Cech at his peak( before skull fracture)was the best goalie ever in PL . Not a modern keeper. Just a fucking keeper. His records existed before goalies were protected by refs and var.

1.Walker

2. nobody

3. nobody

4. Giroud

5. Courtois

6. Ederson

goals/saves is a hard one. If a keeper concedes lots of goals, is it his fault or the defense? Is the shot taker consistently in prime position, or is the keeper fumbling easy shots?

Stats like save percentage and for modern keepers pass success. All stats are slightly skewed by the rest of the team, even goals scored stats (by far the most common/popular) is dependent on chances created.

You can broadly categorise goalkeeping ability down to shot stopping, command of area (claiming crosses, sweeping actions etc), and distribution.

Most of the modern world class keepers you see are very good in all of these (think alisson or neuer).

Shot stopping you can kind of simplify down to xGsave overperformance over an extended period of time, small sample sizes aren’t really accurate for this.

Distribution you can also use progressive passing metrics, long ball success rate, things like that. There’s also an element of eye test in terms of how comfortable they look on the ball e.g. do they manipulate it well when under pressure (ederson) or hoof it out of play when pressed? (De Gea).

Command of area is much more difficult to quantify because it’s a preventative action and doesn’t show in data as easily, for example neuer sweeping and preventing a 1v1 won’t show in the xG data, but it has a massive effect on the game. Or nick pope claiming a cross from a corner that would have found the head of an attacker is hard to quantify.There might be some metrics for this that exist but they don’t come up often in the mainstream.

Being very good at 2 of those 3 things make a fantastic keeper, all 3 and they’re probably elite or have very high potential.

A team like Luton won’t require their keeper to be good at distribution, but Bayern most certainly will, so they won’t really shop in the same market for goalkeepers, on the other hand ederson might not be top tier for shot stopping, but his build up is so important for city that it doesn’t really matter. They also don’t face a huge number of high quality shots game to game.

That’s the way I perceive goalkeeping ability anyway.

I used to work along scouts in the recruitment team of a major Premier League years ago, and their goalkeeping scouting was super detailed. They definitely didn’t pay attention to shots faced/saved like the general public looks at because all that told you was identifying the busiest keepers who more often than not played for the worse teans, but instead scouted the ‘quality’ of those saves. For example they had metrics on how many of those shots are held from distance, hold percentage under pressure, and on shots that are parried, those are graded by ‘where’ those shots are pushed out to based on threat level to a follow up being scored or even a corner conceded (i.e. Keepers who pushed the ball wider instead of in front of them were considered better). They had heat maps on starting positions for a range of situations and success scores on aerial duals and claims. These days you’ll also have deeper knowledge of ball playing abilities and styles too. The resources at the top of the game are genuinely insane when applied.

I think GKs other than the few really elite and the truly shit basically all the same.

As long as the keeper is not actively costing you games like runnarson at arsenal was literally like Nick Vujicic in goal, then the average is good enough.

(Obviously style of play in specific teams can change things but generally)