There is an ever increasing variety of Goal Keeper glove styles.   This article intends to demystify some of the more common terms.   Topics covered include boned vs. conventional; embedded materials; padding.

The debate behind the no bones vs. bones is a choice between freedom and protection.   The conventional wisdom is that non-boned gloves provide more flexibility and feel for the keeper.   The gloves have less mass.   Therefore, they should provide more control and require less effort to handle the ball.   Boned gloves are bulkier, but protect the fingers from hyper extending.   They should provide flexibility when closing the hand, but resist bending beyond a flat palm.   For younger players, this can provide a great deal of protection for little hands and provide a confidence boost.   As players get older, the need for this type of protection may be reduced.   Some players, including two of our GK testers would not play without them.  Others, including any keeper sponsored by Nike, do not feel that the loss of feel outweighs the added protection.   The bones may make it harder to open and close the hand.   They definitely change the feel of a punch or parry.   NOTE: Not all gloves have a bone in the thumb.   Our testers often remove this bone anyway.   It is a personal preference.

Many gloves offer different embedded materials in the palm.   Some of these are intended to provide improved grip, others are intended to provide improved durability.   In our experience, these goals tend to be mutually exclusive.   The most durable gloves are those made for indoor play.   The palm materials used for these gloves are designed to take the abuse of the indoor game.   They tend to be inflexible and have minimal feel or grip.   Gloves with very soft palms tend to wear very quickly.   In order to preserve the latex, they are often embedded with Carbon.   This is a fiber form of carbon similar to fiberglass.   Think race cars and airplanes.   Theoretically, this enhances the durability of the palm, but we haven’t seen a noticeable difference in the wear characteristics; however, they do tend to grip well in damp weather and remain consistent over the life of the glove.   Another common enhancement is Titanium.   This provides better wet weather grip.   The latex is embedded with titanium particles to increase friction and to provide very small sharp edges that grip the ball when it is wet.

All gloves are padded on the palm.   Most top flight gloves have padding on the fingers and backhand as well.   This helps protect the hand from impact with the ground, other players and the posts.   The best gloves have sculpted padding on the fingers and back of the hand to provide a controllable surface for punching the ball.   This is exceptionally important on gloves with bones.   Some gloves also have padding on the back of the thumb.   This seems to be a personal preference.  We suggest you try gloves with and without before buying either.

Proprietary terms for finger bones:

• adidas=Fingersave
• Puma=V-Konstruckt
• Reusch=OrthoTech
• Sells=Guard Frame
• Selsport=ProTect
• Sondico=HyperExTech
• Uhlsport = Supportframe
• Umbro=X-Protect