Ter Stegen, the destroyer of dreams

The title might seem like an overkill, but as a fan who has suffered through the years, many will relate to me. There are certain positions in a football team, which are "pivotal" (fans will get the pun) to it's success, its very rare to find teams who win consistently while having a weak player + backup combo on those positions. The GK and the pivot are chief among these. There are some exceptions to this rule however, like the madrid 3-peat team with Casemeiro. But most (if not all) of their wins had blatant favoritism written all over it. A team with a weak pivot is likely to be weak defensively and generate little confidence in the more technical players when they attempt risky passes or moves, the converse is true as well, if you are well assured of the defence behind you, you will lift your game. A GK is even more important.

A GK is the final line of defence and his presence and confidence transmits belief to his team.A sloppy keeper however does the exact opposite, where people try to play safe to minimize shots on target. Fear has a multiplier effect where because of the questionable keeper behind you, you fear any attack from the opposition and bring about the very things you dread. Every team no matter how mighty, spends time defending and being under the kosh. Great teams easily ride through such storms (in fact some thrive on them) and win trophies. Teams with poor or average keepers can never sustain periods and give away important leads on the cheap. I emphasize the word cheap because a football contest is won by goals, and you want to be setup in a way that helps you score a lot and be hard to score against, especially in big matches where the margins are slim.If you want to lose, you would want to lose to a moment of magic and not to an unforced error/keeper error/ tactical error. The latter scenario is all to common to Barca fans in recent times. On big CL nights (or even Europa/Liga nights) Barca have consistently over a very long time now conceded preventable goals. I understand that, what is preventable and if yes by whom is a subjective debate, but facts increasingly point to the conclusion that most of what Barca have conceded is Ter Stegen's doing.

Ter Stegen is a (supposedly) elite keeper with 400 + appearances for a team like Barcelona. He is also one of the best paid GKs on the planet, for a player of that reckoning you would expect nothing less than world class performers on par with the best keepers in the world. His performances on big nights are woefully short though. It is said that you need bad opposition to find your form, and players can't find one better than ter stegen, who seems to be anti-bogey keeper for a number of players (think iago aspas). Sceptics might say that seemingly average players turn into monsters when they face Barcelona, but they don't seem to do that against other big clubs.

Over the years, Barca has lost many big matches with superb (on paper) performances from seemingly average players (Gini Wijnaldum anyone?). No one has stopped to question why Ter Stegen is absolved of any blame? Why has he got so much sway that he can talk back to literal Messi? And keep the same goalkeeping coach for years who has questionable credentials and based on the selection and performances of Pena (the current understudy) not much in the way of talent ID and coaching chops.

In God we trust,All others must bring data - Dr Edward Demmings

Talk is cheap, so let's dive into some (damning) data. Football fans will be familiar with the controversial PsXG metric , it purports to calculate the expected goal value of a shot after the actual shot which means that even if a ball was struck from 30 yards (which would normally a low xA) if it was fired to the top corner with a lot of dip and swerve, it would have a fairly high PsXG. A keeper thus can be evaluated on PsXG - Goals Conceded, a positive number meaning that the keeper stopped a lot more than he (was supposed to) let in. How PsXG is calcuated is also up for debate, but we will prove later that the technique actually benefits his numbers (which are woeful,spoiler alert)

Let's look at Ter Stegen's percentile among keepers for PsXG - GA in the main European competition Barca were invovled in over the past 3 years, and the equivalent stat for the madrid keeper -

Season	Stegen	Madrid Keeper
23-24	50	77
22-23	31	92
21-22	12	84
Source - fbref.com

You can see an astronomical difference for a very basic stat, even lunin is ahead of him, he is not highly rated on any metric but then again what do data monkeys know? We don't fleece our club of 20M + year while being in the 12th percentile for saves.