Best goalkeepers in the top five leagues, so far – data analysis

With a lot of games gone in Europe’s top five leagues, it’s a good time to analyse who the best players have been. To analyse which players have exceeded expectations, and which just haven’t been up to their normal standard. This rather unprecedented start to the season has been surrounded with debates about whether more goals are being scored because of absent fans in the stadiums. However, most of the attention has been put on the strikers rather than goalkeepers.

This data analysis will use statistics to identify the best performers in each section of goalkeeping. The data will include goalkeepers within the top five European leagues who have played 10 games or more for the same club throughout the 2020/21 season. The data will be broken down into passing, sweeping, and shot-stopping. We will identify the best in each section and which ones performed the best overall.

Who has been the best at preventing goals?

Shot-stopping data can sometimes be the most misleading. For example, a goalkeeper who faces fewer shots per 90 will have less chance of making an error or conceding. This means that those keepers who face more shots per 90 are more likely to have negative stats. So it’s important to keep this in mind. We can use advanced stats to compare keepers to each other to give us a better view of their individual performance, rather than their team’s.

The first graph looks at how many goals each goalkeeper concedes per 90 minutes and how many they were expected to concede. The xG against metric measures how good the chances that each goalkeeper faced were.

As we can see, there is one standout performer. Atlético Madrid’s Jan Oblak is arguably the best goalkeeper in the world. We say arguably because some believe that he is well protected by his great defence. Nonetheless, the Madrid man boasts a huge save percentage of 94.74%, a truly ridiculous number. Although he has faced a below-average amount of shots per 90, he still faced 3.57 shots per 90.

The players towards the top of the graph have faced the most shots, this means that those in the top right quadrant are the best performers. Édgar Badía has had a surprisingly good start to the season with Elche in La Liga. The Spaniard has faced 4.94 shots per 90, saving 81.13% of them.