ThreeMatchBan
Carlos Valderrama had the hair. Jimmy Hill had the chin. And Abe van den Ban had the moustache.
Every era of football has a look, and the 1970s look was bigger, hairier and more confident than anything that came after. Most players of the decade have long since faded into team photographs. A few survive because of one image that captures the whole period in a single frame, and Van den Ban's is one of the best.
The photograph
He is leaning against a garage door outside his mother's house. He wears a roll-neck tracksuit top in the style of the time and a gold bracelet that would not have looked out of place in a nightclub. His haircut, thick and swept forward, was so far ahead of its time that it could pass for a 1990s Britpop cut, or something from the menswear rail of a high street tailor twenty years later.
And yet none of that is what the eye lands on. The moustache steals the show. Groomed, symmetrical and utterly certain of itself, it makes the fashionable clothes and the bold haircut look like supporting acts. A suburban garage door has rarely had to work so hard as a backdrop.
It helps that the man knew what he was doing. Van den Ban was said to have worked as a hairdresser for a period, and the attention to detail shows. His full playing story, from Zaandam to Haarlem, is told in the Abe van den Ban player profile; this piece is about the picture and the style that surrounded it.
A moustache built for a decade
The 1970s were the high point of football facial hair. In England, players from Graeme Souness to Terry McDermott wore the moustache as standard, and in the Netherlands the generation that grew up alongside Total Football favoured long hair, sideburns and plenty of growth on the top lip. Shirts were tight, collars were wide and nobody worried about looking like an athlete off the pitch.
Van den Ban's version was different because it never looked casual. Many moustaches of the era were the product of not bothering to shave. His was clearly maintained. It stayed with him throughout his career, through every season and every club, a fixed point while kits, managers and team-mates changed around him.
The decade's finest examples, from both sides of the North Sea, are ranked in the top 10 of football facial hair, and the wider fashion crimes of the game get their own treatment in a tour of football's aesthetically challenged.
Calm in the middle of chaos
The real test of a moustache is how it behaves under pressure. The match photograph here shows Van den Ban, on the left in a dark kit, as the former Dutch international midfielder Dick Schoenaker launches himself at a header in front of a packed stand. The defence has clearly been breached. Bodies are flying. The moment has the sweat-soaked panic of a back line coming apart.
Van den Ban, by contrast, looks almost serene. The moustache sits perfectly in place, the epitome of calm while everything around it falls apart. It is that composure, as much as the grooming, that makes him seem so gloriously out of time. The stand behind is lined with advertising hoardings for local businesses, the floodlight pylon rises over the roof, and the whole scene is unmistakably Dutch football in its pomp.
A steady career with one wild night
On the pitch, Van den Ban's career was steady rather than spectacular. He spent around a decade playing in the top two divisions of the Netherlands. The peak and the trough arrived together, in the quarter-final of the 1974–75 UEFA Cup, when his FC Amsterdam side met 1. FC Köln. They were beaten 5-1 in the first leg, and Van den Ban was sent off for a second bookable offence. Köln went through 8–3 on aggregate.
FC Amsterdam did not last much longer. The club was relegated to the second tier in 1978 and disbanded a few years later. Van den Ban moved on to HFC Haarlem, where his team-mates around the turn of the 1980s included a young Ruud Gullit, a player who would go on to make his own hairstyle one of the most famous in the sport.
His life after football reportedly took a more serious turn: he is said to have managed a centre for asylum seekers for seven years after retiring. An honourable second career. Still, when his name comes up among supporters, the conversation tends to begin and end in the same place, just below the nose.
Anyone who can spot the great moustaches of the age from a sticker alone should try the facially fuzzy player quiz.