Ah, the life of a national team fan. For the past 20 years, the United States men's national team has had plenty of depth -- at the only position where you don't need it.
First, there was Tony Meola, the ponytailed almost-Jets-punter who had his own video game and started every match at the 1990 and 1994 World Cups -- all before his 26th birthday. He was usurped by the likes of Brad Friedel and Kasey Keller, a pair of Premier League and LaLiga and Bundesliga stalwarts, who then gave way to Tim Howard, he of the phone call from President Obama and the 398 Premier League starts for Manchester United and Everton.
Such was the American depth at keeper that neither Marcus Hahnemann nor Brad Guzan -- both of whom started 100-plus Premier League matches -- ever appeared in a World Cup match. At any other position, that kind of pedigree would've meant "automatic starter." At keeper, it meant second string at best.
For years, fans wondered what life might be like if only America could develop players at all the other positions, too. Well, with Americans now occupying key roles for teams in the Champions League and across Europe's Big Five leagues, it's finally happened. And of course, it's finally happened that the USMNT keeper pool has gone the other way. Such is the volatility of a competition constrained by the country on your (or your close relative's) birth certificate: you only have so much control over who's born where and when.
Barring anything miraculous happening in the next few months, the USMNT now seems likely to head to Qatar with one keeper who's not a starter (Matt Turner at Arsenal) and two others starting matches in the English second division (Zack Steffen with Middlesbrough and Ethan Horvath at Luton Town).
So, three months out, we're here to wonder: Does any of that actually matter?
American goalkeeping at the World Cup
Since 1990, American goalkeepers have played 2,400 minutes at the World Cup:
Tim Howard: 780 minutes
Tony Meola: 630
Brad Friedel: 540
Kasey Keller: 450
In the seasons before his two tournaments as the No. 1, Howard was the full-time starter at Everton. Before the 1998 World Cup, Keller was the starter at Leicester City as they finished 10th in the Premier League. And before the 2006 World Cup, he was the starter at Borussia Monchengladbach as they finished 10th in the Bundesliga. From 1996 through 2007, Keller never started fewer than 20 matches in one of Europe's Big Five leagues. Friedel, meanwhile, started one match in 1998 (Keller made the other two) on the heels of 11 starts in the Premier League for third-place Liverpool. Then, in 2002, he made all five starts after a 36-start season for 10th-place Blackburn Rovers in the Premier League.
So, in its past four World Cups, the USMNT has had a keeper who, at the very worst, was a league-average starting goalkeeper across the Big Five leagues. As for the two tournaments before that? Well, it had a keeper who, uh, barely played professional soccer.
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Major League Soccer, where Meola went on to start for the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, didn't launch until 1996. Meola left the University of Virginia after his sophomore year in 1989. Then, save for a couple of appearances for the Fort Lauderdale strikers of the American Professional Soccer League and a brief dalliance with Brighton & Hove Albion and Watford in the English second tier that was held up by work permit problems, he was essentially a full-time USMNT player. Since there was no first division league in the country, U.S. Soccer set up a full-time, two-year-long camp for its players before the tournament on American soil in 1994.
If you're worried about Turner's form heading into Qatar, perhaps you can comfort yourself with the fact that Meola didn't play consistent competitive professional soccer for a half-decade. Goalkeeping stats get sketchier the further you go back in time, and save percentage is an incomplete stat that doesn't control for shot difficulty, but it's the best we have for this era, and Meola saved 77.8% of the shots he faced in his two Cups. As for the other three:
Howard: 78.8%
Friedel: 73.3%
Keller: 47.4%
Overall, U.S. keepers have saved 73.5% of the shots they've faced in the World Cups since 1990. The tournament average, since then, is 80.5%. In other words, Meola did just fine.
Does form matter in goal?
The state of soccer was drastically different in the early '90s; the level of play wasn't so high that a team of misfits, like the Americans in 1994, couldn't get out of their group. The quality of players throughout the world has only steadily increased since then, of course, so it might not serve us too well to look back to 1990, 1994, 1998 or even a couple of the tournaments after that.
