Arsenal: Statistically, Bernd Leno matches Alisson and David De Gea

Arsenal keeper Bernd Leno isn’t often in the same conversation as David De Gea or Alisson, but he damn well should be, and it’s time we all accept that.

Arsenal have a tremendous keeper in Bernd Leno. One who doesn’t get enough credit because of the defense that plays in front of him. It is the Wojciech Szczesny situation all over again. Now that Szczesny is away form the porous Arsenal defense, he’s arguably the best keeper in the world.

Unless you ask United fans, who stand blindingly by David de Gea, or Liverpool fans, who stand strongly next to Alisson. There will always be a bias, but these two keepers are heralded as the gold standard in keeping excellence.

I’m tired of Bernd Leno not being included in that company just because he’s on a struggling side. Leno is every bit the equal of these two, and the raw figures prove it.

No, not clean sheets. Because if you only evaluated keepers based on clean sheets, you would never get the right keeper.

I’m talking about the numbers that are more representative of the individual skill of a player.

We’re going to start with some big-picture numbers, like percentage of shots saved. I do have to start with the caveat that Alisson has faced one-fourth of the shots that Leno has because he has an actual functioning defense in front of him.

Still, all that considered, here is how the three stack up:

• Bernd Leno: 72% (120 shots faced)
• Alisson: 84% (33 shots faced)
• David De Gea: 68% (85 shots faced)

Again, Alisson’s are skewed by just a superior all around team in front of him. But when you stack the entirety of the Premier League, the only player who has saved a higher percentage and faced as many shots as Leno is Martin Dubravka at Newcastle, and that’s just by 2%.

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Using FBref’s somewhat confusing, yet still telling statistical matrixes of goalkeeping stats, we can go even further and isolate what we want to know down to the expectancy that a shot on target will end up in goal. I will copy the exact definition of the stat that I’m referring to:

"Expected Goals minus Goals Allowed:Positive numbers suggest better luck or an above average ability to stop shotsPSxG is expected goals based on the fact that the shot is on targetxG totals include penalty kicks, but do not include penalty shootouts (unless otherwise noted)."

Following? So the higher the number, the more likely it is that the shot is kept out of the net. Let’s stack Leno up against his two “superiors” for this season.

• Bernd Leno: +3.6
• Alisson: +3.3
• David De Gea: -0.9

How very interesting that the inferior keeper is more likely to stop a shot on target than his two superiors. All this does is add more context to the “expected goals” stat by factoring in such things as the amounts of shots they’re facing. Which is kind of important.

That said, even if we toss out some of the advanced metrics and just filter it based on “Expected Goals per Shots On Target,” even factoring in that Leno faces more shots, what we see is equality.

• Bernd Leno: .32
• Alisson: .24
• David De Gea: .31

Safe to say that your splitting hairs there, barring the fact that Alisson is just facing far less shots than his two competitors.

But wait, let’s not stop with just stopping shots on target. Let’s talk about stopping crosses into the box too, since this was a massive criticism of Bernd Leno in his early days at the club. Based on the same statistical database, Here’s how they stack up, based on the percentage of crosses that each individual keeper stops in his box.

• Bernd Leno: 6.3% (9.4% last year)
• Alisson: 3.6% (6.8% last year)
• David De Gea: 5.0% (6.2% last year)

Interesting yet again, that Leno’s biggest weakness was a strength.

I’m not sitting here telling you that Leno is the best keeper in the world. But it’s time we include him in the conversation rather than laugh at me every time I drop a Leno GIF into a “best keeper in the world” debate on Twitter. Let’s be mature about this, folks.