Data Mining and Machine Learning in Sports: Success Metrics for Elite Goalkeepers in European Football Leagues

This brief highlights the factors associated with good goalkeeping techniques and their impact on goalkeepers’ performance in elite European football leagues. The goalkeeping performances of 1600 goalkeepers from five consecutive seasons across the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, and German Bundesliga are studied. The findings from this brief are useful for identifying the success metrices of top-class goalkeepers that help stakeholders to devise strategies to further enhance their performances and empower talent identification experts with pertinent information for mapping out future high-performance goalkeepers.