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Home » Goalkeeper Performance Calculator – FM23

Goalkeeper Performance Calculator – FM23

    Introduction

    New and in collaboration with FM Scout, I’d like to introduce you to the FM23 Goalkeeper Performance Calculator.

    We’ve already created the Player Performance Calculator tool to compare outfield player performances in Football Manager 2023 which you can use already, but now our attentions turn to the men between the posts with the gloves on.

    This is another intuitive web-based Football Manager analytical tool which introduces multiple columns which enable you to better compare goalkeeper performances. Free and easy to use.

    I’ve previously written at length about performance metrics and analysis in Football Manager 2023, most recently in my ‘What Does Good Look Like?’ post here. The outfield Player Performance Calculator is available here.

    Analysing Goalkeepers

    Quantifying the performance level of goalkeepers is a notoriously contentious and difficult topic. For example, naturally goalkeepers for less successful teams tend to be tested more often than those playing between the sticks for possession-hungry elite sides at the top of the table.

    Here’s a real-life Premier League example – According to FBREF, Manchester City’s Ederson faced 77 shots on target with a 62.3% save ratio in the 22-23 season which has just finished. That’s 48 saves. Leeds United’s Illan Meslier faced 158 shots on target with a 59.5% save ratio. That’s 94 saves. Now nobody would claim that this would make Meslier 22% better than Ederson. It’s not Ederson’s fault he played for a more successful side who conceded fewer shots that would test him. So we need to look at other metrics.

    In FM23, analysing goalkeepers is made even more difficult because the Save Ratio and Expected Save Ratio columns unfortunately don’t currently provide consistent results, depending on if the clubs the keepers play for are in playable, full-detail divisions or not. There’s also post-shot Expected Goals (PSxG) used in real life, which would be a nice metric to use, but it’s not yet made it’s way into FM.

    Therefore, much like in the Player Performance Calculator, we do what we can with the information we do have access to. To build a tool where you can run a Player Search, export and upload the results and compare goalkeepers where the “better” ones will appear at the top, inviting you to scout them properly in-game.

    Like with all statistics, they don’t tell the full story, but can highlight players you may have previously overlooked. Or you may need validation to back up your instincts about a specific player’s talent. Bear in mind I’m having fun playing a computer game, not applying to be the head of Opta or brokering the next deal between the Premier League and Oracle.

    How to use the Goalkeeper Performance Calculator

    • Go to the Goalkeeper Performance Calculator page on FM Scout. Bookmark it too!
    • Download the custom view and put it in your Views folder – usually C:\Users\username\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2023\views. If you are on Windows 11, there may be a OneDrive folder in there as part of that location.
    • Open FM23 and load the custom view in the Scouting > Players In Range screen.
    • Get the list of Goalkeepers you’d like to compare onscreen in your results. Use Edit Search in the top right to filter to just Goalkeepers, but think about any other filtering you may wish to do. Setting a Minutes threshold is always useful to ensure only players with enough minutes to give a decent sample size are included in the results. Maybe a Reputation filter to weed out those players who play at too low a level who you know won’t be appropriate targets for you before you even look at stats? You might even wish to filter results to only keepers playing in your country, or maybe set an age limit or show only those who have expiring contracts. It’s entirely up to you. Whatever suits your reason for going to Scouting > Players in Range and hunting for goalkeepers in the first place.
    • If you want to keep your own goalkeeper in the results, so you can compare his performances to his rivals, simply remember to click the Exclude button in the Edit Search area and untick the box which excludes your own players from the results by default.
    • Select the top row (player) in the results, then click Ctrl + A to select all, then Ctrl + P to print screen and save it as a webpage. This will save a .html file of your results on your computer.
    • Simply click the big ‘Select HTML file’ button on the Goalkeeper Performance Calculator page on FM Scout then ‘Upload and Calculate’ and upload the file you just saved. If the results have lots of players (100+) in them, this may take a few seconds.

    Now your results are onscreen, it’s simply a case of clicking on ‘GK Ranking’ and seeing the keepers ranked from “best” to “worst” based on the underlying calculation.

    The GK Ranking is from 1st in the list to however long the list is. So it’s not 1st as in the best in the world or 1st in his league, it’s 1st out of the results in the list you are looking at.

    The Tool does not consider goalkeeper distribution style or passing accuracy, but compares goalkeepers on the classic art of making saves and preventing goals.

    The calculation considers Expected Goals Prevented per 90 minutes, which measures the quality of shots keepers have had to face and therefore inversely measures the quality of their ability to prevent shots that were likely going to become goals. It also considers clean sheets and goals conceded. I stress again that the results can favour ‘busier’ keepers, but there’s a column included in the Tool to try and mitigate that. I’ll explain this below.

