Top 10 Goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup

Group stage, Qatar 2022. Your country is currently defending against one of those long, probing attacks; the ball is recycled from winger to central midfielder to center back, then switched across to the opposite winger. He takes a touch, jinks inside, looks up. The striker has dropped back to the top of the D. You’re screaming at the TV for someone to step up and get tight to him, but it’s too late – the ball comes in, and he hits it first time, a sweet curling effort that you can tell immediately is on target.

How confident are you feeling in that moment? How confident should you be feeling?

Advanced goalkeeping data from Opta via FBref can help answer that question. Post-shot expected goals, explained here in detail by StatsBomb’s Mike Goodman, measures shot stopping ability using the trajectory and pace of shots on target, as well as the location from where the shot was taken and whether any blocking defenders were in the frame of the goal. By subtracting goals allowed from post-shot expected goals (on a per-90 minutes basis), it’s possible to use the measure as a mark of goalkeeper quality; positive numbers indicate that the keeper is saving more shots than an average keeper would, and negative numbers indicate he’s letting a couple in that he really could’ve gotten.

Of course, shot stopping ability isn’t everything. In recent years, managers like Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola and USMNT head coach Gregg Berhalter have famously opted for ball-playing goalkeepers over one-dimensional shot-stoppers. Playing the ball out from the back is tough if your keeper can’t play a six-yard ground pass under pressure.

FBref scouting reports capture both qualities, as well as a few other goalkeeping tendencies that can help determine whose gloves are safest right now. All goalkeepers who’ve been officially named to World Cup squads (as of November 13) have, for this post, been sorted and ranked according to each of the categories tracked by Opta. Here, because he’s first on the list in alphabetical order, is England / Arsenal keeper:

We can use a radar chart, popular in soccer data analysis, to visualize his contributions over the past 365 days. Percentiles here are calculated compared to Qatar-bound keepers with sufficient minutes played in Opta-tracked leagues. Sorry to David De Gea (staying home), Simon Ngapandouetnbu (called up by Cameroon, no senior appearances in his career), Yousef Hassan (Qatari third-string, club football for Al-Gharafa); you might be the best, you might be the worst, but you’re not in this data set.

Stats here are broken up into categories: light green for shot-stopping (post-shot xG prevented, goals against per 90, save percentage, difficulty of shots faced, clean sheet percentage), dark green for involvement in buildup (touches per 90, percentage of goal kicks launched long, goal kicks per 90, average length of goal kicks), and red for sweeping (crosses stopped, defensive actions outside penalty area, average distance from goal). Larger slices mean better shot-stopping, more involvement in buildup (more touches, shorter passes, lower launch percentage), and more positive activity (higher cross stopping percentage, more actions outside the area). We see here that Ramsdale is a pretty average, maybe even below-average, shot-stopper, very proactive, and that he tends to go long on goal kicks. Overall, Ramsdale is… fine. But who, in each of these categories, is the best of the best?

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Shot Stoppers:

The first thing that should be noted here is that post-shot xG minus goals allowed, while it’s the best metric available, is relatively volatile; that is, sample size can really affect these numbers, and there’s still some debate as to how stable they are over time. If a striker scores well above their expected goals for one season, we’d say they’re on a finishing hot streak; if a keeper saves well above post-shot xG, we should say, “He’s playing well,” not, “He’s suddenly the best in the world”; if his numbers remain great as the sample size increases, we can start polishing the Yashin.

All that said: former Liverpool and Sunderland goalkeeper Simon Mignolet is having an astounding Champions League campaign for Club Brugge. Advanced stats aren’t available for the Belgian Pro League, but in European competition, Mignolet has prevented 0.64 goals per 90 above what you’d expect from an average keeper, based on the quality of shots he’s faced. Brugge were surprise qualifiers from their group, beating out Bayer Leverkusen and Atletico Madrid for a spot in the knockouts, and Mignolet is a huge reason why. (He’ll, of course, back up Thibaut Courtois at the World Cup.)

