had on my grip.
My gloves were old and hadn’t been used in a while, but Vaseline suddenly gave them new life. The only drawback I found was that I needed to occasionally reapply a new coat to the gloves when the effects wore off. This is where Vaseline on the posts comes in handy. If I need to reapply quickly, I just walk up to the post, brush off a piece, and rub it onto my glove.
Onana leaps high to receive the cross (Andrew Kearns – CameraSport, Getty Images)
But I can’t understand why it works. Vaseline is a lubricant, so why doesn’t it make the ball slip from my fingers?
In the months since then, I’ve done some research and learned the intricacies of why it works. My understanding is that latex is a porous material, so over time when the palm of the glove breaks down, dirt and water overwhelm the latex, eventually losing grip. The function of Vaseline is to moisturize the latex of the glove, while also keeping water and dirt off the glove, allowing the latex to do what it was designed to do: grip the ball.
After seeing Onana use it and having time to reflect on my own experience using it, I knew I needed to go a step further and talk to Kalle directly. I sent him a message on Instagram asking if he had time to talk about Vaseline. He answered almost immediately.
When we got the call a few hours later, his voice was filled with excitement, like a kid who knows a secret and can’t wait to tell someone. Before I could ask the first question, he asked me enthusiastically: “Have you tried it?”
I started laughing.
Although Kahler and I have known each other for more than a decade in our careers, we have only spoken a handful of times—but when we did this time, it felt like two old friends reunited.
“That’s great, isn’t it?” he asked. He was excited and curious about what I really thought.
“I know it might not be for everyone, but for me, it made a huge difference,” he explains.
When I asked him how he first encountered Vaseline, he couldn’t remember who introduced it to him, but one thing he knew for sure was that it was at a Swedish national team training camp during the 2015-16 season.
“I was completely against it at first and a little naive,” he said. “I’d heard of it being used before but never really believed in it. I thought it was just another fad that would be phased out soon – but after a few training sessions and seeing other goalkeepers using it, I thought , ‘Well, why not? I’ll give it a try’.
He went on to tell me that several different brands of Vaseline were used during that training camp, and while he could see the benefits first hand, he was not fully convinced of Vaseline until he tried the one with the “blue top” .
“Initially, I tried one brand for a few training sessions, but once I learned about another brand (the brand of the blue top), I immediately switched,” he said.
“I still don’t remember whether it was Robin (Olsen) or Kristoffer (Nordfeldt) who introduced me to this brand, but it was by far my favorite. I remember buying four or five barrels of that stuff and bringing it back to me club. I still use the same one today.
At the professional level, pitches are watered before every practice and game, often making the ball extremely slippery for goalkeepers to try to catch. When the rain is pouring down, sometimes catching a ball can be an almost impossible task even while wearing the best latex gloves on the market.
Every goalie is familiar with the feeling of having soaked gloves, struggling to catch the ball cleanly, and having hands that feel like they weigh a hundred pounds. Vaseline is there to prevent this from happening.
The biggest difference since Kahler started using Vaseline is the mental effect it has on him, especially when catching balls on rainy days. Kahler admitted that he often had problems in the rain because the ball was difficult to catch, but once he started using Vaseline on his gloves, he noticed a huge change in his confidence when catching the ball.
Kahle shows off his Vaseline-coated gloves (Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images)
“When you play, the mental part is very important to have a good feeling,” he said. “The ability to catch the ball is huge and it gives me more confidence as a goalkeeper.
“In the game, it’s safer to just push the ball away or punch it away more naturally, but now I’m catching the ball more than I used to. The Vaseline has really made a huge difference for me.
I was curious if his daily routine had changed in any way 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 than I do now, but now I know how much I need to use and when I need to use it,” he said.
He admits it took a while to get the precise combination right and to learn from trial and error, but he says today his daily routine is almost a science.
On game days, he wets his gloves with water, wipes them dry with a towel, and then applies a small amount of Vaseline to the palms of his gloves. He then applied a small amount of Vaseline to the shin tape and a generous amount to the goalposts. However, he stressed that the Vaseline on the post was just a backup in case he ran out during a game, which he said didn’t happen very often anymore.
Kahler said one of the more interesting things that happened was that at almost every club he played for, he was known by teammates and fans alike as the guy who left Vaseline on every post across the country.
“I still get regular messages from my former teammates in Denmark, joking that I left something behind when I moved to France,” he laughs. “It’s actually quite fun.”
During our conversation, it was clear how strongly he believed in using Vaseline, but I had to know if he thought there were any negative effects from using it.
“When the course is dry, it doesn’t work,” he said. “But I always carry a water bottle with me so I can add water to my gloves if I need to. Plus, when we play or train, there’s always water on the court.
As funny as all this is, I’m still curious if he knows who introduced Robin and Christopher to Vaseline.
“I think Robin was introduced by the Danish goalkeeper Stefan Andersen when he was in Copenhagen, and then he was the first one to take it to the Swedish national team. At least, that’s what Stefan told me when I moved to Copenhagen in 2019 ,” he said with a smile. “Stephen is very proud that it was a Dane who introduced Vaseline to the Swedes.”
Kahler concluded our conversation by saying that he introduced Vaseline to goalkeepers at every club he went to—and the same thing happened every time.
“They were always skeptical, like Robin when we trained together, but when they saw what I was doing in training and how many balls I caught, they always ended up taking some Vaseline off the stumps. And put it on their body. “They always end up loving it. “
(Top photo: Andre Onana; photo by Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth, Getty Images)
