Stefan Ortega Joins Forest

From 3rd Choice at Man City, to 1st Choice at The City Ground? What does the data say?

An injury to Matz Sels coupled with Sean Dyche’s willingness to stick with John Victor earlier in the season, has opened the door to an earlier-than-expected debut for Stefan Ortega. He’ll likely be thrown straight into the starting lineup at Elland Road on Friday night.

Ortega has lacked consistent first team football, understandably when your team mates in goal include Ederson & Gianluigi Donnarumma, but he has made 56 appearances for Man City since joining on a free transfer in 2022, including 25 in the Premier League that we’ll be focussing on here.

Command of Area

One of the reasons I feel Dyche isn’t completely sold on Sels as his first choice, is his clear weakness to command his box. He looks reluctant to come out and claim or punch crosses, and doesn’t look too confident when doing so. You can use publicly available data like ‘Claims per 90’, but this doesn’t give a fair comparison on keepers from different teams - for example up until last week Man City had faced 314 crosses, whereas Forest had faced over 100 more.

So I got a little creative. I defined a ‘Catchable Cross’ as one that at any time goes into the Six Yard Box (in the air or in the ground, regardless of it’s end location). The majority of goalkeeper Claims & Punches happen in this are anyway. This will tell us how many ‘Catchable Crosses’ a goalkeeper has come into their box, and in my view gives us a much fairer way to compare.