It has been a source of frustration that in my extended family I have just one relative who is interested in football, a son-in-law who is a season ticket holder at Southampton and is very sensitive about any discussion of the club.
I was therefore pleased and surprised to learn at the weekend that my eldest granddaughter's partner has been training with one of the country's oldest non-league clubs and has joined the squad as a goal keeper.
Keepers have always fascinated me ever since I watched Sam Bartram. Dean Kiely was another hero.
Yet keepers attract far smaller fees than outfield players in general. Curbs certainly got a bargain when he signed Kiely from Bury.
Success at the highest level of the game seems to depend on
high-quality goalkeeping. And yet that importance is not reflected in what
clubs have traditionally been willing to spend on the position.
The comparison with other positions is startling. Spending
on forwards and midfielders long ago breached the £100m mark. In transfer
market terms, goalkeepers lag behind. Why?
Historically, one obvious explanation stands above others:
attacking players are more fun and fashionable, and it’s easier to measure
their worth. Goalscorers have a clear
value, and that is as true now as it was in the late 19th century. Attacking
players are also more regularly associated with exciting, game-changing
moments, memories that have always justified their value.
That mattered because, for many years, transfer spending
depended on convincing club directors of a player’s worth. In Jonathan Wilson’s
biography of Brian Clough, he recalls the then-Nottingham Forest head coach
facing “murmurings from the board” after spending £270,000 on goalkeeper Peter
Shilton in 1977. Clough described a member questioning why so much money was
being spent on a player who “would not be involved for 85 minutes of a game”. Of course, that is less true nowadays with
sweeper keepers.
Ian Graham was director of research at Liverpool between
2012 and 2023. He is also the author of the book How to Win the
Premier League, published in 2025. He told The New York Times that
analysing goalkeepers remains comparatively difficult for most clubs: “The most
important thing goalkeepers do — stopping shots — is captured very well by
the data, but (as with all football data) it’s easy to analyse it wrongly. The
other aspects of play are also much more difficult.
“For instance, traditional data providers are not good at
capturing whether a goalkeeper tried to claim a cross or corner. Instead, they
often record only when there’s an error or a success. You need tracking data to
capture goalkeeper ability properly. For instance, calculating whether they
could or should have come out for a cross or corner requires significant
modelling beyond what most clubs can do in-house.”
A scout for a Champions League club told the NYT “What’s
really strange is that you meet a lot of scouts who say: ‘I don’t really know
much about goal keepers’. I do it myself. And with other positions that would
never be accepted. Imagine if you said: ‘Oh, I don’t really know much about
wingers?’.
Another analyst commented: There’s not
as much fluctuation in the position — you don’t need to make a change every
second season. If you sign a goalkeeper, sometimes they stay for five, six,
seven or eight years. It’s not that it’s easier to find a goalkeeper, but you
probably have more time to prepare when you do have to sign one.’
Many clubs encourage stability, particularly around their
goalkeepers. While competition and depth are seen as positives in most outfield
positions, the same thinking is not often applied to goalkeepers, who benefit
from trust and faith and are not subject to the same rotation. Most teams have
a designated first choice and do not spend heavily on reserve ‘keepers partly
to avoid that unrest.
A scout for a Premier League team made a further point: “How
many top goalkeepers are there that you would spend a large fee on? There are
fewer than 10 right now, and all of them are starting for top clubs. Gianluigi
Donnarumma was available last summer, but that was unusual.
“There’s a supply and demand problem. The best clubs sign
goalkeepers and stick with them, so they don’t buy very often. There are not
many goalkeepers that are worth that kind of investment, so that’s another
factor. And those that are worth it aren’t moving clubs anyway.”
Talent production is a different issue. Many more youngsters
grow up wanting to score goals rather than save them. The position also
requires a particular size and build, which is another filter.
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