James Shea tells a story that captures the fraternal spirit among goalkeepers. Back when he was a novice at Arsenal – before his meandering path from the wilds of non-league took him to his current club, Luton Town – new gloves felt like a luxury and, on an academy keeper’s salary, were still a significant expense. Shea asked Lukasz Fabianski if he could borrow a pair for training. A few days later, Fabianski turned up with a big box full of gloves with Shea’s name emblazoned on them.

It was far from a one-off act of kindness. There are many goalkeepers with similar stories. Football is so often a dog-eat-dog environment but many keepers testify to a different moral code. There is even a term for this tendency towards mutual support: the goalkeepers’ union. There are no subs, no union meetings and no walkouts, but many will bear witness to the sense of solidarity between the sticks.

“It’s a bit of a cliche, but goalkeepers are effectively playing a different sport,” says Richard Lee, a former Premier League goalkeeper with Watford and Blackburn Rovers. “Naturally, there’s that camaraderie between keepers. You support each other and you can empathise when other goalkeepers are going through a tough time.”

When it comes to criticism, many feel that only those within the goalkeepers’ union really get it. “The position of goalkeeper, even now, is quite misunderstood,” says Lee. “From a goalkeeper’s perspective, if you give an opinion, it is only ever going to be an amateur opinion if you haven’t played the position.”

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That applies to punditry, commentary and mainstream media analysis, which is why Lee started a keeper-oriented podcast called – surprise, surprise – The Goalkeepers’ Union. Co-creator Matthew Beadle, himself a willing goalie as a kid, voices his own frustrations about the way goalkeepers are under-represented on TV. “There’s now saturation analysis in football,” he says. “But there’s rarely ever a goalkeeper sitting on a panel that is able to say: ‘This is why this keeper has done that. Here’s why he may have made an error.’”

Without an expert in the room, former outfield players fall back on platitudes: “beaten at his near post”; “he’s flapped at that”; “a good height for a goalkeeper” and so on. Lee points out that, whereas Sky Sports have Ref Watch – a programme in which a former referee will dissect the big decisions of the day – there is no equivalent for keepers. “Plus, now there are thousands of people on social media who see themselves as goalkeeping experts, telling you what you should have done. It’s tough so goalkeepers do tend to band together. It’s down to that appreciation of the position.”

The same misconceptions can also apply to teammates and even those in the dugout. James Shaw, who plays for Tooting & Mitcham United in the Isthmian League, agrees that goalkeeping is a misunderstood art. Asked about the goalkeepers’ union, he says: “It’s almost like Fight Club. You try to stick up for each other, because no matter what club it is, up and down the country, the goalkeeper is getting stick for something for no apparent reason. Every training session, every game, I get a right-winger or someone asking: ‘Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you come out for that?’ It’s like: ‘If I actually took you through the five decisions I had to make in that half a second, even then you probably wouldn’t understand.’”

Even though the demands of the position are changing – even at non-league level, keepers increasingly need to be comfortable in possession and able to play with their feet – keepers get minimal recognition. “Goalkeepers often don’t even get credit for being footballers,” says Shaw. “People treat you as if you’re just the idiot who stands in goal.” Then there is the brutal nature of their mistakes, with managers breathing fire on keepers who let in a goal after saving five or six.

Goalkeeping is a solitary art, which brings its own unique psychological challenges. The Russian author Vladimir Nabokov idealised the goalkeeper as “the lone eagle”, which goes some way to explaining why keepers feel a distant kinship.

“At times it’s like you’re friends, even though you don’t know the opposition keeper at all,” says Shaw. “It’s like meeting a long-lost brother. You know them, you know they’re related to you somehow and you don’t really know anything about them, but you can appreciate that you’re probably dealing with the same sort of things.”

In the Premier League that can mean standing alone in front of a sheer wall of noise. In non-league it can mean facing down intensely personal abuse from a handful of fans. And for every goalkeeper it means long spells waiting in the wind, rain, sleet and snow, punctured by sudden rushes of desperate adrenaline.

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Goalkeepers also train in tight-knit units, often sharing a small pool of coaches who, as ex-keepers themselves, serve as the invisible glue that holds the union together. While that contributes to their closeness, it also breeds a fierce competitiveness, and rival keepers cannot be entirely selfless. “If a mistake happens and your team concedes, you obviously feel sorry for them but you’re also like: ‘I could be back in next week,’” says Shaw. “That’s a cynical way of looking at it, but sometimes you need to look after No 1.”

If that is a tension within the goalkeepers’ union, most manage to keep it under wraps. “It’s just the reality, there’s only one position on the field,” says Lee. “I was with Brad Friedel at Blackburn and the guy just never gets injured. Peter Enckelman was there with him for four years and barely played a game of football.”

If anything, the possibility of spending weeks and months on the sidelines, waiting, is just another shared psychological challenge that brings keepers together. Even when pitted against each other, then, the spirit of the goalkeepers’ union remains and is symbolised, after training or the final whistle, by the clasping of gloved fists.

• This article appeared first in When Saturday Comes

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