Playing for Keeps
We're failing to identify many of the most talented goalkeepers
Freddie Woodman’s career in football started so well. A star of the Crystal Palace academy, he played in goal for the English Under-17 and Under-20 national teams, a particular highlight being the 2027 FIFA U-20 World Cup. Not only did England win the tournament with Freddie keeping goal in every game, but across seven games he only conceded three goals, and England’s 1-0 victory in the final owed a lot to his 73rd minute penalty save.
With such a glittering resume, it was only natural that he would end up at a top club. And indeed, tomorrow he will take the field in the FA Cup quarter-final, representing a team who have reached the final of that illustrious tournament seven times, including winning it twice. That’s right, Preston North End: champions of English football in the 1880s, now in the lower half of the Championship, approximately the 35th strongest team in England.
Why did his glorious career in the Premiership fail to materialise? One can imagine several plausible explanations:
Most simply: perhaps he displayed a great deal of promise, but then failed to live up to it, and is one of the many former child stars who ends up a second-stringer.
Perhaps I’m overrating the significance of his early achievements. Maybe he benefitted from having strong defenders in front of him and the penalty save was one-off luck?
Or, my going theory: career success as a goalkeeper is simply a lot less meritocratic than outfield football.
With outfield it’s often possible to quantify performance. This is most obvious with strikers, where goals and assists pile up over the course of the season into a very usable statistic. Furthermore, playing alongside other top-class players gives more opportunities to display your talents: the winger with a talent for perfectly-placed crosses will give his best when matched with a centre-forward who can time his runs well. Goalkeepers, by contrast, show their best when the rest of the team is failing to do so. When a team loses 7-0, it’s practically a cliche that the goalkeeper, unlike the men in front of him, will have actually played well.
Perhaps the biggest blocker to meritocracy, however, is demonstrated by the man who will be at the far end of the pitch from Freddie Woodman tomorrow: Aston Villa and Argentina goalkeeper Emi Martinez. Aged 18, Martinez was picked up by the Arsenal academy, but spent the next decade either warming the bench, on loan, or both. Between 2012 and September 2020, he notched up a mere 71 appearances for seven different clubs, often serving as reserve goalkeeper even at the clubs he was loaned to. With the exception of Getafe in La Liga, they were all lower-league sides: Oxford United, Sheffield Wednesday, Rotherham United, Wolves, and Reading. Similarly, he failed to make it onto the Argentinian national team, being an unused substitute on two occasions.
Then, on 20 June 2020, 41 minutes into an away defeat at Brighton, his luck changed. Brighton striker Neal Maupay clattered into Arsenal’s first-choice keeper Bernd Leno, who hit the ground awkwardly and spent the rest of the season out on injury. Suddenly Martinez was the first choice and put in a string of excellent games, enabling him to make the case for being a first-team goalkeeper. When Arsenal decided to return to Leno at the beginning of the 2020-21 season, the Villains were very happy to buy Martinez with £20m and the promise of a first team slot. He immediately shone in the role, equalling the club record of 15 clean sheets in his first season as goalkeeper.
His success at Villa Park prompted the Argentinian national team selectors to give him a shot, where he established himself as the goalkeeper of choice for both club and country. Four and a half years on from that game in Brighton, Martinez is a winner of the 2022 World Cup, and twice winner of the Lev Yashin Trophy for the world’ s highest-performing goalkeeper. He has 172 first-class appearances for Aston Villa and 51 for Argentina, all of those since 2021.
How did his light remain under a bushel for so long? Perhaps it was his modest, unassuming character…
…or perhaps not. More likely, it was the fact that only one goalkeeper can be out on the pitch, with the result that goalkeepers face a vastly sharper choice between playing for a higher-ranked team (with the wages to accompany it) and playing the games which enable them to build their reputations. An up-and-coming defender or midfielder playing for Arsenal might only get 5 or 10 appearances across the season, but they will usually get some. Managers will chop-and-change, trying out different combinations of players for different tactics and opponents. For the goalkeeper, they just put in “the best guy” for league games, and anyone else will maybe get to play a game or two in the FA Cup. Not much for other clubs’ scouts to go on.
The combination of low quantifiability, anti-correlation with broader team performance, and inability to try multiple goalkeepers in game situations means that career progress for goalkeepers is, compared to outfield players, extremely luck-dependent. There are surely some truly excellent goalkeepers plugging away in lower leagues and second-teams, who if they only got the chance, could make it big – in a way which is just not true when a player’s contributions can be measured reasonably well by Goals Plus Assists.
This in turn suggests a business opportunity. Football clubs tend to handle recruit fully in-house: players are recruited to meet specific needs in the team which may not be at all obvious from outside (“I need a left winger who likes cutting inside and is good at free kicks”), a tendency which will only be strengthened as decisions to sell are increasingly driven by Financial Fair Play rules. But perhaps goalkeepers could be different? A team of smart analysts could develop models of goals-conceded-minus-expected-goals, build other models aiming to link goalkeepers’ distribution decisions to their team’s xG, and quietly approach strong teams whose goalkeepers are aging out. It’s not entirely clear to me how you’d structure the transaction to avoid the buying and selling clubs cutting out the middle man – but there’s enough money in football that you wouldn’t have to take much of a cut at all for it to provide a comfortable living.