Alisson, De Gea, Ederson: Premier League goalkeepers ranked by goals prevented

The 2022/23 Premier League season has taken a pause for the first international break of the new footballing year – and it’s a chance for us to all take stock of what’s come before.

Arsenal have turned heads by setting the early pace, Thomas Tuchel and Scott Parker have already bitten the dust, Liverpool are currently running through treacle and Erling Haaland simply can’t stop scoring.

However, today, we wanted to specifically focus in on the goalkeepers who have both impressed and struggled the most between the sticks across these opening six weeks of action.

And to look at which shot-stoppers are stopping the most shots, we’re calling upon one of the most fascinating data sets that you can use in order to judge goalkeeping performances: PsXG minus goals conceded.

We are, of course, talking about ‘number of goals prevented’ which is a loose term for the difference between the actual total of goals that a ‘keeper has conceded and how many they were expected to let in based on statistical modelling of the quality of the shots that they faced.

In other words, if the data suggested that, say, Peter Schmeichel was expected to concede 11 goals, but he only let in nine, then he would – in theory – have prevented two goals from being scored.

All this is based upon the ever-controversial ‘expected goals’ phenomena, which you’ll have to trust us when we say that it’s a lot more telling than a lot of naysayers will have you believe.

And the only caveats you’ll need to bear in mind is that own goals aren’t included and the data, too, can also be indicative of luck as much as it does largely illustrate the goalkeeper’s shot-stopping quality.

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