What’s it like to cut the hair of Premier League players?

Ask anyone with even the slightest interest in football, and they’d probably agree that Declan Rice has lovely hair. What they might not know is that the Arsenal and England midfielder had said hair cut for £27, in an unassuming barber’s on the outskirts of Surrey.

Kings Cuts is located on a parade of shops off an A road in Epsom, sandwiched between a solicitor’s and a print shop. Seven minutes from local rail station Stoneleigh, the walk through the small-town streets takes you along quiet suburban residential avenues and includes the sight of an old video store and a bookshop devoted to cricket. The barbershop itself is relatively unremarkable: brightly lit, greyscale floor, five barbers’ chairs and FIFA on a gleaming TV screen.

Then you look at the walls. They’re peppered with framed football shirts, bearing familiar names from leagues across the UK and Europe: Jamal Musiala (Bayern), Cole Palmer, Tino Livramento (Newcastle) and Billy Gilmour (Napoli) – Palmer aside, all are former Chelsea players – plus Fulham captain Tom Cairney and Rice. This impressive collection are grateful souvenirs from Kings Cuts’ starry clients, and are often covered in scrawled messages of thanks.

On a Thursday afternoon in January, five barbers are poised to trim the great and the good of football – and anyone else after a cut. Set up in 2021 by locals Huw West and Joe Gledhill, other staff members include Alex Bradley, Billy Bennett and Matt Campbell, all of whom are clad in the black dress code designed to avoid clipped hair showing up. If Gledhill, 28, is more of the silent type, West is a confident 30-year-old dressed in a sensible sweater, trackies and Crocs.

A cutter of hair since he left school, West fell into barbering after originally training as a hairdresser, and his football connections came early. ​“It was getting to know footballers from when they were younger [in the youth teams] and cutting their hair,” he explains. ​“As they’ve got older, they have broken into first teams. And then once you do one, it’s like a chain reaction.”

Location is on his side. Kings Cuts is 11 minutes’ drive from Motspur Park, Fulham’s training ground (West is a Fulham fan, Gledhill supports Sheffield Wednesday) and 24 minutes from Chelsea’s Cobham. ​“I’ve been doing Dec since he was young,” he says of the local lad who was at the Chelsea academy before joining West Ham as a teenager. ​“Then I did [Chelsea centre back] Levi Colwill and that opened the door up to do Cole. And I’ve been doing Tom since he signed to Fulham 10 years ago.”

West’s reputation within football means he has been invited into the inner sanctum: the England camp. Before last summer’s Euros final, he drove to Berlin to give Rice and Palmer pre-match trims. He describes it as ​“the pinnacle of what you can do” and says it makes sense for the players. ​“If you’re playing a final, say you did win it – you’d want to have a photo with a good haircut.”

Kings Cuts is not the only barber’s on the radar of sportsmen, of course. There’s HD Cutz in South London, run by Sheldon Edwards, who attends the hair of superstars Antonio Rudiger, Phil Foden and Karim Benzema. There’s SliderCuts, the Hackney barbers run by Mark Maciver, who West describes as ​“the GOAT”: he wields scissors for Anthony Joshua and LeBron James. In Kingston-upon-Thames, there’s Ahmed Alsanawi’s A‑Star, the barbers behind Jack Grealish’s cut (Foden’s also been seen there, as has Reece James), and in Birmingham there’s New Era, who work with players including Jude Bellingham, Ollie Watkins and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Edwards, arguably, is the OG clipper-to-the-sports-stars. Working out of his Clapham shop since 2000, HDCutz was founded in 2016 after ​“Mousa Dembele walked in”. He describes Kings Cuts as ​“my guys”, backing up West’s idea that there is a ​“barber union”. As he puts it, with footballers rocking an ever wider – and fancier – range of cuts, ​“The market is a wide one [and] there’s something for everybody.“

Edwards has 250 footballers as clients and is branching out into tennis, F1 and even athletics, cutting the hair of Usain Bolt. His success is partly down to his skilful use of social media. After giving Foden that blonde crop in 2021, his Instagram numbers jumped by 200,000. He now has more than 2.2 million followers on the platform, 110,000 on TikTok, plus his own YouTube channel. ​“People understand that it’s not only a job now, it’s a career,” says Edwards. ​“Kids want to stop university to be a barber. Before, parents would be like, ​‘What are you doing? No, it’s crazy.’ Now they’re supporting those kids.” And so is he: he’s set up an academy for wannabe barbers.

