The role of the goalkeeper in football has undergone a notable evolution in recent years, extending beyond traditional shot-stopping duties- Most notably, regarding their ability with the ball at their feet, and how they distribute it. One can assume that the introduction of the backpass rule in 1992, coupled with the success of pressing systems deployed by some of the best clubs in world football, would demand keepers who are committed to playing shorter accurate passes instead of longer inaccurate clearances. After conducting a time series analysis on data from the past six seasons across Europe’s top 2 leagues, the Premier League and La Liga, the study concludes that while the shotstopping metric has stayed relatively consistent, there has been a rise in the importance of playing shorter passes, thereby indicating an increase in the significance of ball distribution, confirming our assumption. The Kendall’s tau statistical test is used to determine the significance of the trends present in the metrics and comment on their increasing or decreasing nature, when statistically significant.
Check notebook
Click here for the code written to scrape FBREF.