Similarly to Mignolet, there’s a sample size issue here; we don’t have league numbers for Argentina’s Franco Armani, but in the Copa Libertadores, he’s been stellar for River Plate. The 36-year-old won the starting job from Willy Caballero midway through Russia 2018, and this time around, he’ll be competing with Aston Villa’s Emiliano Martinez for a place in manager Lionel Messi Scaloni’s starting XI.

Curious case, Matt Turner. In the 450 minutes captured by his 2022 scouting report, he looks awful, conceding -0.10 goals per 90 compared to expectation; however, when you expand the data set to include the 2021 MLS season, the former New England Revolution keeper is one of the best in the bunch. 0.43 post-shot xG per shot on target goes a long way towards explaining why: the Revs defense was allowing really good shots in 2022, and attackers were really wellying the ball against Turner. (He’d also already agreed a midseason move to Arsenal.)

Liverpool and Brazil keeper Alisson Becker is near the top of almost every statistical category here, and there are no caveats this time – he’s been consistently good for Liverpool, he was good at Roma, he’s good for Brazil, and he’ll probably be good in Qatar. He, along with one other keeper we’ll look at later, could reasonably call himself the best in the world right now.

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Most Involved:

Familiar to many for his penalty-saving heroics at Euro 2020, Switzerland’s Yann Sommer leads World Cup goalkeepers with 53.88 touches per 90 for club side Borussia Monchengladbach. He prefers to go short with his goal kicks (average length of 35 yards; launch percentage of 27.8%), and he’s remarkably consistent when he does: this season, he’s completed 404 of 410 attempted short and medium-length passes (between 5-30 yards), a very healthy 98.5%.

Unai Simon looks likely to get the nod for Spain at the World Cup, but Luis Enrique’s inclusion of Brentford goalkeeper David Raya in his squad over Manchester United’s David De Gea is a great indicator of how he wants his side to play. Raya is a less consistent shot stopper, but he gets a lot of touches, and he’s comfortable coming out of his box to sweep up behind the defense. If Simon scores another ridiculous own goal, Raya could slot in just fine.

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Most Likely to Play it Short:

Costa Rica’s Keylor Navas splits time with Gianluigi Donnarumma at PSG these days, but he still gets enough time in the Champions League and domestic cups (1226 minutes in this sample) for his +0.08 post-shot xG minus goals allowed and 80% save percentage to be impressive. He also, as you’d expect for PSG in Europe, never, ever goes long from goal kicks (12% launch percentage; average length of goal kicks, 21.6 yards). Funnily enough, the most similar goalkeeper to Navas in the top five European leagues, according to fbref’s player comparison tool, is: Donnarumma.

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Cross-Stopper:

You’d expect a taller keeper to take this category – Martinez is listed at 6’3” – but, in all of Europe, Martinez is in the 99th percentile for percentage of crosses stopped, based on 3544 minutes for Aston Villa in the Premier League. He is, in every other statistical category, average or below average; over his career, he’s at +0.05 PSxG-GA/90. But he can certainly grab a cross!

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Sweepers:

Unfortunately for him, Kasper Schmeichel is Denmark’s vice-captain and the third-most-capped player on their 2022 squad; fortunately for Denmark, the 35-year-old Schmeichel has a capable understudy in 23-year-old Hertha Berlin sweeper-keeper Oliver Christensen. Relatively middling shot-stopping numbers are made up for by Christensen’s proficiency stopping crosses (8.6%), his involvement in buildup play (40.8 touches per 90), and his ability to come out of his area to clean up behind the defensive line (2.4 defensive actions outside area per 90, average distance of 17.9 yards). The Bundesliga seems to produce a lot of these proactive keepers, probably at least in part due to the influence of:

With the highest average distance of defensive actions not only in our data set but in all of Europe, Neuer more than lives up to his reputation as the archetypal sweeper-keeper. What makes Neuer so special is that he’s also an excellent shot-stopper, even at 36. Whether you’d take Neuer or Alisson for your World XI probably depends on who you’ve seen play more recently, and either way, you’d be correct.

Brief Note: data current as of November 12. Also, this piece has a companion, linked here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2022 at 5:46 pm and is filed under 2022 Men's World Cup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.