From curtain to World Cup orbit, how a barber joined the U.S. team

Sebastián Morales Cortés carried an Antioquian barber’s craft into one of soccer’s most visible stages, traveling with the Selección de Estados Unidos at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar as part of the delegation. In a tournament that ran from 20 November to 18 December 2022, his presence reflected more than grooming. It showed how trust, routine and personal style travel with elite players when the pressure rises.

The U.S. arrived in Qatar after qualifying on 9 November 2022, returning to the World Cup for the first time since 2014. U.S. Soccer said 25 of the 26 players on the roster were set for their first World Cup appearance, a young squad that needed familiar routines as much as tactics. Drawn into Group B with Wales, England and Iran, the Americans entered a tournament where even appearance became part of the larger performance, and Morales helped shape that off-field ecosystem.

His path to that role began far from the global spotlight. Morales has said his first tools were a pair of old scissors, a living-room curtain and a motorcycle mirror. From those improvised beginnings, he built a career that reached a turning point in May 2019, when at age 27 he won a major barber competition at the Connecticut City Expo. That event drew contestants from the Americas, Latin America, Asia and Europe, with only two Colombians in the field, and it marked him as a stylist capable of working on an international stage.

The visibility around his work also fit the World Cup’s own culture. FIFA has long noted that striking hairstyles have been part of World Cup folklore, from mohawks and mullets to ponytails and bold colors. In Qatar, FIFA even singled out Weston McKennie of the United States among the tournament’s most memorable looks, reinforcing how image and identity can become part of the football story itself. Morales’s place with the American team showed that the barber’s chair was not a side note but part of the matchday structure.

His reach did not stop with Team USA. In 2024, Morales also gave Emiliano Martínez, the Argentina goalkeeper known as Dibu, a special haircut during the Argentine national team’s tour of the United States. The move underscored how a barber from Antioquia had moved from local improvisation to a transnational network of players who trust him to shape the way they present themselves on the world stage.