The nights are getting longer up here in the Northern Hemisphere, and soon children will be donning their traditional transfer window jumpers and gathering around open fires to sing traditional transfer window songs. In preparation for the festive season, I’m going to think about teams with really obvious deficiencies, and work out what Santa’s elves might be able to fax over on deadline day to fix them.

We’re going to start with goalkeepers, because frankly it’s easiest to draw up a naughty list of of rubbish keepers using our expected saves model. Below is the list of all keepers that have on average underperformed in the last five seasons, i.e. they’ve made fewer saves than the expected saves model expected. The rating is simply saves over expected saves, times 100. 100 is a keeper that saved exactly what the model thought they should, over is good, under is bad.

An aside as an Everton fan: I am going to note here that the player just above this list, who only just scraped a rating of 100.1, is Tim Howard. I don’t believe he’s as bad as most Everton fans like to make out (he’s just above Joe Hart in this year’s ratings, basically in the middle of the pack), but those that want to play along can by all means picture my recommendations below as applying to Everton as well (or indeed whichever team you happen to support). Just note that whoever Everton might get in will be facing the second most shots of any keeper in the Premier League, and mistakes will be made.

Keeper	Season
	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	Avg
Simon Mignolet	99.3	101.5	107.7	96.6	98.2	93.3	99.4
Julian Speroni				103.1	95.1		99.1
Tom Heaton					98.7		98.7
Richard Kingson	98.7						98.7
Adam Federici			98.4				98.4
Ben Hamer					98.2		98.2
Ali Al-Habsi	102.2	100.2	92.1				98.2
Matthew Gilks	98.0						98.0
John Ruddy		100.4	100.1	98.3		92.9	97.9
Robert Elliot			92.3		97.6	102.9	97.6
Brad Friedel	94.4	101.7	96.4				97.5
Bradley Jones			97.4				97.4
Kasper Schmeichel					98.7	95.9	97.3
Costel Pantilimon				90.9	104.5	96.4	97.3
David Marshall				97.2			97.2
Paulo Gazzaniga			103.6	90.3			97.0
Tim Krul	87.2	101.2	99.7	101.0	95.4	95.3	96.6
Boaz Myhill	85.4		108.8	87.4	104.9	96.1	96.5
Thomas Sørensen	99.4	99.7		89.9			96.3
Steve Harper	97.4		87.0	96.4	104.5		96.3
Adam Bogdan	93.3	99.3					96.3
Mark Bunn			96.3				96.3
Marcus Hahnemann	96.2						96.2
Robert Green	97.2		91.6		99.9		96.2
Gerhard Tremmel			102.5	88.2			95.3
Wayne Hennessey	95.6	100.4				89.9	95.3
Anders Lindegaard		107.0	83.3				95.1
Brad Guzan		98.1	97.8	92.6	96.7	89.9	95.0
Joel Robles			92.5		96.0		94.3
Kelvin Davis			90.5		96.9		93.7
Paul Robinson	101.3	85.9					93.6
Artur Boruc			95.3	100.4		85.0	93.5
Scott Carson	93.1						93.1
Patrick Kenny		91.4					91.4
Allan McGregor				93.7	87.4		90.5
Maarten Stekelenburg				93.9		83.1	88.5
Dorus de Vries		85.8					85.8
Stuart Taylor			81.2				81.2

There are a few main things I want to note here:

1. Southampton have terrible taste in keepers – Boruc, Davis, Stekelenburg, all generally underperforming expected saves. Fraser Forster may come good, but until then, Southampton’s overall organisation is covering up a lack of quality between the posts.
2. Bournemouth are in real trouble – Boruc isn’t great (not shown here is his 3 mistakes leading to goals already this year), and Adam Federici hasn’t done much better, but he’s left off this table as he’s below the 10-save cutoff. On top of these fairly poor performances is the fact that the shots Bournemouth are allowing are far, far trickier than any other team in the league (0.42xg against Boruc, 0.48 against Federici, against a league average of about 0.3), so literally anyone in their goalmouth would struggle.
3. Brad Guzan is the only keeper consistently, year after year, to underperform expected goals but keep his place. The 100-based ratings actually boost him up the table a bit – in terms of raw goals above/below expected, Guzan is last this year, last in 2013, and firmly bottom 6 every season he plays. That’s partly Aston Villa’s woeful defence, but I do not know how Guzan has kept his place for so long.

