Joe Hart deserves to be remembered for his Man City peak, not his wilderness years

For some people in England, the news that Joe Hart will be retiring from football at the end of the season will be greeted with a shrug.

He has not been a Premier League regular for six years, and had not been among the best goalkeepers in the league for a while longer than that. He has not played for England since November 2017, back in the first phase of the Gareth Southgate era, and was moved on almost as briskly as Wayne Rooney. Hart has spent what will be the final three years of his career in Scotland with Celtic, playing on a huge stage but one out of the eyeline of many English fans.

But none of this means that we should ignore what a significant figure Hart has been, what a great career he has had, or what a brilliant, charismatic goalkeeper he was at his peak.

Because Hart’s retirement means more than just the end of his time as a player. It could also signify the end of at least one era.

First, the time where it wasn’t unheard of to win the Premier League with an English goalkeeper. Hart was utterly integral to the Manchester City sides that took the title in 2011-12 and 2013-14. Whatever happened in the second half of his career can never diminish how good he was in those years. And those championships established a link between him and the last great English goalkeeper before him, David Seaman (and the three titles he won with Arsenal), and the great English ’keepers of the distant past.

It is no slight on Jordan Pickford, Nick Pope and the next generation to wonder when we will next see a team with an English goalkeeper win the Premier League. Aaron Ramsdale got close with Arsenal last season but is not even first-choice there any more. It may be another generation or longer before we see anyone else do what Hart did twice at the start of the previous decade.

Perhaps even more significant is the fact that Hart is one of the last leading goalkeepers who won his reputation based on what he could do with his hands rather than his feet.

At his best, he was physically dominant, electric off his line and athletic enough to pull off some remarkable saves. But Hart was never a goalkeeper who looked like he could play as an outfielder if he had to; one who was comfortable receiving the ball under pressure, or could break through the opposition press with an incisive pass.

This was part of why his career went in the direction that it did, as football started to change. (Although we cannot ignore the fact that his shot-stopping ability also started to wane in his late twenties, giving him a career arc, peaking in his mid-twenties, more akin to an outfield player than a goalkeeper.)

When Pep Guardiola arrived at City in summer 2016, one of the first decisions he made was to sideline Hart.

It made sense: Guardiola wanted his team to build up from the back and Hart was not able to give them that. Claudio Bravo was swiftly signed but was never convincing in that first season. And when City signed Ederson from Benfica the following summer, people quickly stopped asking about the treatment of Hart.

For England, Hart also lost his place to Pickford during that 2017-18 season as Southgate too decided to go for a ’keeper more comfortable with the ball at his feet. This summer, Pickford will play in his fourth major international tournament, and if he keeps going towards the 2026 World Cup he will surpass Hart’s 75 caps (he currently has 58).

Goalkeeping has changed in the past 10 years and when you watch Ederson or Allison or David Raya or Guglielmo Vicario, you can see why Hart was a ’keeper for the 2010s rather than the 2020s.

But in his era, playing a game that suited his strengths, Hart was supreme.

Not many goalkeepers arrive into the senior game fully-formed but Hart was City’s first choice at the age of 20 and an England international at 21. When his club career appeared to be blocked by City signing Shay Given from Newcastle United in 2009, he went away on loan to Birmingham City at age 22 and made himself even better.

Once Hart returned from that loan, City manager Roberto Mancini made the bold decision to make him first-choice, ahead of Given. In his first game back, he made a series of brilliant saves in a goalless draw at Tottenham Hotspur and by the end of that season he had lifted the FA Cup, having starred in a 1-0 defeat of Manchester United in the semi-finals. The next season, Hart and City won the title.

It felt like he had years at the very top ahead of him.

Hart saves a Lionel Messi penalty in 2015 (Tom Jenkins/Getty Images)

When Mancini was replaced by Manuel Pellegrini after the 2012-13 season, Hart had a brief spell out of the side but came back to help City to their second Premier League title. There were brilliant Champions League performances against Barcelona and Borussia Dortmund. Those two titles (and the 2011 FA Cup) mean he will always be remembered at City — along with Vincent Kompany, Sergio Aguero, Pablo Zabaleta, David Silva and the rest — as the indispensable men to that first phase of success.

Hart never came close to winning anything at international level but those 75 caps, and his three tournaments as No 1, give him his place in England history. With hindsight, he should have been first-choice at the 2010 World Cup too, ahead of Rob Green and David James, but manager Fabio Capello did not have the bravery to make the same decision his Italian countryman Mancini did at club level later that summer.

Sadly, Hart will often be associated with his ludicrous attempts to put off Andrea Pirlo in the Euro 2012 quarter-final shootout defeat to Italy, or the goals conceded to Wales and Iceland in the same tournament four years later. These are moments that can not be spun into anything else. But the broader story of England’s failures in the 2010s extends far beyond a few goalkeeping errors.

It was a transitional era, from one generation to another, overseen by a manager who never quite had the right answers. If Hart had been five or 10 years older, and had played in the Sven-Goran Eriksson era, his international career might be seen in a different light.

For years it was fashionable to knock Hart, to focus on his weaknesses rather than his strengths, to laugh about the big moments where he got it wrong rather than the many where he got it right. But in the fullness of time, the successes will be remembered for longer than the failures. And while there was something dramatic about his difficult early thirties, as he moved between Torino, West Ham United, Burnley and the bench at Spurs, he has been able to end on a high.

These three years at Celtic, winning at least two league titles and three domestic cups, have allowed Hart to show that some of his strengths, as a shot-stopper and as a personality you can build around, have stayed relevant after all.

(Top photo: Mike Egerton – Empics/Getty Images)