West, too, realises the importance of social media – it’s a part of his job that he describes as time-consuming, but undoubtedly gets eyeballs on the shop and punters through the door. Kings Cuts has 30,000 followers on Instagram and 50,000 on TikTok. ​“I’ve posted a video of me cutting [co-worker] Alex’s hair and it won’t get hardly any views,” says West. “[But] if you change that person to a footballer, it automatically gets loads of attention.” There are also other ways he gets the name out there, like sponsoring the shirts of two local sides. ​“We’ve got a Saturday team and a Sunday League team. I think we gained a lot more customers out of that than we realise.”

Naturally, most of the people getting a trim at his place aren’t millionaires who are paid to kick a ball around. ​“In this area, there’s so many barbershops. But we’re probably one of the cheapest,” says West. ​“We want to be good to everyone, because everyone’s going through a hard time financially.”

The relatively low prices – £27 for a haircut, £32 for a haircut and beard trim – mean it’s feasible for customers to come back more than once a month. HDCutz is the same: prices start from £25 for a shape-up, and only £45 to get the same shaping from Edwards himself. Edwards says the non-celebs are ​“why I’m in the shop today”. He supports the community by doing things like ​“cutting kids’ hair for the mum who is not able to pay for three weeks or a month”.

These prices are nothing for the super rich, of course. Talking about his hair routine on YouTube last year, Cristiano Ronaldo revealed he gets it cut every week, pre-match, at $1000 a pop. If CR7’s outlay might be more than average, but its frequency is the same as the players West works with. The result: barbers’ workload is directly linked to the fixture list, with their busiest days coming in the 24 hours before matches. West puts this down to the pressure of being watched by thousands of people every week, and sometimes a bit of superstition. ​“We have a thing with Cole that every time I cut his hair the night before, he’ll score the next day – which worked at the Euros as well.”

Footballers’ haircuts have, over the years, prompted ridicule, but also trends. David Beckham’s different styles – from boyband waves, ponytails and ill-advised cornrows to the mohawk THE FACE famously gave him in 2001 – kept barbers busy throughout the late Nineties and early Noughties. We have Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Gareth Bale to, er, thank for the man bun, Grealish’s hair brought back the undercut and Bellingham’s precise taper fade (sometimes called a ​“Bellicut”) is a current reference.

Sam Diss, who writes about football and style for GQ, says social media means that no one person dominates haircuts as they might have in Beckham’s era. But he does describes the middle parting as a trend emanating from the football pitch, as with players like Rice. ​“I told my hairdresser I want a middle part – not Nineties curtains, but the middle part all the cool lads have,” he says. ​“It’s very clearly on trend.”

Diss says the rise in focus on hair is partly due to the influence of Black British culture, where the barbershop is a centre for community and style. ​“Nothing really has the cultural cachet of Black British culture on the Premier League. It has an impact on the way that these players create this sense of self and identity for themselves.”

​“A lot of the haircuts [on the pitch] are a reflection of Black culture,” affirms Edwards. ​“If you rewind quite a number of years, there’s no [white] European person that’s going to be doing any kind of fade or shape up. Most of the haircuts now are replicas of the afro services that we provided and our ancestors have been providing for numerous years.”

West agrees that the fade is popular and he also sees the wider impact of trends that ripple out from football pitches across schools, gym changing rooms and pubs. Enter the mullet. ​“I cut [Chelsea striker] Marc Guiu’s mullet,” says West – although, in a sign that tonsorial trends change faster than deals on the closing day of the transfer window, he’s just chopped off his own. Nonetheless, does he think anyone might still experiment with a mullet? ​“Jose Mourinho, definitely.”

