Join The Club
Iconic World Cup haircuts
The Champions League may be superior to the World Cup as far as quality is concerned, but the latter remains the most high-profile and significant football tournament out there.
Indeed, the World Cup is still the biggest and best stage to make an impression and announce yourself to the planet – preferably with your ability as a footballer but, in some cases, with an iconic hairdo…
Paul Breitner (West Germany, 1982)
The Beatles reckoned that if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aren’t going to make it with anyone anyhow. But the Fab Four hadn’t banked on Breitner, who was apparently an avid reader of the Chinese communist’s Little Red Book, and was almost certainly “making it” with whoever he liked.
Breiner’s barnet was a glorious fluffball, earning him the nickname Der Afro, and in 1982 he caused a kerfuffle by shaving himself for a German fragrance firm.
Chris Waddle (England, 1990)
More words have now been written about Waddle’s mullet than any other topic in football history, but it’s still worth taking a moment to bask and bathe in its visual magnificence. With thick swathes at the top and an expertly dyed lower portion, it billowed like the tail of a carefree pony as he scampered down the left flank.
The winger may have hoped it would distract opposition goalkeepers, which would theoretically be particularly useful in penalty shoot-outs. Unfortunately for Waddle, it didn’t work: he blazed the decisive spot-kick over the bar as England lost to West Germany in the semi-finals.
Rene Higuita (Colombia, 1990)
Higuita was appropriately nicknamed El Loco: as well as performing unorthodox scorpion kicks, he bashed out lines of cocaine, was mates with Pablo Escobar, and was in jail during USA ’94 after getting involved in a kidnapping case.
So you’d think twice before mocking his lavish, tumbling locks, which closely resembled the sweetly teased curls of an inaccessibly beautiful girl from your 1980s high school. Any comparisons to Diana Ross, however, were deflected with a truly sinister spiv moustache.
Carlos Valderrama (Colombia, 1994)
Like Taribo West, Valderrama deserves to be remembered globally for his skills – a sublime first touch and passing range, in his case – rather just be the victim of tiresome Sideshow Bob gags.
But, hey, this is an article about haircuts, and El Pibe’s barnet remains the gold standard – superior to David Luiz’s tribute act thanks to the sheer tightness and canine undertones of his utterly superb blond perm. Even two-and-a-half decades on, Valderamma’s remains perhaps the most recognisable hairdo in the history of football.
Roberto Baggio (Italy, 1994)
Despite being a Buddhist rather than the more traditional Italian Pope-botherer, the Azzurriforward still saw his barnet-bottom given religious honours back home, as Il Divin Codino (The Divine Ponytail).
In reality, it was a fairly run of the mill ponytail attached to a truly divine fantasista (“The angels sing in his legs,” his Fiorentina boss Aldo Agroppi once said). Alas, Buddhism is based upon the understanding of suffering, and Baggio got enough of that with the final kick of USA ’94 in the penalty shootout, a bar-ballooner that would haunt him for years to come.
Taribo West (Nigeria, 1998)
West was a genuine rival to Higuita in the mania stakes: he spent huge amounts of money on witchdoctors, allegedly signed for Partizan Belgrade aged 40 despite telling them he was 28, and is now a Christian pastor.
His wild haircuts often distracted from his brilliance as a player, but with these kind of stylings, can we be surprised? His zenith was in 1998, where he adopted Keith from the Prodigy meets seven-year-old girl bunches, which sprouted from the defender’s dome like spring onions.
Ronaldo (Brazil, 2002)
“Everybody was talking about that [a leg injury], so I decided to cut my hair and leave the small thing there,” Ronaldo said of the astonishing forehead triangle he exhibited in 2002. “I come to training and everybody saw me with bad hair. Everybody forgot about the injury. I could stay more relaxed and focused on my training.”
David Beckham (England, 2006)
Literally every male human in England copied David Beckham’s haircut in summer 2006: even a pensioner nipping into the barber for a short back ’n’ sides would emerge with some kind of approximation of the ‘Hoxton Fin’.
Those stylists had been gripped by World Cup fever, thanks to a Becks chop which made the man himself look (as ever) like a rugged dreamboat, but left everyone else resembling a despicable blockhead emerging from a Foxton’s Mini or begging the Dragons to fund his rocket shoes. Some guys have all the luck.
Kyle Beckerman (USA, 2014)
Whether or not it's cultural appropriation for white people to wear dreadlocks is a question for another day, but the fact is that the roll call of examples is pretty shameful: Mick Hucknall and Newton Faulkner, for starters.
Alas, the Real Salt Lake captain’s dreadlocks never quite worked. Beckerman looked like he should be leading a bongo and puppeteering workshop in the Glastonbury Green Fields before selling terrible quality marijuana to some 15-year-olds.
Arturo Vidal (Chile, 2014)
As Jez and Mark once pondered on Peep Show while locked in a flat foyer, as a delivery man stuffed pizza through a bristled letterbox: “Does post even need brushing? Who wants brushed post?”
We’ll probably never know the answer, but Vidal, a savant of crazed stylings, decided he’d like a ‘letter plate draught excluder’ (that’s what they’re officially called) atop his cranium ahead of the trip to Brazil. The biggest tragedy of Chile’s failure to qualify for Russia 2018 is the fact we won’t get the chance to see Vidal’s latest wacky World Cup hairstyle.
