The alarming stats that prove Aston Villa have an Emi Martínez problem they must solve

He he’s World Cup winner, a Copa América champion, and the man who has taken the last two Yashin Trophies home. He’s the best Aston Villa have ever had and can pretend to copulate with as much silverware as he wants – but after another costly error against Manchester City, is it time to wonder whether Emiliano Martínez is really the greatest goalkeeper in the world anymore?

Errors happen to the best shot stoppers, of course, although the way in which Bernardo Silva’s shot powered through his limp attempt at a save at the Etihad was more troubling than most minor ricks, not least because it deeply damaged Villa’s chances of making the Champions League – a competition they have only just been knocked out of on the back of another Martínez mistake. The problems are piling up, and the stats suggest that Villa’s number one is starting to struggle…

Is Emiliano Martínez still the best goalkeeper in the world?

For the last two seasons, Martínez has been voted as the best goalkeeper on the globe. Instrumental to Argentina’s World Cup win, he followed that up with a brilliant individual season, propelling Villa into Europe’s biggest competition for the first time in four decades and helping his country to yet another major trophy.

There were arguments that other goalkeepers, mostly playing for ‘bigger’ (or at least richer) clubs, were better than the effervescent Argentine, but it was Martínez who was handed a ceaseless string of awards and trophies with which to simulate lewd acts. He seemed unstoppable, if also an occasional menace to public decency.

This season, however, the mood music has changed. Villa fans have been noticing it for a while, but his standards seem to have slipped, and now a pair of extremely expensive and high-profile mistakes have thrown his form into the spotlight for everyone else.

Against City, his attempt to save Bernardo’s strike was simply weak, not an adjective usually used to describe Martínez or his play. He was arguably culpable to an extent for Matheus Nunes’ winner, too, diving hopelessly to stop a Jérémy Doku cross he could never reach when he could have scrambled across to his back post to turn a guaranteed goal into a 99% chance of one.

His error against PSG was perhaps worse still, a simple low cross spilled needlessly out into the path of Achraf Hakimi to open the scoring at Villa Park. His team showed immense determination to push PSG and come within a few inches of mounting a wildly improbable comeback, but had Martínez not made that foul-up then the scores might have finished level on aggregate after two legs.

The upshot is that Villa are out of the Champions League and their chances of qualifying again dangle by a thread. It’s not as though Martínez has never made a mistake before – his awkward own goal against Liverpool at the very end of the 2023/24 season springs to mind – but they seem to be happening with increasing frequency, against a backdrop of performances which feel a little less dominant than they once were. Unfortunately for Villa, the stats back up the impression that Martínez’s form has decline.

The stats which prove that Martínez is having a bad season

This season, Martínez has conceded 45 goals in the Premier League. Only four goalkeepers have conceded more over the course of the season, and of the 43 goalkeepers to play any number of minutes in the top flight since August, he ranks 36th in terms of the difference between the expected goals he’s faced and those he has actually conceded.

Those 45 goals came from exactly 43 xG’s worth of opposing chances. Last season, by comparison, he saved the equivalent of 6.6 goal’s worth of chances against what might have been expected – only José Sá and Aro Muric managed more. He is making fewer saves and his save percentage has dipped, too. In the 2022/23 season, when he won his first Yashin Trophy, he saved 74.2% of the shots that came his way. Now, he sits at 65.9%.

In short, Martínez has performed worse this season than he has in previous years, and by a fairly long way. This isn’t just about individual errors or moments of madness. Game by game, shot by shot, he is making fewer saves and is now allowing more goals than the average goalkeeper would expect to conceded given the chances he has faced.

The graph below highlights how Martínez has performed compared to the average Premier League goalkeeper since he signing for Aston Villa five years ago, in terms of the simpler-than-it-sounds stat of Post-Shot xG/Goals Allowed – a wordy, nerdy way of saying the difference between the number of goals a shot stopper has conceded against how many the xG model thinks that they ‘should’ have conceded.

For four years in a row, the average Premier League goalkeeper prevented slightly fewer goals than the xG model reckoned that they should, but Martínez flipped the script for three of his first four seasons, and never dipped below the mark set by the middle-of-the-road goalie in the top flight. In 2022/23 and 2023/24, in particular, he was operating way above the average and was one of the best in the division. The stats backed up the eye test resoundingly.

This season, however, everything has turned on its head. Goalkeepers in general are getting better, and have saved goals at a fractionally better rate than ‘expected’ – except for Martínez, who has plunged down below the average.

There are plenty of other relatively niche stats, and they pretty much all tell the same story: Martínez is no longer the same goalkeeper that won those Yashin trophies, and isn’t even close to being the best goalkeeper in the Premier League, let alone in the world, at this point in time.

The question, of course, is why Martínez’s performances have fallen off. Confidence? Perhaps, although he’s always projected absolute self-belief. Age? He’s 32, hardly ancient by goalkeeping standards, but perhaps those fast-twitch muscles are starting to tighten up a little bit. Just the vagaries of form? He’d hardly be the first world-class player to have an inexplicable off season before getting back to his best.

Whatever the cause, Emery must make a determination – whether to trust Martínez to right the ship and get back to his indomitable best, or whether this is the start of a permanent decline towards a point at which he is no longer a serviceable top-level goalkeeper. This season, Martínez has been below par while saving his worst errors for the worst moments, but his performances overall - while relatively bad - have not been so abysmal as to suggest that he is beyond salvation.

The graph above at least offers one data point that could be taken to imply that he has some road left ahead of him at the top level - he actually performed worse, by some key metrics, in the 2021/22 season (when Villa finished 14th) than he has done this year, and then had two outstanding seasons immediately afterwards. He has dipped and peaked once more before, and that offers hope that he can do so again. There is every chance that with a summer’s break and a bit of a mental or physical reset, he will be his old self again.

But what if he isn’t? What if he isn’t quite the same player anymore, and the intimidating, almost overbearing goalkeeper of the past few years isn’t coming back? Then Villa may have to consider a move which would have felt unthinkable a year ago – and replace what had been one of their very best players. If they want to get back into the Champions League and stay there, mistakes such as those made against PSG and Manchester City simply won’t cut the mustard, and nor will the way he has performed over the course of the last nine months. The club face a very difficult decision, but the data from the past season is only pointing in one direction.