In the days before the 2021 Champions League final, there was one man seemingly busier than anyone else in the heat of Porto. Sheldon Edwards, the celebrity hairdresser, had no fewer than 16 trims to organise.
Eight players from Manchester City and eight from Chelsea. Edwards, who moved to the UK with his family from their native Jamaica in 1998, has been in serious demand for years.
Raheem Sterling and Antonio Rudiger were his two big early advocates, spreading the word among team-mates.
Edwards, whose popular salon HD Cutz in Clapham regularly welcomes high-profile Premier League stars, spends much of his time on the road or in the air.
This week he was up in Cheshire’s affluent Alderley Edge before City’s Champions League quarter-final date with Bayern Munich. Riyad Mahrez and Phil Foden are both clients. So too is Erling Haaland.
Haaland is not shy about coming forward. You can’t be with his physique and stature. A man who does not shirk making a statement, and that was certainly the case in the build-up to this tie.
As he strode out of the City Football Academy’s changing rooms on to the enclosed pitch, to shield Pep Guardiola’s sessions from wind, he was sporting plaits.
Edwards did them, at a price of around £100, and has been working with Haaland since he was at Borussia Dortmund, with Jude Bellingham a fan of his work. Bellingham’s high top is the most requested by the public.
He travels across Europe weekly looking after the very best – fades, curls, tapers for the likes of Karim Benzema and Vinicius Junior – but Haaland’s mane is wildly different to the normal look.
Edwards indicates that given the eyeballs on matches - the sponsorship and social media pressures - a fresh haircut is part of a player’s checklist these days.
Not that everybody understands that. Ralf Rangnick was left seething in 2020 when the RB Leipzig squad flew Edwards in before a Bundesliga defeat by Frankfurt when they sat top of the league, branding the players decadent.
‘The 2-0 defeat was annoying enough, the hairdresser story leaves me stunned,’ Rangnick said.
Edwards – popular with the England squad and who was out at the World Cup in Qatar - was the professional behind Foden’s peroxide blonde number at the European Championship, while there was even talk that a change in style proved lucky for Sterling as it coincided with an upturn in goalscoring form at the Etihad Stadium a few seasons back.
The third-generation barber, who learned the ropes at his grandfather’s shop on the Caribbean, is a trusted confidante of plenty – including the striker who is set to send records tumbling in the coming weeks.