World Cuts: Harry Redknapp, John Barnes, and the Haircuts That Made Football History

Saturday morning, Redchurch Street, queue outside a barbershop that's got nothing to do with a fade. Ruffians has turned itself into a sort of shrine for the weekend, courtesy of viagogo's World Cuts — Valderrama's curls going on under the clippers, Hoddle's mullet two chairs along, Ronaldo's 2002 fringe three seats past that. Walk-ins all weekend, wigs going if you're not ready to commit, fans wandering out looking like the players who made them love this game in the first place. Clever idea, and it's clearly landed — nearly half of Gen Z fans say they actually asked their parents for a footballer haircut as a kid. So I sat down with Harry Redknapp and John Barnes, and the conversation kept finding its way back to exactly that. Not just the football — the version of the game people actually fell in love with, hair and all.

Barnes lived through the actual hinge point, so his read on it carries weight. George Best had already done the style-icon thing before football caught up — “He wasn't football, he was just him,” Barnes says, always out with Miss World and models. Football back then, in his words, was “normal lads down the pub.” Then Beckham arrived and, as Barnes puts it, “took it to a new level” — the first player to make “footballers themselves... aware of fashion... and people started to take notice.” Fans clearly agree — Beckham's 2002 mohawk has since been voted the single greatest football haircut of all time, ahead of Gascoigne's Italia '90 crop and Ronaldo's own fringe. Two-thirds of Gen Z reckon the haircuts are as memorable as the matches themselves, which sounds mad until you remember the kit, the stickers, the whole habit of wanting to carry a bit of the player around with you.

Ask Redknapp the same question — favourite hairstyle, no caveats — and he doesn't think twice. “I like the Valderrama,” he says, pointing across at a fan mid-transformation, wig already on. “I love those curls. I'd love to wear them to dinner tonight.” Big laugh, then straight back in — Ronaldo's cut from 2002 comes up next, the one everyone still does, he'd already spotted someone wearing it at the event that afternoon. Then Beckham, obviously — mohawk one summer, slicked back the next, a different look every time England played, bigger news every time. Three haircuts, three different eras, and he reels them off like someone who's genuinely had a laugh watching it all from the stands. Same arc Barnes is talking about from inside the game, basically, just told from the outside — Best, then Beckham, decades of tournaments boiled down to three names and a joke about curls at dinner. It tracks with what fans say too: over a third would commit to a World Cup-inspired cut themselves if England somehow won the tournament, and one in five reckon they'd take the haircut over almost anything else if it actually broke the sixty-year duck. Between the two of them — Redknapp and Barnes — you've got the whole route, start to finish, right up to a free, walk-in barbershop on Redchurch Street this weekend, open to anyone who fancies turning up as their own football hero for an afternoon.

Which is really what World Cuts is offering. A chance to step inside a bit of football history that was never built to be iconic at the time — Valderrama's curls, Ronaldo's fringe, Beckham's mohawk, none of it planned as legacy. It was just the look, in the moment, the way a kid plays football because there's nothing else to do that Saturday. The history gets written after, in barbershops, decades later, by fans turning up and deciding for themselves what's still worth doing.