Stefan Frei re-ups, with Seattle through 2025
While it has yet to be officially announced by the club, Jeremiah Oshan at Sounder at Heart has reported this week that starting goalkeeper Stefan Frei renewed his contract with the Seattle Sounders and remain with the club through the 2025 season. His contract was previously set to expire at the end of this season.
Frei, 37, has taken the field for the Seattle Sounders more than any other player in the MLS era. His ever-presence, clean sheets, upper-tier shot stopping, and general adult-in-the-room demeanor has been the solid foundation on which Sounders’ recent successful period rests.
Why it makes sense
I have heard a lot of folks say that they think Stefan Frei is past it this season. I think this is mostly due to a couple high profile early-season spills which led to goals (in particular in Carson on 2 April and in that collapse in Portland on 16 April). But since those admittedly bad fumbles, I haven’t really seen any evidence of him diminishing.
When you look at the counting stats, Frei looks very good. He kept a league-leading number of league clean sheets this season, conceding only 28 goals in the process, putting him in the 85th and 84th percentile respectively for all active goalkeepers in those two categories.
These good counting stats did not lead to a nomination for the Goalkeeper of the year award, but that seemed somewhat controversial, even to some of his fellow pros.
Unfortunately, fbref doesn’t have advanced goalkeeper stats going back more than a handful of years, but over the past six years since they have been publishing them, his numbers have held remarkably consistent.
If you’re unfamiliar, the PSxG suite of numbers essentially builds on the xG model by taking the xG of all shots faced by a specific keeper and then controlling for how many of these shots find the back of the net. It does so by assuming the difference in xG:G is a result of the goalkeeper in question’s actions. In my opinion, it’s not a perfect metric because of this assumption, but these stats have a way of evening themselves out given a sufficient amount of time. A whole season’s worth of data, in my opinion, is at least worth taking a look at and drawing some inferences from.
While his best year was unquestionably 2018, his PSxG+/- the last two years has been the best it’s ever been since then. His 0.10 PSxG+/-/90 means he’s good for saving 1/10th of one goal per game better than an average goalkeeper would, which is good enough for 10th best in 2023 in MLS for keepers who played over 1000 min, and 6th best for keepers who played over 2000 min.
He’s also been available. Since he came to Sounders in 2014, Frei’s played 90.1% of the available league minutes. He missed half of 2021 after his knee injury in San Jose (the Alex Roldan goalkeeper game), but other than that year and 2022, when he missed about 21%, he’s never missed much more than 10% of the available minutes in any single season, having played a 26,596 of the of the 29,520 available minutes since then.
Part of that is his physicality. He is a notorious worker, in that he’s always putting in his dues to keep his body in tip-top shape. Whether that’s being in the gym, doing yoga, or unwinding at Banya, the guy takes his craft — and its vessel — seriously.
But more than that is the mental toughness he exhibits. Where he is now, an established MLS goalkeeper, is a credit to him, because it was not a foregone conclusion.
When Frei came to Seattle from Toronto, he was second choice, jittery, low on confidence, coming off injury, and just clearly not in the right headspace for a goalkeeper. The position is mentally taxing, requiring flashes of intense action amidst time spent standing around trying to keep your mind from wandering. My point is that it says something about his mental strength and willingness to improve that he — with the help of goalkeepers’ coach Tom Dutra — has built himself into a premier goalkeeper in this league, and the subject of an iconic moment that will live in MLS lore forever. He’s an example to his teammates and just an all around great representative of this club.
Finally, there are a few “soft factor” reasons that the contract makes sense for him. First, he recently finished building a brand new house on Blakely Harbor. He designed it himself and oversaw the build, including several bespoke and custom elements, so I suspect he’d like to continue living in it.
He’s intimated before that he’d like to retire a Sounder, and I’m happy for him that he will seemingly avoid the Osvaldo Alonso / Brad Evans situation where he sees out the twilight of his career at some other club. The man is thoroughly engrained in Seattle and it wouldn’t be right to see such a legend retire as a Toro, a Whitecap, or a Loon. And while I have no sources to back me up on this, I suspect the chances are good he’s giving the team an economic incentive to keep him by not demanding too much in salary in exchange for the second guaranteed year.
I love Stefan Frei. The man has saved the Sounders’ bacon more times than I can count, and on a personal level I’m very happy he’ll be coming back.