There's also no reason to limit it solely to Americans, either. For the previous two World Cups, Stats Perform has tracked the expected goals on target (xGOT) faced by each keeper. (For those unaware, xGOT is essentially just your standard xG, adjusted for where the shot is located on the goal frame. Still not perfect, but way better than save percentage.)
In the past two tournaments, there are 32 instances of a keeper starting three matches and allowing fewer goals than xGOT. That, roughly, makes sense; there are 32 teams in each tournament, and 32 of the 64-ish keepers in the sample were "above average." Ideally, whoever is in goal for the U.S. in November comes out of the tournament with an above-average mark, too.
Howard's performance in 2014 ranks seventh among the 32, as he conceded six goals from 8.75 xGOT. The bigger the circle, the higher the xGOT:
Of the 32 keepers on the list, 14 of them were starters at a Big Five European club for the season before the World Cup, while 18 were not. However, Manuel Neuer only started three games for Bayern Munich before the 2018 World Cup because of injury, so he doesn't really count. You could argue the same for Guillermo Ochoa, who was a starter for Ajaccio in Ligue 1 before his lights-out performance at the 2014 World Cup and then was a starter for Standard Liege in Belgium before his lights-out performance at the 2018 World Cup. Yes, he's on the list twice; 2.25 goals saved in 2014 and 1.85 in 2018.
Along with Ochoa, the only other keepers to appear on the list twice are Neuer, Costa Rica's Keylor Navas, Belgium's Thibaut Courtois, Colombia's David Ospina and Russia's Igor Akinfeev. Save for maybe Akinfeev, the other five really are the defining keepers from the past two tournaments.
If you want to be needlessly pedantic, there are zero Championship goalkeepers on this list. Ergo Steffen and Horvath are screwed! Now, that is obviously untrue. On this list, there are keepers from the Serbian first division, the Iranian first division, the Honduran first division, the Dutch first division, the Bulgarian first division, the South Korean first division, the Belgian first division and the Spanish second division, and plenty of keepers who were playing in lower levels have outperformed their bigger name counterparts at the past two World Cups. South Korea's Cho Hyun-Woo, who was playing for Daegu, the seventh-place team in the K-League the year of the tournament, led all keepers in 2018 with 3.9 goals saved.
But what about keepers who barely play? Mikel Arteta urged Turner to fight with Aaron Ramsdale for the No. 1 spot at Arsenal, sources told ESPN's James Olley, but the reality is that the club expects him to be the backup and then pick up minutes in spot-starts across the various cup competitions.
All but six of the keepers on our list started at least 15 league games the year of the tournament -- and one of those six, again, is Neuer. Of the other five, Morocco's Munir started just one game for Numancia in Spain's second division before the 2018 tournament, while Nigeria's Francis Uzoho made just two starts for Deportivo La Coruna in the first division the same year. In 2014, Greece's Orestis Karnezis had made just six starts for Granada in LaLiga.
However, there are two other examples that seem more instructive for Turner's situation. The first one is Argentina's Sergio Romero, who saved 3.15 goals for Argentina en route to their runner-up finish in 2014. In the season leading up to the event, he'd made just two starts for AS Monaco in Ligue 1.
Then there's Ospina, who was a full-time starter at Nice before the 2014 World Cup. Much like Turner, after establishing himself with high-level performance in a lower league and some standout matches for his national team, he made a move to one of the biggest and wealthiest clubs in the world, where he ultimately became a backup. Despite only four league starts in the 2017-18 season, he saved more than a goal above-average at the 2018 World Cup for Colombia.
Oh, and about that club he joined in 2014. Plenty of U.S. fans are worried about this exact question: Can Arsenal's backup keeper still play well at the World Cup? Four years ago, Ospina answered it, definitively, with a "yes."