Yes! I knew I could goad you into an economics smackdown. I definitely had considered adding an asterisk to my argument to suggest maybe there is some sex-appeal value to the goal scorer that simply isn’t present in defensive saves for whatever reason. Maybe because after a defensive move, you never get to run to the corner flag, jump in their air and yell Siiiiuuuuu! Or rather, you could, but I’m pretty sure you’d be a viral sensation for another reason.
Come to think of it, Bounou celebrated that goal he scored way more than any stop he’s ever made, likely including PK saves with hardware on the line.
And yeah, fair enough on both arguments, teams are optimizing on revenues, not wins, per se. And even if they were optimizing on wins directly, the analytics may still be imperfect on contributions to wins. But one would think in that case that with the growth of analytics, the gap would have started to narrow, all else equal. And maybe it has, I honestly haven’t followed those numbers enough to know. What I have learned by heart is the list of goalkeepers who have sold for more than 100 m €. Heck, I know the list of keepers who have sold for more than 50 m €. The former is an empty set ∅, the latter is not far from empty: Kepa, Alisson, Onana, Buffon. Somewhat unrelated to this heated 
, angry 
debate 
, but how crazy is that? That the world’s best keepers are transferring for 30 and 40 million (or if you’re Sevilla, for 20 million), while you have practically no-name transfers, say James Ward-Prowse, being transferred to West Ham for 35 m €. I dunno, maybe this is the goalkeeper in me, but I really don’t understand how the marginal difference between a baseline keeper and a great keeper is 10-20 m, while the marginal difference between a mediocre midfielder and a great midfielder is 5-10 times that.
But yeah, I’m sensitive to your counter-counter-argument, as you can see. But your argument does sound like a conspicuous $100 bill on the sidewalk for a club who were willing to pay an extra buck for an extra marginal win/return. Right? I mean, assuming keepers are systematically undervalued, any club wanting to outcompete their rivals could overbid them by a dollar, and not only would they get a leg up on their rivals, but they would also be getting improved marginal performance out of their squad. If the market is so unreflective of true value, that would be an excellent opportunity for arbitrage, n-est-ce pas?
*Hope you can see that I’m goading you again… 