Speak now or forever hold your peace
It wouldn’t be a Soundernavia piece if I didn’t bring up my concerns. So with all the nice stuff out of the way, here’s where I want to be honest about what I think and what I see. There’s no such thing as a risk-free move, and while I’m happy he’s coming back, I’m not without some anxiety over this one. You’re always welcome to disagree, I obviously have no exclusive claim on the truth.
Concern #1: Age
Look, it’s safe to say that renewing Stefan Frei’s contract would be a no-brainer if he were 27 years old. He’s a B+/A- MLS goalkeeper on less than max-senior roster numbers, and that is a perfect combination … if the age profile is correct. But he’s a decade older than 27, and for every year above 30 you go, the chances of a significant and sometimes very sudden drop off increase.
I’m going to introduce some data below that I think might give my concern some context. But first, a few caveats up front. First, the data presented below is a bit old now (between 2–4 years, depending), and the goalkeeper position has changed quite a bit year-to-year over the past decade. Consequently, what is valued now¹ may be different to what was valued when these data were compiled. Second, what’s presented comes only from specific data sets (either European top-five leagues or Premier League only). While the underlying considerations for what makes a goalkeeper good may not be different, the salary cap does change the way rosters are constructed. I don’t know off the top of my head whether that would change anything in this analysis, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it may not be exactly 1:1. Finally, note that all that can be inferred from these data are conclusions based on an imaginary “average goalkeeper” within the scope of data in question. It doesn’t tell you anything about a specific player on a specific team, because this data is just a composite.
Alright, let’s get into it. I refer you to the below, which I have taken from an interesting piece written by Paul Johnson a couple years ago at Bavarian Football Works, SBNation’s Bayern München blog.
This shows the number of goalkeepers active in Europe’s top five leagues during the 11 seasons between 2010 and 2020. Of course this is not prima facie evidence of declining performance among the goalkeepers playing in these leagues. However, that steep decline at the right side of the chart does suggest that only a very small percentage of goalkeepers make it to the stage Frei is currently. It’s safe to say that by the time 37 rolls around, most are not still playing, at least at a European top-five league level, and I don’t think it’s simply because players decide they want to take up bowling when they turn 38.
The next chart below, from Tom Worville, who was previously Mr Stats at The Athletic and also worked in-house at RB Leipzig. This chart shows “peak age” of each position for Premier League teams, based on the age of the players that played the most minutes at that position group. Again, this does not specifically measure performance, only participation, but once again I think we can infer, to the extent that we believe football at least resembles a meritocracy, a conclusion that performance drops with age.
Finally, these last two charts below (again from BFW). The first shows the post-shot expected goals minus goals conceded (PSxG+/-) across every goalkeeper in Europe’s top five leagues. Again, this stat isn’t perfect, but considering the sample size here (all of the keepers in the all of the games of Europe’s top five leagues over a few years), I think we can safely infer that it shows us a pretty hard-and-fast trend.
The second chart shows the goals saved above average (GSAA) stat, which uses an average save percentage based on the data-set and then produces each goalkeeper’s positive or negative value relative to that.
The main inference to be drawn from these final two data visualizations above is that the relative value a goalkeeper gives a team over time peaks when they are between 24–26, carries on at a decent level until around 31, and is then followed by a decline until right around the 35 year mark, at which point the composite goalkeeper no longer produces value above what a goalkeeper at the very low end² of the age curve produces.
Again, this is not conclusive, or even applicable to any specific player. It is, rather, instructive in laying out the path that the average goalkeeper’s career takes.
As I said in the caveats at the beginning of this section, the metrics in that data visualization tell us literally nothing about the specific person of Stefan Frei or about whether he can continue as Sounders’ goalkeeper through 2025. It may provide some guideposts in how skeptically we should treat this decision, but it is also worth keeping in mind that Tom Dutra is a very respected goalkeeper coach, drives his charges hard, and spends hours of each of his days instructing them and analyzing their ability to perform. I’ll defer to him and the Sounders brass on whether Frei is up to it. They seem to think he is.
Concern #2: Play style
As discussed above, Frei is a good goalkeeper, likely in the right salary range, and is a respected and trusted veteran in the Sounders locker room. Brian Schmetzer’s prime directive when it comes to goalkeepers is “keep the ball out of the damn net,” and Stefan Frei does that better than most. With the exception of the age concern I laid out above, I don’t really have any anxiety over Stefan Frei’s ability to defend our goal. I am, however, a little concerned about his feet.
