The One Stat You Want Your Goalkeeper To Have...And A Few Other Nice Ones As Well!

Right, a while back I wrote a blog post about the anatomy of a world class player. Following the link will take you to that article. I have now decided to take that one step further and go through at each position one at a time in the same manner. The goal is to determine exactly what attributes you can't live without in each position. Todays post is about the last line of defense, the goalkeepers.

The methology is simple. I will go through each of the top 100 highest valued players in a specific position manually. Each attribute with a value of 16 or higher will be noted. If the value of the player in the 100th position the remaining players of the same value will be included. In the case of goalkeepers that means 108 players in total will be analysed.

By a huge margin there is one runaway attribute in the Goalkeeping Attributes department.

As you can see Reflexes is by far the single most important goalkeeping attribute. In fact it outranks all other attributes in my research by at least 16 points! The next Goalkeeping attribute I would like my keeper to have is One On Ones, but reflexes is the must have attribute that a good keeper must have.

The result in the mental attributes department took me by surprise. Although I knew the winning attribute was important in all players I had expected another attribute to shine a bit more than it did. Here's the graph.

Determination confirms its position as one of the most important attributes in the game. The second highest attribute, Positioning, was one I had expected to be more important than it apparently is. It's an attribute you would definitely like, but it's apparently not as important as other attributes.

In the physical department I went "Oh yeah. That makes sense."

Agility and Jumping are the physical attributes you want your keeper to have, and that makes a lot of sense. I was kind of surprised to see so many keepers having a high Natural Fitness, but there you go.

So, if you are looking for a new keeper the attributes he must have (in order of importance) are: Reflexes, Jumping, Determination and Agility. Secondary attributes it would be nice for your goalkeeper to have are: One On Ones, Handling, Kicking, Aerial Ability, Positioning and Natural Fitness.