Want to compare keepers fairly? Take a deep dive into their clean sheets

10-Mar-2021 11:19:18 | The Guardian

It’s tempting to rate keepers by the number of clean sheets they keep, but some clean sheets are more impressive than others

By Martin Laurence for WhoScored

The phrase “lies, damned lies and statistics” is one that football statisticians hear regularly. The introduction of deep data such as expected goals has been met with skepticism by many fans and pundits, but the same people who cast aspersions on newer metrics are often happy to take other numbers at face value. One statistic that is often delivered without any real context is clean sheets but, if we really want to know how well a goalkeeper is performing, the metric needs far more consideration.

With statistics on goalkeepers relatively thin on the ground compared to their outfield counterparts, clean sheets are still seen by some as the best indicator of a keeper’s performance. However, it is a statistic we can qualify relatively simply, merely by considering just how much work a keeper has to do to earn a clean sheet. We are going to do that here by considering how many saves a keeper makes when keeping the opposition at bay.

Barcelona

Want to compare keepers fairly? Take a deep dive into their clean sheets