Here’s a bunch of rankings for where the Sounders fall within the league on various metrics. They’re ranked third in MLS — behind only the LA Galaxy and Columbus Crew — in attempted passes this season. They’re fourth in total completed passes, number of passes received, and progressive passes received. They rank third in total touches in the attacking third and second in middle third, and third in total touches overall. They’re third in short passes attempted and eighth in medium passes attempted. They’re also fifth in MLS in highest average possession, with an average of 54.2%. On the other hand, they’re 26th in total take-ons, 12th in long passes, and 12th in switches.
The reason I threw all these points at you is that I think it paints a picture of the Sounders’ play style. In essence, the Sounders knock it around, they do so in a relatively controlled manner, maintaining possession, and heavily relying on short passes— as opposed to dribbles and medium, long, and switched balls — to progress the ball away from their goal and up the field.
Stefan Frei does not seem to fit in with this way of playing very cleanly, at least not from these numbers I have available to me.
Frei doesn’t touch the ball very much. He’s in the 10th percentile for goalkeepers in total touches. He ranks 17th of the 23 MLS goalkeepers with 2000+ minutes this year in total passes attempted, 18th of 23 in total completed passes, and 19th of 23 in attempted short passes. He’s 16th in medium ranked passes attempted, but 8th in long passes, which he attempted nearly 500 times this season at a success rate of only 44.5% (ranking 9th). Finally, he ranks in the 70th percentile among all goalkeepers for how often he just yeets the ball 40+ yards. In other words, he’s almost exactly inverse to the general philosophy of play the Sounders employ.
Whether this is by instruction or is just a player-specific trait is something we can’t really know. Cleveland played too few minutes to serve as direct comparison from which to draw inferences, and Defiance employes a style and formation distinct from the first team Sounders.
All we have to go on is the rest of the team, and the picture of it that the numbers presented paint for us. Take Yeimar Gómez Andrade and Jackson Ragen for example. As you can see below, the centerbacks are attempting short (and medium, in the case of Ragen) passes out of the back at a rate much higher than their peers. These are clearly not perfect corollaries, but it does provide evidence of the way Sounders would like to play out of the back, and it seems at odds with Stefan Frei’s distribution.
What I have also noticed this season is that, especially when running backwards toward their own goal, Sounders defenders seem reticent to pass to Stefan Frei, and him being in the 10th percentile of total touches seems to back this up. I don’t know if this is a trust thing with Frei specifically, in their own ability to make the risky back pass, or something they’re told to do by their coaches, but they seem to prioritize either attempting to turn and playing out or simply putting the ball out and allowing the defense to reset over risking the back pass.
Summing up
Stefan Frei, along with Nicolás Lodeiro and Cristian Roldan, is a statue candidate in my mind. He’s been between the sticks for all of the Sounders’ biggest achievements apart from the 2014 Supporters Shield. As with Lodeiro, if there isn’t some granite and bronze in his likeness at Longacres in the next decade then the club has royally messed up.
Even so, I have concerns with the new contract. I’m worried about giving a two-year contract to a guy at the exact age the wall seems to come for goalkeepers, and I’m worried that the way Stefan Frei plays doesn’t match the style of play the Sounders are trying to employ. I hope I’ve laid these concerns out in a way that you can at least understand them even if you don’t buy into them or give them the weight that maybe I do.
With all that said, dependable goalkeepers do not grow on trees. We have one that we know and that does the most important thing a goalkeeper can do very well. The coaches, defenders, and fans love and trust him, and he’s likely on a team-friendly contract. He also likes us and wants to be here. So while he may not be the absolute ideal, this is a salary-capped league that necessitates pragmatic cut-off points where ideology has to take a back seat to the economic restraints. We can’t all be Saudi-backed. He’s a very good goalkeeper and from a big picture perspective, there’s not a lot to dislike.
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Notes
¹ At my most anxious, I think similar data in 2023 might be worse than this data from 2021 is suggesting. The goalkeeper position, particularly for teams that like to keep the ball and control the game like the Sounders tend to do, has changed such that traits like being comfortable with high usage rates and ability to cover lots of ground and be able to cut balls out that sneak through a high back line are more valued than it has previously.
² This is speculation, but I think it’s worth noting that due to the unique college situation and relatively underdeveloped academy structures, in US soccer, it seems likely to me that the low end of the age curve’s PSxG+/- is likely worse than it is in Europe’s top five leagues, and consequently, a goalkeeper on the high pole of the age curve may have a longer runway before his PSxG+/- contribution is at par with the low end, which may lead to a slightly longer GK shelf life in US soccer than elsewhere.