If The Special One has yet to darken Kings Cuts’ doors, Tom Cairney comes in during my visit. He fits in with other customers, dressed in a black hoodie – although, if you look closely, it is crisp and more expensive (the real giveaway sits in the parking space outside). The Fulham captain says he likes Kings Cuts because West ​“does a trim in about 0.4 seconds… [And also] he’s a great guy. I see him outside of the barbers. You need a relationship with your barber.”

Cairney and West have worked together on his current haircut. Previously, Cairney says, it was ​“a bit like an Iced Gem”, so West kept the height but reined it in a bit. The player says the ritual of coming to Kings Cuts before a match is now baked into his routine. This visit is with an eye on Leicester away, a game which ends in 2 – 0 victory for Fulham. ​“I’ve never said it out loud, but it would feel weird going into a weekend game without a fresh haircut,” he says. ​“I’d say there’s a really small percentage of players that don’t [do that]. Every game is televised, you’re always on camera. It’s like an event every weekend, you know?”

Not everyone attends events every weekend where they’ll be seen by tens of thousands (millions if it’s on the telly), of course, but many still come to Kings Cuts every few weeks. Other customers having trims include 18-year-old student Miles Harding, who’s still in his college uniform, and Lewis Skilton, a 29-year-old builder who arrives fresh from work with a bulky toolbox. ​“Most times I come in here there’s someone famous,” says Harding. ​“I get to see some faces and get to see their cars, which is quite cool.”

Skilton is less bothered. ​“Declan Rice goes here and I’m an Arsenal fan but that means nothing to me. I come here because my old barber moved away and he recommended Bill,” he says of Bennett. ​“The chat is a bonus.”

It’s perhaps the relative normality of Kings Cuts – spelled out in the prices, emphasised by the craic – that keeps players coming back. Cairney is clear that the promise of a good chinwag about everything from Love Island to hair transplants and the price of sports cars are all part of what he enjoys about his time in the chair. He’s also keen for updates on Bennett’s ​“search for the one”, and the fact the barber has now been exclusive with his partner for six months.

For footballers and their tightly controlled lives, a visit to the barbers brings something different, says Diss. ​“There are very few instances where football players are meeting, quote unquote, normal people in an intimate setting that isn’t a staged PR thing. These guys have been told that they’re going to be millionaires from about the time they’re about 10. Their entire life has been essentially weaponised towards becoming these world-class athletes. And as the opportunities become bigger, their social circles – the aperture of it – close down to pretty much nothing.”

For his part, Edwards leans into what he learned growing up in barbershops in his home country of Jamaica, where they were ​“the centre of the community… where people go to speak about what’s going on in their life. We carry that on to a footballer who’s going through enormous pressure, on and off the pitch.”

West, meanwhile, is conscious not to talk about football with his player clients. ​“It’s [their] work – I don’t want to talk about cutting hair when I’m not working.” Instead, he sticks to other interests, including golf, which he and Rice both play.

But no matter who’s in the chair, West says the cliché that barbers know more about their clients than their nearest and dearest is true.

​“People totally tell you their deeper stuff,” he says. ​“It’s mental, they just open up!” Has he ever felt burdened by a secret? ​“Nah!” he says with a laugh. ​“I probably go home and never think about it again, to be honest.”

Going by Edwards’ experience, West could soon be forgetting the secrets of his heroes, like Man City legend John Stones. ​“I used to watch the Olympics on television,” remembers the HDCutz barber. ​“I would see Usain Bolt racing and I would be telling my colleagues ​‘I’m going to cut his hair one day. I’m going to be a global barber, and I’m going to cut [the hair of] people all over the world.’ It’s all about speaking things into existence, believing you can work towards making it possible.” Stones walking into Kings Cuts, and out with a £27 mullet, is only a matter of time.