    The columns

    Going from left to right, the columns on the Tool are:

    • Name – The goalkeeper’s name. Mindblowing I know, but you probably need his name if you want to go and scout or sign him after using the Tool.
    • Club – The goalkeeper’s employer. If he plays for PSG and you are managing Rotherham, it’s unlikely that he’ll sign for you, though stranger things have happened.
    • Wage – Similar to the above, while doing any scouting, it is frustrating to find a target who looks like a perfect fit for you, only to realise that while your average player wage is £5k, this guy is on £150k. It’s another column to help narrow down your results to ensure the list is relevant and helpful to you when scouting. My tip is to filter out irrelevant players in the Scouting screen in FM before you even export the data, but the Wage appearing in the tool is a nice inclusion to glance at when comparing targets. Maybe one keeper is 4th in the ranking and on £10k a week, while the keeper just below him in 5th is on £7k. Potential bargain! Remember it can go the other way too. If you are a team with players who earn on average £5k a week, a list of goalkeepers who play at such a low level that they are on £800 a week might not be the best calibre of talent to look at. Though we’ve all seen it a million times before where a low earning player at a small team makes a big step up and becomes a superstar. It’s entirely up to you.
    • Minutes – This is all about sample size. Like any statistical analysis in football, the more minutes a player has played, the more reliable the data you can extract about his performances. The last thing you want to do is see someone who has incredible ‘per 90’ numbers at first glance, then realise he only played 200 minutes all season so his numbers were inflated, while every other keeper in the list is being analysed on their 2,000+ minutes played. Again, this is something I’d suggest you filter out in the scouting results in FM before you even print screen and export your list.
    • Saves per 90 – As I’ve talked a lot about throughout this post, completing more saves per 90 does not a better goalkeeper make (remember the Ederson vs Meslier example?), but it’s a good column to have on the Tool so you have an idea of how busy this keeper was. Much like the Minutes sample size explanation above, while busier doesn’t necessarily mean better, it lets you see just how often he has been tested. Whether you consider busier goalkeepers to be better, or if you take those who don’t have to make as many saves as a sign of a keeper who organises his defence in front of him so well that he faces fewer shots, is entirely up to you. Football is about context and opinions. This Tool just takes the basic data and brings those to the top who have prevented a higher quality of shots turning into more goals conceded more regularly.
    • GK Ranking – THE KEY COLUMN. An adjusted calculation considering Expected Goals Prevented, Clean Sheets completed and Goals Conceded (all per 90) to boil a goalkeeper’s core performance level down to a single value. The actual value or score if visible would be a meaningless number like 3.54645, so this is expressed simply as a rank like 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc instead. Those with the highest statistical performance at the top, working it’s way down the list to those with less impressive numbers.
    • Signature Style – The first of two columns that are a bit of fun. For most keepers, this will be blank, but it can contain one of two descriptors, either “Reactive shot stopper” or “Safe pair of hands.” Those with “Reactive shot stopper” are those keepers where a high percentage of their stops are diving ‘tipped’ saves. Think David De Gea or Jan Oblak-style keepers. Those with “Safe pair of hands” are those where a high percentage of their saves are ‘held.’ So not neccessarily as instinctive shot stoppers as the first category, but regularly and safely keep a hold of the ball when it’s fired at them. Those with neither descriptor simply have a fairly even spread of save types between tipped, held and parried, and therefore don’t fall into one of those two unique categories.
    • Penalty Saving – Again, this isn’t a key metric to compare player performances fairly, as goalkeepers are largely unable to dictate how many penalties they have to face in any given game of football. Though if a goalkeeper has 1) faced a decent number of penalties in the games he has played and 2) saved a notably high percentage of those penalties, “Penalty save specialist” will appear in this column. This doesn’t mean that keeper who have this decsriptor are guaranteed to save penalties for you, while those with a blank in this column will not, it’s simply additional colour to highlight those keepers who have had to face a significant number of penalties, and seem to have a knack of getting their body, hands or feet in the way of them.

    That’s all there is to it!

    So while the Goalkeeper Performance Calculator doesn’t do your scouting for you, if you’ve got a list of goalkeepers on your Players In Range screen and want some simple calculations to rank those targets on shot-stopping to help speed up your scouting or provide a bit of insight into a keeper’s performances you may not see at first glance in game, why not Print Screen and upload them into the tool and have a play around yourself?

    How will you use the Goalkeeper Performance Calculator? Let me know on Twitter.

    I want to thank not only FM Scout for their coding expertise but also FM Tahiti who is regularly my sounding board and a statistical expert who is always a great help whenever I am considering new calculations or metric combinations. Tahiti has an excellent website of his own you should definitely visit if you don’t do so regularly already.

    Thanks for reading and using the tool.

    FM Stag