Of this year’s relegation candidates, Robert Elliot, standing in for Tim Krul at Newcastle, is the only keeper to be performing above expected saves, by a teeny 0.3 goal margin. Pantilimon at Sunderland is poor but not the worst, Bournemouth would probably benefit more from a defensive shakeup to reduce the quality of chances conceded, and I think that leaves Aston Villa as the prime candidates for an upgrade. I might argue in a future post that their defence needs patching (*cough* Alan Hutton *cough*), but they’re conceding chances with an average 0.25xg which isn’t terrible. Guzan, however, is four goals down on where he should be this season and if history’s anything to go by, he’s going to get continue leaking goals. This is the last five seasons in detail:

Season	Mins	Shots	Saves	Goals	Save %	Expected Saves	+/- Expected	Shot Difficulty	Rating
2015/16	1134	58	39	19	67%	43.4	-4.4	25.2	89.9
2014/15	3201	148	101	47	68%	104.5	-3.5	29.4	96.7
2013/14	3570	167	110	57	66%	118.8	-8.8	28.9	92.6
2012/13	3385	174	114	60	66%	116.6	-2.6	33.0	97.8
2011/12	620	26	18	8	69%	18.3	-0.3	29.4	98.1

So it kinda goes without saying, looking at the historical data above, that Villa could have sorted this out over the Summer, or last year, or the year before. But we’re entering a hypothetical world here where teams might agree to sell their first-choice goalkeeper in the January window, and those keepers might agree to join a team at or near the bottom of the Premier League, plus or minus any sort of reaction that Remi Garde gets between now and then. Let’s assume that nobody is going to drop down from a team above Villa to help out, otherwise I’d probably just point at Jack Butland and be done with it. Villa have been bringing in youth over the Summer, so let’s look at keepers 25 and under in Europe, playing at teams not currently in European competition, with decent ratings from our model. Let’s just assume that Premier League TV money is enough to land one of these targets. Who’s out there?

Keeper	Mins	Shots	Saves	Goals	Save %	Expected Saves	+/- Expected	Shot Difficulty	Rating
Timo Horn	4155	231	177	54	76.6%	165.2	11.8	28.1	107.2
Gerónimo Rulli	2922	133	93	40	69.9%	87.9	5.1	33.1	105.8
Julián	1491	101	75	26	74.3%	71.1	3.9	20.2	105.5
Loris Karius	6208	349	257	92	73.6%	244.8	12.2	29.6	105.0
Benjamin Lecomte	4968	246	178	68	72.4%	171.0	7.0	29.1	104.1
Alphonse Areola	4386	183	131	52	71.6%	126.3	4.7	33.2	103.7
Marco Sportiello	4881	269	197	72	73.2%	191.1	5.9	30.2	103.1
Mattia Perin	9428	548	388	160	70.8%	380.0	8.0	30.6	102.1
Nicola Leali	3587	195	135	60	69.2%	132.9	2.1	31.3	101.6
Oliver Baumann	10447	573	406	167	70.9%	404.9	1.1	29.2	100.3

I’ve snuck Alphonse Areola in here despite the fact that he’s on a season long loan, just because he is/was vaguely available in principle. Any of these players, dead or alive, would probably be an improvement, and it seems like the transfer rumour mill, and potentially even Villa’s scouts, are ahead of me, they’ve been linked with Mainz’s Karius, and indeed Timo Horn. I don’t have Championship data, or smaller foreign leagues, so I will rely on those of you with eyes to fill me in there.

It’s worth noting that perhaps these numbers miss important parts of a modern goalkeeper’s game: Paul Lambert certainly rated Guzan’s distribution, we ought to look into that. Here’s everybody’s overall passing numbers:

Keeper	Passes	Completed	Ratio
Oliver Baumann	4898	3096	0.63
Timo Horn	1537	953	0.62
Loris Karius	2633	1560	0.59
Gerónimo Rulli	973	574	0.59
Marco Sportiello	1616	931	0.58
Alphonse Areola	1383	798	0.58
Nicola Leali	1122	651	0.58
Mattia Perin	3167	1839	0.58
Benjamin Lecomte	1690	939	0.56
Brad Guzan	4455	2450	0.55
Julián	473	234	0.49

And here’s everything over 40 yards:

Keeper	Passes	Completed	Ratio
Gerónimo Rulli	666	295	0.44
Nicola Leali	779	337	0.43
Brad Guzan	3181	1319	0.41
Marco Sportiello	1034	417	0.40
Julián	370	149	0.40
Oliver Baumann	2592	940	0.36
Benjamin Lecomte	1064	378	0.36
Timo Horn	857	305	0.36
Loris Karius	1527	548	0.36
Alphonse Areola	836	290	0.35
Mattia Perin	1845	641	0.35

So Guzan has 5% over Timo Horn on long balls, take it or leave it.

It remains to be seen whether Aston Villa’s transfer window tree will be sheltering a Timo Horn-shaped present this holiday season – I nearly ran the numbers on January goalkeeper transfers to see if it happened that regularly – but I’ll leave that for the more enterprising of you. It’s possible these targets have been approached and Villa have neither the ambition nor the spending power to land any of them. All you can ask for in your letters to Lapland this year is that Remi Garde gets Villa’s Summer signings to gel into some sort of attacking unit, Jack Graelish stops being peak-Ross Barkley wasteful, and someone keeps putting their face in the way of the ball.