Finding The Next Edouard Mendy
Edouard Mendy has been the latest star of a rags to riches story in the football world. 7 years ago in the summer of 2014, Mendy was released from his third-tier French team, Cherbourg. Unable to find a new team that summer, he spent 12 months as a free agent whilst his partner became pregnant with their first child. In order to try and support his family, Mendy even had to claim unemployment benefit during this testing period of his career. Understandably the pressure was mounting on him to find some sort of employment. The pressure almost resulted in Mendy accepting a job offer to work in a menswear store and giving up on his dream. If you told a 23 year old free agent being released from a third tier team that they would become Chelsea’s starting goalkeeper and win the champions league 6 years later, they would of thought it impossible.
However ex Cherbourg teammate, Ted Lavie, managed to secure a trial for Mendy to become Marseille’s third choice goalkeeper. Mendy managed to impress in this trial and caught the opportunity with both hands. No pun intended. After a year at Marseille, he joined Ligue 2 side Reims in 2016 where he spent a year as back up to Johann Carrasco before impressing in cameos to become number 1 the following season. In his first season as number 1 he helped Reims gain promotion to Ligue 1 by keeping 19 clean sheets. After impressing in his first season in Ligue 1 and becoming Senegal’s number 1, Mendy was beginning to gather some admirers.
Rennes became the next step in Mendy’s journey, joining them in 2019. Here he played a big role in them securing champions league football that season. Through the years following his time as a free agent, coaches and teammates all spoke highly of Mendy’s personality and in particularly his dedication. No doubt the adversity he faced earlier in his career had an impact in creating the desire and discipline to succeed. After just one year at Rennes, Chelsea came calling for Mendy on the recommendations of Petr Cech. Arriving with little fanfare for £22 million, Mendy quickly established himself as number 1 and as they say, the rest is history.
Chelsea and Petr Cech scouted excellently for value here and learned from the £72 million transfer of Kepa Arrizabalaga. In admiration of this scouting, an attempt will be made to find the next Edouard Mendy. A keeper who is young, reasonably priced and ready for a bigger club will be found using a three step method based on one created by the wunderkind Ashwin Raman.
Shot Stopping
Shot Stopping is still a goalkeepers bread and butter despite the increased demand for sweeper keepers who are comfortable with the ball at their feet.
To begin creating the shortlist, the best performing goalkeepers (Amongst top five European leagues) in terms of Post-Shot Expected Goals minus Goals Allowed will be identified. PSxG +/- is an expected goals model based on how likely a goalkeeper is to save a shot. If a goalkeeper has positive numbers in this metric it essentially means they are saving more shots than they are expected to, highlighting strong shot stopping skills. Taking the 2020/2021 stats, 42 goalkeepers had positive numbers in this metric. Here are the top 20:
Passing
To narrow down our shortlist of 42 keepers, the next area taken into consideration will be the goalkeepers passing ability.
Teams are now placing a lot of value in keepers that are good with the ball at their feet. One of the reasons Mendy has seamlessly fitted into Thomas Tuchel’s system is how composed he is on the ball as well as his passing ability. Elsewhere in the Premier League, Alisson and Ederson have raised the benchmark in terms of how good a goalkeepers passing ability can be. Other examples of keepers good with the ball at their feet include Jordan Pickford, who has an impressive passing range and Robert Sanchez, who comes out his box to become an auxiliary center back when Brighton have possession.
The next metric to add to the shortlist will be the keepers pass completion percentage on passes over 40 yards. Although a slightly simple stat, it does provide a good indicator on the keepers long passing ability as it shows which keepers are passing with intent and accuracy. Last seasons top 3 for this stat were Manuel Neuer, Wojciech Szczesny and Marc-Andre Ter-Stegen which does bode well as these keepers are universally regarded as strong passers. Mendy also lead the Premier League in this stat last season. After applying this to our list of 42, the well below average long range passers were removed giving us a new list of 36. Here is the top 20 for this metric:
Obviously this doesn’t evaluate a keeper’s short passing ability but this will be done in the final stage through video analysis.
Aerial Ability
The cherry on top of the cake for our prospective keeper would be a keeper who is confident claiming crosses. I used the percentage of crosses stopped by the keepers to highlight keepers who regularly claim crosses into their penalty box. This stat is probably the least important as it doesn’t account for the amount of mistakes the keeper makes, its more an indication of their confidence in their aerial ability. After removing the below average cross claimers, I whittled our 36 down to 26. The top 20 are below:
Final Shortlist
For the final shortlist anyone that would be overly expensive or is over the age of 27 (With 2 exceptions) was removed. Jordan Pickford and Pau Lopez made the shortlist but were removed for below average shot shopping stats at the end. The final shortlist ended up as this:
First of all, Illan Meslier is an amazing prospect. Donnarumma was the only other u24 keeper that made the penultimate shortlist which highlights how good Meslier is. After watching each keeper (Disclaimer - I’m no expert) and considering his age also, he would be the best choice from the final shortlist in my opinion. Now I know he would likely be a bit too expensive which doesn’t fit with article but any elite team needing a goalkeeper should seriously consider buying him.
In terms of value for money and transfer availability, I’d look to Jonas Omlin. Omlin has just came off a fine first season in Ligue 1 for Montpellier, which is impressive considering it was his first in a top 5 league. Omlin is an average height for a keeper, standing at 6'2. Similarly to Edouard Mendy, he has a well rounded game which is backed up by the stats but through watching him it is clear that he is a modern keeper that is comfortable on the ball and happy to come out his box. His distribution in particular, is what I believe would make him appealing to a bigger club as he would suit a possession focused team. Look out for his chipped passes in particular, he excels at these which would be ideal for teams looking to beat a press.
Alphonse Areola deserves mention as well as he had an excellent season for Fulham as they got relegated last season. He is unlikely to be attainable however as West Ham recently signed him on loan and have an option to make his loan permanent for around £11 million. After watching him last season and seeing the stats and transfer value, West Ham look to have a potential bargain should they take it.
Overall, if money isn’t an issue for a team then I'd say go all out for Illan Meslier. In fitting with the headline, however, my value pick would be Jonas Omlin. If Omlin carries on like he did in his first season I'd expect to see some more hype develop around him. Osasuna’s Sergio Herrera and Cagliari’s Alessio Cragno are slightly more traditional goalkeepers but both would offer decent alternatives.
Shoutout again to Ashwin Raman (@AshwinRaman_ on twitter) for the idea. If you haven’t heard of him already, check his page out for lots of awesome stuff. I know my attempt wasn’t to the same standard as his article but it was just a bit of fun and I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll leave a link for Ashwin’s original article on my twitter for you to check out also. Make sure to hit me up on twitter @ttfootball5 to talk all things football!
