Assessing Goalkeepers and Goal Scorers the Liverpool Way

Scorers should be recognised for beating the best goalkeepers, with shot stoppers acclaimed for keeping out the top finishers. Who's the best in the Premier League?

Premier League goalkeepers are rubbish. The data says as much.

Between 2017/18 and 2023/24 they collectively conceded 7289 times (excluding own goals) from a total of 6976.4 expected goals on target (xGOT). That’s a league-wide underperformance of roughly 45 goals a season.

It could be that it’s the data that’s to blame rather than the shot stoppers. Adding France, Germany, Italy and Spain to the sample shows that goalkeepers in the big five leagues underperformed by 941 goals across a seven year period. Can’t anyone save a shot around here?

Perhaps the model is wrong. Or maybe it’s a quirk of an enormous sample; the average goalkeeper being just 0.04 goals per match below par makes the system sound more accurate than underachieving by almost 1,000 goals.

The heart of the issue is that it is impossible to beat the model year after year. This became apparent when reviewing the efforts of Alisson Becker and Giorgi Mamardashvili in 2025/26. Both are underperforming against xGOT this season when they have rarely had such problems in the past:

Alisson's Starting to Flatten

There are 68 goalkeepers who featured for over 900 minutes in at least five campaigns in the aforementioned seven year period. Not one of them saved more goals than expected every season. You need a huge sample to get a decent read on their abilities.

If anyone has the data for 2024/25, let me know. For now, I’ve pieced together 2017-2024 with the current campaign. The stats appear to pass the eye test for the big dogs of the goalkeeping world; Jan Oblak has performed at 14.8 per cent above xGOT, with Thibaut Courtois is at 10.5 and Allison 8.6. The latter would look better with last season included but perhaps the others would too.

The Brazilian’s statistics brought to mind a passage in Ian Graham’s book, How To Win The Premier League. When he was Director of Research at Liverpool, they would use similar numbers to weight performance.

“Each outfield player and each goalkeeper was given a conversion skill. Players that consistently overperformed the predictions of our Post-Strike model increased their skill rating and vice versa. The result was that elite finishers like Son Heung-min and elite shot-stoppers like Alisson Becker were expected to score and save more goals than the model estimated. A side effect was that making a save from a Son shot, or scoring past Alisson, was more highly rewarded than performing the same action against a lower rated player.”

By compiling the details of every goal scored in the 2025/26 Premier League, we can do a simplified version of the same process. Who deserves credit for against whom they’ve scored and which goalkeepers might have exceeded expectation given who has beaten them?

Before we get to the data, an inevitable note on the system. Having stressed the importance of a large sample, we’ll have to slightly go against that here.

There are eight Premier League goalkeepers in 2025/26 who’ve yet to face at least 50 post-shot expected goals in their careers in England’s top flight. They have to be considered average shot-stoppers at this point as we can’t be certain either way, even though the limited data appears to match perception of their abilities. We should have a much higher bar but this would be a pointless exercise if we had to exclude almost everyone.

Alisson will be our test case to explain the concept. As he has performed at 8.6 per cent above expectation, anyone who nets past him will be rewarded with 1.086 goals. Here are the 18 scorers with at least nine goals in the Premier League this season.

You won’t need reminding that six of the top seven have bagged against Liverpool this season (with Giorgi Mamardashvili also rated better than average, albeit not at Alisson’s level). While Antoine Semenyo scored twice at Anfield on opening night, his braces against Karl Darlow and Guglielmo Vicario have helped dragged his score back down. Nobody said this was fair.

We can assume that Graham would not have made a transfer move for Viktor Gyökeres. Would he have gone for Darwin Núñez, who also built his reputation by beating Primeira Liga goalkeepers of (presumably) lower standard?

In fairness to Gyökeres, if the table included players with eight goals then Jean-Philippe Mateta (-1.96%), Zian Flemming (-2.43%) and Bruno Fernandes (-4.37%) would all be below him. You’d hope a peak-age £64m striker playing for the league leaders would produce more against better opponents, nonetheless.

We’d have to lower the bar to just six goals to find any other Liverpool players. Let’s move onto goalkeepers rather than doing that. The scorers are rated by how they’ve performed against xGOT, as these are the only expected goals that concern shot stoppers.

We again have to mark some of the players as average; I’ve gone with those who have taken fewer than 50 Premier League shots in their careers. As there are far more scorers (258) than goalkeepers (34) this season, there is inevitably a greater chance of variation between goals conceded and their weighted value. It would also make this analysis better to include every saved shot too, though sadly there is no quick way to gather this data (as far as I know).

You have to have some sympathy for Lucas Perri, who has lost his place in the Leeds side to Karl Darlow. Only five of the goals he has conceded have been to sub-par finishers, meaning he has been heavily punished by the better marksmen. Equally, this could suggest he’s out of his depth.

Mamardashvili’s record is more heavily affected in this way than Alisson’s has been. Combined with the findings in the previous newsletter, we can say that the Georgian has faced higher quality chances and been beaten by stronger finishers than Liverpool’s number one.

Or at least he has according to this system, which is nowhere near flawless, far less robust than Graham’s model. We’ll finish with a combined look at the performance of the top 10s of current Premier League attackers for shot volume and the goalkeepers who’ve dealt with the most xGOT. I’d say the order passes the eye test for the shot stoppers better than for the forwards but you can argue about that in the comments.