The Yashin Trophy is much better than the Ballon d'Or - and Aston Villa's Martínez is only part of the reason

The Ballon d’Or? Boring, really, when you think about it. We usually know who’s going to win, and voting has more to do with star power and the players who lifted major trophies than who the best player in the world actually is. Vinícius Junior will probably win the men’s award, and Aitana Bonmatí will surely retain the women’s. As for the Kopa Trophy? Please. Lamine Yamal’s name is already engraved on it.

No, if we’re being asked to watch awards ceremonies, we need drama. Uncertainty. Surprise winners, not foregone conclusions. That’s where the 2024 Yashin Trophy comes in – the Ballon d’Or’s answer to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. Because frankly, who knows who the best goalkeeper really is right now, or what will happen when Emiliano Martínez is in the building?

L’Equipe will award the Yashin Trophy for the fifth time on Monday evening, with Aston Villa’s irrepressible and often quite irritating goalkeeper hoping to become the first man to retain the award. For the second successive ceremony, he heads to Paris with a major international title under his belt and he may well be the favourite to take it back to Birmingham once more.

What makes this year’s award truly intriguing is the curious spread of nominees. There are the established stars of the shot-stopping world, like Mike Maignan and Gianluigi Donnarumma, another forward winner. There are young up-and-comers like Diogo Costa and Liverpool-bound Giorgi Mamardashvili. And then there are the wildcards.

Andriy Lunin, who was the back-up goalkeeper for Real Madrid and who played for most of their trophy-laden season only to be displaced by the fit-again Thibault Courtois for the Champions League final. He plainly isn’t even seen as the best goalkeeper at his club, less still in the world, and had a terrible time at Euro 2024.

Yet there the Ukrainian is, alongside South Africa’s Ronwen Williams, a 32-year-old goalkeeper who remains relatively obscure in European circles but who was nominated in part for leading Mamelodi Sundowns to the inaugural Africa Football League and who was exceptional in the most recent edition of the Africa Cup of Nations. Fans of Tottenham Hotspur may be intrigued to learn that he spent a small portion of his youth career in their academy, although he never played in England.

Making sense of the list of nominees is an interesting challenge. Some ‘keepers have evidently been included for their role in trophy wins, such as Martínez, Williams and Unai Simón. Others have been nominated largely for sheer star power, such as Donnarumma and Maignan. Without intending too much disrespect to a fine and developing goalkeeper, it isn’t all that clear what Diogo Costa has been nominated for.

It would, perhaps, be an informative exercise to ask Premier League fans which goalkeeper they see as the best in the top flight. Most would probably say Alisson, or maybe David Raya, with a few shouts for Ederson, at least if people were putting their biases to one side. But only Martínez makes the cut.

On the one hand, one can certainly argue that for all Raya’s excellence since joining Arsenal, he can’t be the best in the world if he isn’t the first choice for his country, as Simón is. On the other, few experts would argue that Raya was below Lunin in any kind of international pecking order – and Gregor Kobel gets a nod for his work with Borussia Dortmund despite having been behind Yann Sommer, who is also nominated, in the Swiss pecking order prior to the Inter Milan man’s retirement after the Euros. If Kobel wins, the Switzerland manager may be left scratching his head.

All of which leaves us with a panel of one hundred international journalists to determine who the best in the world right now is. That seems like an impossible question to answer, especially with some of the players who should be in the conversation absent from a strange and scattershot ballot sheet.

We could try to turn to the statistics, of course. Clean sheets don’t really help, and nor do total saves, because goalkeepers at less successful teams (or with less capable defences) will inevitably face more shots from easier positions. That’s where the wordy but more helpful post-shot expected goals versus goals allowed metric comes in, or PSxG/GA, if you will. You probably shouldn’t.

Mouthful though it may be, it just measures how many goals are actually scored against them versus the xG they face – in other words, a nice big positive number either indicates that they’re making saves that other goalkeepers aren’t capable of, or are getting incredibly lucky.

Martínez, apparently the best goalkeeper in the world this time last year and who perhaps still is, managed +7.8 last season, which is the timeframe that matters for this award. That is a deeply impressive number, and not only the best he has managed in any season of his career thus far, but way ahead of what he actually did when winning the award the first time around.

As strong as that number may be by the standards of ordinary goalkeepers, however, it still leaves him quite a long way behind Sommer, Simón, Donnarumma, Mamardashvili and the outright leader by this metric, Kobel, who prevented 10.5 expected goal’s worth of chances from hitting the back of the net.

In terms of sheer capacity to stop chances from going in, Kobel may, just about, have been the best goalkeeper in the world last season. Except that he wasn’t even first choice for his country. In other words, even digging into the stats doesn’t really prove much, unless it proves that Murat Yakin doesn’t know which goalkeeper to pick. Incidentally, the worst of our nominees by this method of calculation was Maignan, who actually allowed 5.8 more goals in than an average goalkeeper would have done. He has been nominated as the best in the world after the worst statistical season of his career, during which he won absolutely nothing. Make sense of that.

Of course, while that one statistic may be our best generalised measure of a goalkeeper’s fundamental shot-stopping ability, it doesn’t take into account all the other skills that are required for the role – quality of distribution, capacity to claim crosses, and so on.

In other words, we have absolutely no reasonable way of determining the best goalkeeper in the world and there really hasn’t been a clear standout over the past season, meaning that this strange list of nominees will produce a somewhat arbitrary winner. In some ways, that’s a little unsatisfactory. But on the other hand, it’s quite a lot more fun than a foregone conclusion. Just don’t let Emi Martínez do anything obscene with the trophy if he wins it this time.