Goalkeeper Value Part 2: Goalkeeper WAR
Unless you are blessed with the gift of goalkeeper foresight that our Goalkeeper Streaming Challenge contestants were lacking, you probably cannot regularly out-stream Random Number Generator FC. Although you cannot consistently pick the best goalkeeper each week, this doesn’t mean that all keepers are identical. Instead, it implies there is too much variability week-to-week to accurately pick out the best starters for any given game week. Over the course of an entire season, however, goalkeepers can begin to separate from each other. This is evident in the 20/21 year-end goalkeeper standings (Table 1).
Three goalkeepers rose above the rest in the 20/21 season -- Emi Martinez, Illan Meslier, and Nick Pope all averaged over 1 point more than their closest competitors. We wanted to put this increased output into a more tangible context, namely wins and losses. Enter our favorite Fantrax statistic -- Wins Above Replacement (WAR). We were curious how much relative value an additional point per match for goalkeepers actually provided. Equally importantly, how did this compare to outfield players? Did any goalkeepers produce enough wins to be worth significant draft and trade capital last season?
Using a similar strategy as for outfield players, we simulated games using weekly scores from the 20/21 EPL season and assessed how much goalkeepers contributed to fantasy wins. The basic scheme is the same as our previous WAR article, except with the additional wrinkle of adding keepers to the mix.
Below you can find our results in gif format:
And in a summarized table:
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So what conclusions did we draw after crunching the numbers?
Top goalkeepers provided top-50 overall value in the 2020/2021 season. Unsurprisingly, Emiliano Martinez led the charge, finishing the season in the 48th spot. Although his average WAR per gameweek was only 91st best (0.033 wins/gameweek), his near-constant starts vaulted him up the leaderboard to earn a total of 1.13 wins. This puts him ahead of fantasy favorites such as Paul Pogba (1.12 wins), Bukayo Saka (1.01 wins) and Wilfried Zaha (1.00 wins). And his top goalkeeper colleagues were not far behind – Illan Meslier and Nick Pope finished 50th (1.09 wins) and 67th (0.86 wins) overall, respectively.
There was a huge drop-off in GK value beyond the top 3. No other keepers finished in the top 100 players. Ederson was closest to matching this milestone, but still finished a considerable distance from the rest (124th overall; 0.428 wins). Even further behind were the likes of Lloris, Johnstone, and Alisson, finishing 167th, 178th, and 181st respectively. In fact, Lloris finds himself closer in WAR to the worst goalkeeper (Rui Patricio, -0.588 WAR), than to Emiliano Martinez in 1st.
Goalkeepers earned WAR for their teams in massive point outbursts. Rather than slowly accumulating WAR at a consistent pace across the season, top goalkeepers earned WAR in chunks. Of the top 10 GK weekly WAR performances last season, 7 belong to Meslier, Pope, or Martinez.
This final observation especially makes sense due to the high variability in goalkeeper performances, which stems from the huge value placed on clean sheets (8 Fpts). Although an obvious point, it deserves restating for those in the back -- for a typical goalkeeper, weeks with clean sheets result in good performances, and weeks without are rarely impressive. Of the top 100 individual goalkeeper scores last season, only 6 did not include a clean sheet. This results in a generally bimodal distribution of scores (Figure 2). Consequently, the best players are not more valuable because they consistently score subtly better than other goalkeepers (which a unimodal distribution might imply), but instead have either more huge performances, or, the biggest performances, to their name.
How are players faring so far this year? For the 21/22 season, Eduoard Mendy leads the pack, currently sitting in the 47th spot through 7 weeks. His closest competitors are Aaron Ramsdale (73rd overall) and Robert Sanchez (87th). You can see the full WAR rankings, now including GKs, for the current season here.
Our streaming challenge demonstrated that it is not all that easy to pick goalkeepers week-to-week, while our WAR analysis shows that certain goalkeepers each year can provide immense value. Enough value, in fact, that if you could identify the best keepers, they would be worth trading for (or drafting highly). So what's left? Well, the all important question for fantasy managers: how can you pinpoint the best keepers each year? In our next article, we will explore some of the attributes of the best fantasy keepers and attempt to identify characteristics that will aid in picking goalkeepers and unleashing their potential on your unwitting league-mates.