2022 will go down as a landmark year in women’s soccer history book.
In America, the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) reached a historic agreement with the U.S. Soccer Federation to achieve equal pay between the men’s and women’s national teams in future competitions, marking the long-awaited victory of the USWNT players’ six-year equal pay battle.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, women’s attendances have dominated European football. The UEFA Women’s Euro final last month at Wembley Stadium set a tournament record, joining the two Women’s Champions League matches at Camp Nou last season becoming the top-three most-attended soccer matches in Europe this year.
Behind these ground-breaking achievements and records is the improved quality of soccer displayed in the women’s game. Last month’s UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 saw some record-high statistics for the competition. The total number of goals scored, shots attempted and attacks produced all reached new highs compared to the tournament 2017. The fluidity of the game also saw improvement as the teams’ overall pass completion rate went up. The champion Lionesses, for example, improved their pass completion rate by 20% compared to the last campaign.
As outfield positions have shown significant improvements in their games, goalkeeper, the position considered the most inferior to male players in the women’s game, has also evolved and shortened its gap to the men’s counterpart thanks to the increased goalkeeping resources for professional women. While the quality of goalkeeper coaches for younger females has also seen an improvement, specialized training is still not prevalent outside of the professional level. The game needs more female players and female coaches to offer the new generation of goalkeepers a better training environment.
Coaching of professional female goalkeepers is improving
There is a distinct difference in terms of the access to female goalkeeping resources on a professional level in the U.S. versus in Europe, said Aleksandar Sarić, World Cup-winning coach with the Serbian U20 men’s national team. Professional female goalkeepers in America have similar access to specialized training compared to males.
“There are some pretty good goalkeepers (in America). Especially the national team like Alyssa Naeher, and Hope Solo in the past,” Sarić said. “In Europe, maybe that difference exists. They had less access to coaches, the better coaches.”
Many professional female goalkeepers in Europe have spoken about the lack of access to goalkeeping resources. In England, for example, former Manchester United goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain didn’t have a full-time goalkeeper coach after 12 years into her professional career. English goalkeeper Carly Telford said female goalkeepers were “10 to 15 years behind outfield players” due to the position’s lack of specialized training.
But with clubs in the Women’s Super League (WSL) starting to improve the coaching system by employing goalkeeping coaches on the team, the position has shown development as the gap between male and female goalkeepers began to shrink.
Some top female goalkeepers have put up similar shot-stopping numbers than males last season
The most straightforward statistics that inform a goalkeeper’s shot-stopping ability are clean sheets and save percentage. Take the 2021-2022 Premier League Golden Glove joint-winners Alisson and Ederson as examples, both of them recorded 20 clean sheets, not allowing any goals in 20 matches, last season, just over half the number of games they played. Meanwhile, in the WSL, Arsenal’s Manuela Zinsberger led the league with 13 clean sheets followed by England’s No. 1 Mary Earps’ 10 times and PFA WSL Team of the Year goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger’s 9 times. Given that a WSL team only plays 22 games in a season, these three keepers’ clean sheets rates are 65%, 45.5% and 64.3%, respectively. Two of the females kept a higher percentage of clean sheets than the best male goalkeepers in the Premier League. When it comes to save percentage, while Earps had a below-average number, both Zinsberger and Berger recorded a higher save percentage compared to the two Brazilians.
Chart 1
However, keeping a clean sheet is an entire team’s job. A team with a stronger defensive backline is likely to allow fewer shots and therefore less chance to concede goals. In order to better reflect a goalkeeper’s individual shot-stopping ability, this is when Post-Shot Expected Goals (PSxG) comes in.
Different from the traditional Expected Goals (xG) model which measures the probability of a shot resulting in a goal based on previous actions including the position of shot, angle to goal, body part used to contact the ball and the type of assist, the PSxG model calculates expected goals based on how likely the goalkeeper is to save the shot. It uses information “after the shot has been taken up until the shot was to pass the goalkeeper”, such as shot velocity and placement of shot that are not considered in the xG model, according to StatsBomb’s definition.
For example, if a player launches a shot from 35 yards away from the goal, the probability of the shot resulting in a goal would be low because of the position of the shot taking place, and thus the xG would be low. However, if the player hits the ball perfectly with enough power to send it towards the top bin, it would be harder for the goalkeeper to save the shot than the xG suggested. In this case, the PSxG would be higher because the goalkeeper is less likely to make the save.
Using PSxG minus actual goals conceded can then show a goalkeeper’s shot-stopping performance – a positive number indicates the goalkeeper prevents more goals than expected, and vice versa.
Chart 2
The average number of shots on target by a Premier League and a Women’s Super League team last season was 4.16 and 4.11, respectively. The graph above tells that Premier League goalkeepers are more evenly distributed around the mean of shots on target they faced, while WSL goalkeepers are divided into two clusters, with several performing at a top level while facing a below-average number of shots, but the majority that faced more shots conceded more goals than the PSxG suggested. Zinsberger and Berger, again, have conceded fewer goals than expected than Alisson and Ederson while facing a similar number of shots.
figure 3
Access to quality goalkeeper training has been proven as the key to the improved performances shown by female goalkeepers. For instance, before Zinsberger arrived at Arsenal in 2019, she didn’t have a full-time goalkeeping coach. After training with coach Leanne Hall for three seasons, Zinsberger has shown improvement in every key aspect of the goalkeeping game.
