Let’s put it bluntly: in recent seasons, several sides promoted into the Premier League have barely given themselves a chance of survival because their goalkeepers haven’t been good enough.
Premier League newcomers are no more likely to have world-class shot-stoppers than they are to boast world-class strikers but assuming they are going to be battling against relegation, they will probably concede more shots in games than they take. This means goalkeeper is clearly a key position.
One of this season’s three newcomers, Southampton, suddenly find themselves with an unusually established Premier League goalkeeper.
A year and a half ago, Aaron Ramsdale was the undisputed regular starter in goal for an Arsenal side challenging for the Premier League. He was voted into the PFA Premier League Team of the Year for 2022-23 and there were calls for him to be England’s No 1, ahead of Jordan Pickford.
When Arsenal’s recruitment of David Raya from Brentford before last season dropped him down to a backup role, it meant this summer’s move in search of first-team football somewhere else was inevitable. But it was still something of a surprise that he has dropped so far down the league table to get it.
“Ramsdale wants to become England No 1, and he wants to be here,” Southampton manager Russell Martin said. “Five weeks ago, I’d have said it was crazy. Even a week ago, it was not achievable. We have pestered him, he’s seen how we have played, and he wants to show everyone how good he is.”
Well, how good is he?
First, let’s look at how bad others playing his position have been.
For much of this article, we’re going to use a metric called ‘post-shot expected goals (PSxG +/-)’. Forgive the slightly complex term but PSxG +/- takes the positioning of where a shot on target was taken from and where it ended up (regardless of whether it was saved or not) and works out how likely it was to end in a goal. The +/- part is a comparison of that figure to how many actual goals were conceded.
So, if a goalkeeper faced 43 PSxG but conceded 50 times, he has statistically underperformed by around seven goals from a shot-stopping perspective. If he only allowed 40, he saved the equivalent of three goals more than might be expected.
Using those numbers, Southampton should be particularly wary of enduring poor displays from their ’keeper.
Sorting the goalkeeping performances according to each club’s finishing position (without including any points deductions, to give a true reflection of on-field performance), the worst PSxG across the past seven Premier League seasons was Southampton’s relegation campaign in 2022-23.
Gavin Bazunu had arrived from Manchester City’s academy ranks the previous summer with a promising reputation, having played out on loan in the EFL for the previous two years, but he had a disastrous season. Southampton conceded around 22 goals more than you would expect based on the position and quality of opposition shots. Bazunu was, at age 20 for much of that season, out of his depth, and Southampton finished bottom.
This graph (hover over a dot to identify the team) shows how few relegated clubs have been able to count upon good performances from their goalkeeper.
The real outlier, towards the bottom-right, was Swansea City’s Lukasz Fabianski in 2017-18. He was over five goals ‘up’, and performed so impressively that he remained in the Premier League the following season, with West Ham United snapping him up. The only other goalkeeper to overperform his underlying numbers by more than two goals was Alphonse Areola, in his loan spell at Fulham during the 2020-21 season. Areola also moved to West Ham for the next campaign.
But this is possibly considering things in the wrong manner. Southampton will not be relegated in May (if that happens) simply because they are a promoted club, even if last season’s trio all went straight back down.
So let’s use the same PSxG statistics for each side over the past seven seasons, but rather than sorting them by finishing place, let’s do it by points, and highlight the promoted sides in blue (again, hover over each dot to identify the team).
This shows that the best goalkeeping performance by a promoted side was thanks to… a signing from Arsenal.
Fulham enjoyed an excellent 2022-23 on their return to the big boys’ table, partly because Bernd Leno played so well between the posts. Sheffield United in 2019-20 also fared well, thanks to Manchester United loanee Dean Henderson and Newcastle United in 2017-18, unusually, did so while using three goalkeepers — Rob Elliot, Martin Dubravka and Karl Darlow — roughly equally due to injury problems.
Many more promoted sides, though, have had difficulties in this respect.
The blue dots in the bottom-left of the chart show the struggles of Sheffield United last season (with Wes Foderingham and Ivo Grbic), and, going back to 2021-22, two sides who went straight back down: Norwich City (Tim Krul and Angus Gunn) and Watford (Ben Foster and Daniel Bachmann). Also featured is Aston Villa’s narrow escape from relegation in 2019-20, when they recorded the worst shot-stopping figures in the division, with ’keepers Tom Heaton, Pepe Reina, Orjan Nyland and Jed Steer all involved.
Notably, the following season Villa jumped from having the worst PSxG figures to the best, thanks to the signing of Emiliano Martinez from… Arsenal. Considering Fabianski, Leno and Martinez have all come out well in these statistics, there’s evidently value in signing an Arsenal cast-off to play in goal for you.
The next question is how Ramsdale, who has been relegated twice from the Premier League in his career, with Bournemouth in 2019-20 and Sheffield United a year later, has fared in terms of these numbers. The answer, a little surprisingly, is not entirely well.
Only once in his five Premier League campaigns has Ramsdale been ‘up’ on his underlying numbers — and even then, only narrowly — in his first season with Arsenal. This seems to contradict the fact he won his club’s player of the year award in both those campaigns, as well as the aforementioned place in the Premier League’s team of the year for 2022-23. Besides, even these slightly underwhelming numbers are a major upgrade on Bazunu’s debut top-flight campaign in that latter season.
The other factor, of course, is distribution.
Ramsdale was displaced by Raya at Arsenal in part because the Spaniard is considered to be better with the ball at his feet, so it’s notable he has moved to a team with an unswerving commitment to playing out from the back. A couple of errors in possession from Southampton defenders in his debut, a 3-1 defeat against Brentford in their most recent match, show the danger of that approach, and a couple of times Ramsdale hit longer balls downfield to relieve the pressure.
While reasonably impressive with his kicking for Arsenal, Ramsdale did have a habit of making bad mistakes out of nothing — not always in terms of his distribution — as if concentration was sometimes an issue.
Still, signing Ramsdale must be considered a major coup for a promoted side.
The concept of ‘having something to prove’ is overused when it comes to football transfers but it’s difficult to think of a better example than someone who was displaced as first-choice goalkeeper at his previous club shortly after being voted the best goalkeeper in the whole Premier League.
Do not underestimate just how desperately relegation contenders have lacked a good shot-stopper in recent seasons.
(Top photo: Matt Watson/Southampton FC via Getty Images)
