Where does the term “hat-trick” come from?
From cricket: in 1858 a bowler who dismissed three batters with three straight balls was presented with a hat.
A soccer player scores a third goal, the commentator shouts “Hat-trick!” and the stadium erupts. It is one of the great moments in the game.
But it is an odd phrase when you think about it. Scoring three goals has nothing obvious to do with headwear. Follow the term back, and you end up not in soccer at all, but in another sport born in Britain.
It started with cricket
That sport is cricket. A “bowler,” the equivalent of a pitcher in baseball, delivers the ball and a batter tries to hit it with a flat bat. Behind the batter stands the wicket, a set of three wooden stumps, and the bowler gets the batter out by knocking it down or by getting a hit caught, among other ways.
In 1858, at the Hyde Park ground in Sheffield, in northern England, the All England Eleven, a touring side of star players, took on a local team of 22 from Hallam. During the match, the All England bowler H. H. Stephenson dismissed three batters with three consecutive balls.
Impressed by the feat, the spectators passed the hat, so to speak: they took up a collection and used the money to buy Stephenson a hat. In cricket at the time, it was customary to reward a professional’s outstanding performance with a collection like this.
From a hat to a word
Taking three wickets with three consecutive balls came to be known as a hat-trick. The earliest known appearance of the term in print is in an English newspaper, the Chelmsford Chronicle, in 1865.
In cricket the definition is still strict. One bowler must dismiss batters with three consecutive balls of his own. The sequence may be interrupted by another bowler’s over, but the three balls must follow on from one another within the same match. In Test cricket, the top level of the international game, hat-tricks have been recorded only about 50 times since the first in 1879.
Into soccer, and onto the ice
The term later spread to other sports, coming to mean three goals or successes in a single game. In soccer, a player who scores three times in a match has a hat-trick. The goals do not need to come in a row: one in the first half and two in the second is fine.
Some countries are pickier, though. In Germany, three goals scored in a row within the same half, with no other goal in between, are singled out as a “pure” hat-trick. And one goal each with the right foot, the left foot and the head is known as a “perfect hat-trick.”
In ice hockey, a hat-trick is the cue for fans to shower the rink with their own hats. There are several stories about how the custom began, including one about a hat shop in Toronto, Canada, that in the 1940s promised a free hat to any player who scored three goals.
Hat-tricks on the biggest stage
Only two men have scored a hat-trick in a World Cup final: England’s Geoff Hurst in 1966 and France’s Kylian Mbappé in 2022.
In the 2015 Women’s World Cup final, Carli Lloyd of the United States scored a hat-trick against Japan within the first 16 minutes. Her third goal was a huge shot from around the halfway line, and the US went on to win 5–2.
In England’s Premier League, Sadio Mané scored three goals in just 2 minutes and 56 seconds in 2015. It remains the fastest hat-trick in the league’s history.