For any club arriving in the Premier League, the question of how to stay there can be reduced to one word: stability.
That stability begins at the back, and at the very core of the defensive unit is the goalkeeper.
In recent years, most newly promoted sides have chosen to remove uncertainty by bringing in established names with Premier League experience.
Fulham turned to Bernd Leno in the summer of 2022, and his presence immediately authoritatively boosted their survival push.
Burnley went down a similar route more recently, signing Martin Dúbravka.
Sunderland, however, have approached their return to the top division differently.
They chose to invest in youth, paying around €10.5m for 22-year-old Robin Roefs from NEC Nijmegen.
The reaction was mixed, ranging from cautious optimism to concern about whether a young Eredivisie goalkeeper could cope with the step up.
Our Robin Roefs scout report and player analysis article examines the new Sunderland stoppers game and attempts to answer that question.
Robin Roefs Stats
Robin Roefs arrives as an unknown gamble, but as a player who has already established himself as NEC’s number one.
He made 42 appearances and registered 13 clean sheets to help the club finish in eighth place in the Eredivisie.
The radar chart above visualises Robin Roefs’ goalkeeping profile from the 2024/2025 Eredivisie season with NEC.
Each metric is expressed as a percentile value that ranks his performance against other goalkeepers in the same league and position.
All the data shown is based on percentile values; the 50th percentile represents the league median.
Robin Roefs Pizza Chart
He further raised his reputation last summer during the UEFA Under‑21 Championship, playing a big role in the Netherlands’ run to the semi-finals.
His recent call-up to the senior Dutch squad for FIFA World Cup qualifying matches only adds to the evidence that the Black Cats were right to believe that they may have one of Europe’s best young keepers at a low fee.
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