Worst goalkeeping performance ever?

Heading into Tuesday night’s UEFA Champions League match against PSV Eindhoven, Arsenal had failed to score in their previous two matches, and three of their last four. Injuries to Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Gabriel Jesus and Gabriel Martinelli have left the attack thin, and they looked well short of ideas in a sub-1 xG performance against Nottingham Forest on the weekend.

But nothing fixes a broken attack quite like a terrible opposing goalkeeper. The Gunners set an unlikely record against PSV, becoming the first team to score 7 goals away from home in a Champions League Round of 16 tie.

Count how many times you say “the keeper should have done better there” on these highlights (USA version here):

This was not exactly a huge step forward for the Arsenal attack. PSV actually played reasonably well up until the 4th goal, which was the point where they visibly lost confidence and started to fall apart. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a funnier race chart than this for a 6 goal margin of victory.

I do not personally put any stock into the FotMob rating system or any of the websites that take event data from a game and assign players a score from 1-10. But they’re just fun to laugh about sometimes. It’s a joke, a banter, you piece of idiot.

Anyway, PSV goalkeeper Walter Benitez. I have not ever checked one of these sites like FotMob, WhoScored, Sofascore, etc. and seen a rating that starts with a 2. I haven’t seen it playing Football Manager either. I was not aware that such a thing was possible. But I guess if you allow roughly 4 more goals than you’d expect a decent Champions League keeper to allow, well…

Even though I watched the game and definitely had the thought live that Benitez wasn’t playing well, I was wondering if there would be any difference between the post-shot xG values that Opta assigned live vs. what they or StatsBomb would have the next day, after running the full analysis. The answer is no, there is not.

Three of Arsenal’s shots on target would have gone in more than half the time, but an average CL level keeper would have saved 3 or 4 of these on most days.

Walter Benitez’s Eredivisie numbers were decent, though not amazing last season. This season, he seems to have taken a nosedive, both domestically and in European competition. I am not terribly familiar with PSV backup goalkeeper Joël Drommel or academy product/B-team starter Niek Schiks, but the chances of them being worse than Benitez are… pretty much zero.

Off the back of Tuesday’s performance, Benitez is now very comfortably the worst performing goalkeeper in the Champions League. But 11.3 90s isn’t a tiny sample. If he was good previously, one bad performance wouldn’t have completely tanked his stats. He’s just been bad all year.

Mikel Arteta gave an interview to the American Champions League broadcast after the match where he said his team had to be humble. I think he’s very much aware that he has not fixed his team’s attack, and that this was a good-not-great performance. The Gunners were fortunate to face one of the weakest goalkeepers to ever appear in this stage of the competition.

Maybe in their next match, Arsenal will face a much stronger opponent who isn’t so prone to calamitous… oh FFS.

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