If you sat down to watch a few Premier League matches on Saturday, you might have thought England had been infested by a vicious brain-eating parasite that lurks in goalkeepers’ water bottles.
Ten minutes into the day’s first game, Alisson inexplicably passed to Manchester City’s Phil Foden at the edge of Liverpool’s penalty area. Later, at St James’ Park, Nick Pope of Newcastle chipped a short ball straight to Chelsea’s Conor Gallagher in front of goal. Then Aaron Ramsdale, making a brief return between the sticks for Arsenal, gifted a ball to Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo inside his own six-yard box.
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This is the scene in the movie where the world’s leading brain-worm scientist scribbles frantically on a map to explain the gravity of the situation.
“We have to act fast, Prime Minister, before we lose — oh my god, no… not Sheffield United!”
If it feels like you’re seeing more of these bloopers than you used to, you’re not wrong. As recently as six years ago, you would have had to watch more than 11 games to see a shot directly from a goalkeeper’s mistake — fewer than one chance per weekend. We’re up to one in every six games now and the error rate is still skyrocketing.
What’s behind the wave of catastrophes at the back? Well, the simplest explanation is that this is what happens when goalkeepers’ short passing doubles all of a sudden.
The past decade has dramatically transformed how football is played in England thanks to an influx of foreign players and coaches, club video and data analysts, global match streaming, and social media platforms that can spread tactics trends at the speed of a tweet. If you had to sum up that whirlwind of change in 10 words, you could do worse than this: goalkeepers just don’t lump it long like they used to.
In 2018-19, the year Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City won their second title, 42 per cent of Premier League goalkeepers’ open-play passes travelled longer than 40 yards. This season, that’s down to 25 per cent. Coaches used to warn their shot-stoppers “When in doubt, kick it out”, but these days the rule is more like, “When in doubt, be sure to scan before receiving the ball in order to read the pressing scheme, then execute a Cruyff Turn six inches from your goal line and split three opponents with a disguised, line-breaking pass”. Not quite as catchy, alas, but such is the cost of progress.
Not only are goalkeepers’ passes shorter, but they are also getting more ambitious. Most passes from the back are simple lay-offs to the nearest available centre-half, but if we track the relative trends within each destination zone across the past six years, we can see some interesting developments around the margins.
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Passes have got shorter in very specific ways, starting with a shift about five years ago from long balls over the top to targeted chips out to the full-backs. In the past few seasons, we’ve seen more short passes in and around the box, while this season there’s been a sudden eruption of goalkeeper passes straight into the heart of the build-up.
First goalkeepers played over pressure, then around it, then in front of it, and finally through it.
It’s not uncommon these days to see a manager select a goalkeeper based on the decisions they make with the ball at their feet. Roberto De Zerbi swapped out Robert Sanchez for Jason Steele for tactical reasons at Brighton and, lately, he’s taken to rotating Steele with Bart Verbruggen on an almost weekly basis, apparently depending on the matchup. Arsenal are coming off their best season in years, but that didn’t stop Mikel Arteta from benching Ramsdale for David Raya, who takes different risks on the ball. The first step in Ange Postecoglou’s passing revolution at Tottenham was to replace Hugo Lloris with Guglielmo Vicario, who loves to play short through the middle. The list goes on and on.
There’s no question that the new crop of goalkeepers are taking more risks on the ball than ever before — at least if we’re talking about immediate risks in front of their goal rather than the longer-term risks a team may incur by playing long instead of building up — but a lot of these players are very good at picking and executing their short passes. At a league level, it’s clear that more short passes translate to more mistakes, but some teams make more mistakes than others.
The clubs to have conceded the most expected goals from goalkeeper mistakes aren’t necessarily the ones who play short the most, such as Brighton, City or Liverpool.
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There are three teams on the chart below who have got into trouble while playing a lot of short passes (Burnley, Spurs and Arsenal) but also four (Bournemouth, Wolves, Everton and Sheffield United) who make costly mistakes even though — or maybe because — they rarely play short from the goalkeeper. (Due to the small number of shots involved, this chart will change a lot over the course of the campaign, so please don’t sack any goalkeeping coaches quite yet.)
Notice that we’re not just considering incomplete passes here — a goalkeeper “mistake” could also be a successful pass that plays a team-mate into trouble, leading to a quick opponent shot. For example, the Vicario pass pictured below did technically make it to the feet of James Maddison, but after Gabriel Jesus came around Maddison to nick the ball and fire a shot from the penalty spot, the goalkeeper probably wished he had just hoofed it.
Are all these risks worth it? That’s a harder question to answer.
We know by now that building out of the back can have major tactical benefits, such as allowing teams to break through a press at speed or bring their players forward together to win back lost balls. There’s a reason almost every good modern team likes to play short from the goalkeeper. But that doesn’t mean playing short from the ’keeper will automatically make a team good — just ask Burnley — or that it’s always a smart decision to gamble in your box. Building out of the back isn’t as simple as cranking some great big goalkeeper risk-taking dial all the way up to “Rene Higuita”.
The reason we’re seeing so many mistakes right now is that goalkeepers are being asked to take more and different risks than before. Teams will get better at this. What we don’t know yet is how much risk is too much, or how far the league can go toward playing out of the back before the tactics pendulum starts to swing back the other way.
Maybe one day we’ll just accept goalkeeper blunders as a routine cost of playing good football and wonder what kind of brain worms ever made us want to hoof it long.
(Top photos: Getty Images)