Stat Scouting: David Raya

A new challenger to the Arsenal number one shirt emerges

The Arsenal goalkeeping situation looks to be getting a bit of spicy competition for the coming season.

Current number two Matt Turner is on his way to Nottingham Forest for a respectable fee in the region of 10 million (7 + 3) opening up a spot for a player that Arsenal have long coveted in Brentford’s David Raya (Arsenal chased him the summer they ended up going for Aaron Ramsdale as well).

The opening bid for Raya has been rejected but the signals that are coming out in the reports suggest that he has picked Arsenal for his next team and with just a year left on his contract Brentford have less leverage to stand in the way or extract a massive fee here making this feel like something with a real possibility of coming to completion.

So what exactly would Raya be able to bring to Arsenal? This is a question that probably requires more video work but for today we will look at how his stats stack up against Ramsdale.

Shot Stopping

The first and most important job of a goalkeeper (at least on most teams, there might be a weird exception out there) is to take advantage of being the only player on the team that can use their hands to help prevent goals.

Over his career Raya looks like a fine shot-stopper; in the Opta data available on FBRef.com he has faced 742 shots on target, saving 538 shots good for a 72.5% save percentage. That’s in the above-average range and compared to Ramsdale’s 758 shots faced and 520 shots saved (68.6%) looks like a step up.

However, like I am sure we are all aware now, not all shots are the same and a simple save percentage doesn’t always tell the full story.

Last season Raya did not just have a good save percentage but looked to have saved more shots than expected. By my model it was almost 10 goals, by Opta’s model it was 5 goals, and on Wyscout’s model it was 8 goals.

Ramsdale by comparison has rated as at best saving as many shots as expected to at worst saving fewer than expected. On the StatsBomb data, he rates as saving fewer goals than expected, on Opta’s data he rates as saving fewer goals than expected, on Wyscout’s data he rates as saving fewer goals than expected, on my model he rates as saving essentially as many as expected.

There is a company that is dedicated to rating goalkeeping and they published what they found for the 2022/23 season for the overall contribution that goalkeepers did for preventing goals.

Ramsdale is liked better by this metric but still was worth almost 7 goals less than Raya in this metric.