Kepa Arrizabalaga is the world’s most expensive goalkeeper, yet his time at Chelsea has not been smooth sailing since he joined the club in the summer of 2018.
Maurizio Sarri tried to substitute him during the 2019 Carabao Cup final, but he refused to come off and was later fined for his indiscipline. While there have been no such issues for the Spaniard since Frank Lampard took charge, his form deteriorated to the point he was dropped in January and replaced by veteran back-up Willy Caballero.
Arrizabalaga later regained his place, keeping clean sheets in wins against Everton and Liverpool. However, it seems the Blues are on the lookout for a replacement, and Borussia Dortmund’s 29-year old stopper Roman Burki has reportedly caught their eye .
Chelsea are said to be lining up a £15million deal to secure the Swiss international. He was slightly shown up by Joshua Kimmich’s excellent chip which won Der Klassiker on Tuesday evening, but would he provide a safer pair of hands than Kepa has?
The headline statistics are in Burki’s favour. He has kept 10 clean sheets in the Bundesliga, with a further two – including one against Barcelona – in the Champions League. Only Manuel Neuer has kept more in Germany’s top flight this season.
By contrast, Chelsea’s number one has just six league shutouts to his name, with one in Europe. It’s important to consider how many shots each goalkeeper has faced though, and the proportion of them which they have prevented from going in.
Unfortunately, this does Arrizabalaga’s reputation no favours either. Having saved 68 per cent of the shots on target he faced in the Premier League during his debut campaign in west London, Kepa has kept out just 54 per cent of them in 2019/20, per NBC Sports . That puts him bottom of the league among first-choice goalkeepers in England this season.
Burki has fared little better. Having saved 69 per cent of opposition shots on target across his first four seasons with Dortmund ( NBC ), he sits third bottom in the Bundesliga on 57.5 per cent this term.
But we need to dig deeper still. How difficult were the shots each goalkeeper had to deal with? To assess this, we can look at Statsbomb’s post-shot expected goal model on fbref.com .
This data only looks at shots on target and accounts for how testing the shot was by factoring in information such as where in the goal the ball was heading. An effort destined for the top corner is obviously harder to save than a grass-cutting effort in the centre of the goal, after all.
Neither Arrizabalaga or Burki have done well here though. Excluding penalties, the Chelsea man has conceded around four goals more than an average goalkeeper would be expected to with the shots he faced. The same is true of Burki, meaning both men occupy low positions in the ranking for their respective divisions.
There’s little in these numbers to suggest Burki would be an upgrade for Chelsea, but there’s one other thing to consider. On average, the Dortmund man has faced the hardest to save shots in Germany, while Arrizabalaga has been up against the joint-second toughest in the Premier League.
With that in mind, it is unlikely either man would’ve produced stunning statistics this season. Lampard needs to focus on tightening up the whole of his defence, and not just replacing the man between the posts.