Distribution has become a big part of male goalkeeper’s game, it’s the same for female keepers
In modern day soccer, goalkeepers’ overall quality is no longer measured solely by their defensive attributes, they are playing a more vital role in the team’s build-up plays and sometimes can impact the entire team’s play style.
“The best goalkeepers in the world now are not just shot-stoppers,” said Christian Benjamin, founder of Keeperstop.com, an online website that provides goalkeeping equipment and education. “They are goalkeepers that can truly be a first attacker with the ball at their feet to break lines, or a defending option where the ball plays through, whether it’d be Neuer, Ederson, (Alisson) Becker, or somebody else that can play a little higher up their line and is really good with their feet.”
A typical example of this is Luis Enrique removing David de Gea from the Spain National team this year. Being Manchester United’s No. 1, De Gea only started 12 games for the national team after the 2018 FIFA World Cup. He became the team’s second-choice in 2021 after Unai Simón overtook his starting position and played the entire Euro last year. From a pure shot-stopping point of view, De Gea would well deserve a starting position for the national team considering he had a higher clean sheet rate and PSxG difference in the 2020-2021season than his compatriot.
But his distributing ability became the major letdown that led Enrique to ultimately leave him out of the roster. The 30-year-old only ranked 14th among the Premier League goalkeepers last season for completed passes with 646. The league leader Alisson completed 1178 passes, almost doubling De Gea’s number. The significantly less amount of passes completed shows De Gea’s lack of confidence and uncomfortableness with the ball at his feet, and it has led to some costly errors, including the most recent one against Brentford this season.
Figure 4
Passing has also become an increasingly vital component in female goalkeepers’ skillset. In the WSL last season, Zinsberger led the league with 690 passes completed, averaging 34.5 passes per game with 89.1% of them finding their target. These numbers are higher than Premier League leader Alisson’s 32.7 passes per game and 86.6% pass completion rate. There was a total of six goalkeepers who surpassed the 500 completed passes mark last season, while this number was only one in the 2018-2019 season.
The average passing distance by a WSL goalkeeper also was shortened from 43.2 yards in the 2018-2019 season to 35.2 yards in the 2021-2022 season. This indicates the shift of goalkeeper play style happened in the female’s game as well. Instead of launching long balls and clearances with less chance to reach the target, females also start the buildup play from the goalkeeper by playing the ball short.
Coaching at youth level is also improving, but there’s still a long way to go
While things are starting to get better for professional female goalkeepers, goalkeeper coaching has also seen some improvements at college and youth levels as coaches now have a better understanding of the female’s game.
“I will always say a female coach will coach the female’s game better than anyone else because, at the end of the day, a man has never played the women's game.”
But the truth is there’re not enough female coaches in the game now. This results in many females having to be coached by male coaches. But some of them simply don’t understand the difference between male and female keepers.
“I’ve seen situations when males and females are training together, and there's a male coach. If they're smacking the ball hard at a man, and then a woman comes in, they're just tipping it. It doesn't benefit anyone. Nothing frustrates me more than this.”
Rather than lowering the standard for female goalkeepers, it’s crucial for coaches to understand and embrace the biological difference between the players, and to learn the game that they have never played, Sarić suggested.
“I think the main difference between male and female (goalkeepers) exists in power,” Sarić added.
There are plenty of examples showing the physicality difference Sarić mentioned. For example, male goalkeepers can throw the ball to the mid-field to start a counter-attack, but it doesn’t happen in the women’s game very often. Females generally don’t have that long of a throw.
The power difference also shows up when goalkeepers try to stop a shot. With the explosiveness and verticality difference, in addition to the size difference, when the same shot goes against a female and a male goalkeeper, they might make the save in a completely different way.
“Their (smaller goalkeepers) footwork has to be impeccable. If it’s a ball into the corner or side netting, maybe a 6-foot-6 goalkeeper like Thibaut Courtois, can (reach the ball) with one step and long wingspan to make that save. A smaller goalkeeper may need to be a little bit tighter with their footwork. So with a shuffle or crossover, they can make that save just as easily as well.”
The increased female participation in youth and college soccer has also helped shape a better goalkeeper coaching landscape for women.
According to SFIA’s 2020 annual report, soccer was the second-most participated sport among females between the age of 18 to 24 in the United States with a participation rate of 5.9%. For female youths aged between 13 to 17, there was a 2.1% of annual average growth in team soccer participation in the past five years.
“We're seeing more coaches have started to adapt to that (the increased female participation),” Benjamin said. “Now that the learning styles have changed with more females, the teaching styles have to change as well.”
As the quality of goalkeeper training is improving at the younger level, the next step for a more well-developed female goalkeeper coaching system is to make the resource prevalent.
“There is still a lot that needs to change at the youth level. I go and watch warm-ups at showcases for goalkeepers and 90% of the time, it's them not really knowing what to do and two goalkeepers just kicking the ball to each other.”
At the college level, although it’s not regulated by NCAA, most female teams now have a goalkeeper coach. As female professional soccer continues to grow, the demand for a well-coached goalkeeper has gotten a lot higher, Duwve suggested. And Eriksson hopes this demand from the highest level can drive more female players to go back into the game to coach the younger generation, and thus closing the loop of a healthy training ecosystem.
“I think that will be the big change for the next generation is having more of us come back and coaching the young players. And then hopefully that will help evolve the game as a whole,” Eriksson said.
