De Gea, Alisson, Neuer, Mendy: Ranking the world's best goalkeepers by goals prevented

David de Gea has played like a man possessed for Manchester United this season.

Having suffered a post-2018 World Cup slump of such damning proportions that Dean Henderson almost usurped him as United’s number one, De Gea has played out of his skin in 2021/22.

There can no longer be any denying that De Gea is back to the superlative form that saw him win four Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year awards in five years – and he could easily add another one to his collection come May.

However, what if we were to go one step further and tell you that De Gea might well be the best goalkeeper in the world right now? Would you think we’d lost the plot and simply been shallowly reactionary?

Well, fear not, because we’re still compos mentis and have stumbled across fascinating data from FBref suggesting that De Gea is the best in the business when it comes to shot-stopping if nothing else.

You may or may not have stumbled across the ‘goals prevented’ metric before, but it’s arguably the finest statistical measure when it comes to gauging how effectively goalkeepers, well, prevent goals.

It’s calculated by taking a shot-stopper’s ‘Post-Shot Expected Goals’ – which is how many goals they would be expected to concede based on the quality of the shots they faced – and taking away the total of goals they actually let in.

A few things to note are that own goals aren’t included in the equation and that, yes, an element of luck can play a role in why a goalkeeper might have saved a shot that statistically ‘should’ have rippled the net.

Nevertheless, the moral of the story is that De Gea is the top performer in Europe’s top five leagues based on the metric having prevented 9.8 goals.

The United number one was statistically expected to have