Robert Sánchez had another nightmare against Fulham - but the stats suggest that he might make up for all the mistakes.
The new season may have brought a new manager and a renewed sense of optimism to Stamford Bridge, but one thing that hasn’t changed since Chelsea last played a competitive match is their goalkeeper and the mistakes which seem to follow him around the Premier League.
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Robert Sánchez made yet another blunder – two of them, in fact - during Monday evening’s 3-2 win over Fulham. It was a pair of entirely characteristic errors of the kind which has kept the eyes of Chelsea supporters rolling in their sockets for the past three years.
On Sky Sports, Gary Neville opined that Sánchez’s mistakes could “undermine everything Chelsea do” and quite a few of their fans might agree with that assessment. Nevertheless, it looks unlikely that the Spaniard is replaced before transfer deadline day, with the club seemingly content to fly in the face of public opinion by keeping him on as their number one.
Are they right to keep faith with Sánchez, or is Neville right to suggest that his continued presence will hinder their progress under Xabi Alonso? We took a deep dive into the stats to figure it out…
Chelsea’s Robert Sánchez made yet more mistakes – but is the criticism totally fair?
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You generally don’t have to wait all that long for Sánchez to make a mistake worthy of criticism, and he’s up to two already just 90 minutes into the new Premier League season. Whenever he pulls on the gloves, exasperation seems to follow close behind.
His positioning for Fulham’s first-half equaliser was remarkably poor, and most top-flight goalkeepers would never have allowed Joshua King’s relatively tame shot to squirt inside their near post. Many would also have contrived to push Timothy Castagne’s strike away from danger rather than straight into the path of Gonzalo García, an error which allowed the home side back into the game and which teed up a nervy finish.
Chelsea got over the line and Sánchez’s mistakes went unpunished, but three points weren’t enough to shield him from criticism. Neville’s comments on Sky Sports likely captured the mood of plenty of the club’s supporters.
"For the first time in a while I really like the spine of Chelsea’s team," the former England full-back said. “Chelsea were in a really good shape… Xabi Alonso will be thinking, 'how have we conceded from here?'
“[Sánchez] will undermine everything Chelsea do. It’s a problem for Chelsea and I don’t know if Emi Martínez is available, but they need someone like that.”
Leaving the off-the-cuff comment about Aston Villa’s Martínez aside, Neville is only begging the same question that plenty of other pundits have been asking for a while now: Can’t Chelsea do better?
It’s perhaps an ongoing curiosity that a club who have been so trigger happy with transfers under the current ownership have made no serious attempt to move on from Sánchez. It implies that some people in positions of influence at Stamford Bridge remain positive about the former Brighton goalkeeper, and believe that he’s a better choice than a potential replacement in spite of the litany of high-profile errors.
It would not necessarily be such a wild position to take – it’s surely possible, after all, for a goalkeeper to do enough good, to make enough saves and handle enough difficult situations, to balance out a propensity towards comedic mistakes. Sánchez would need to do an awful lot right to make up for all his clangers, but it’s certainly possible. And the stats actually make the argument that he does.
The stats which suggest Sánchez isn’t as bad as some pundits think
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While Sánchez has been responsible for some god-awful errors since he made the move to Stamford Bridge back in 2023, he’s also been among the better goalkeepers in the division in terms of his ability to prevent goals, at least according to the raw data.
Last season, for instance, Sánchez was credited with 1.7 prevented goals based on the xG model – in other words, the average Premier League goalkeeper would most likely have conceded a couple more based on the quality of the chances they faced. That may not sound like a massive amount, but only five players in the top flight did better in the 2025/26 season. The year before, only three outperformed him on that particular metric.
It’s only one data point, but it’s also one of the most important. The simple fact is that Sánchez makes enough high-difficulty saves that he statistically makes amends for his mistakes – and then some. The numbers don’t necessarily mark him out as a truly world-class shot-stopper, but he’s better than most even when all the ricks are taken into account.
He’ll have to come back from a pretty poor start to keep that statistical record up this time around, admittedly – so bad were his mistakes, that the xG model puts him down as having shipped 0.86 goals more than he ‘should’ have in the Fulham game alone. The stats don’t make apologies for his errors, but they do imply that the good may outweigh the bad.
There’s more to goalkeeping than simple shot stopping, of course, and Sánchez is generally in the top half of the table when you look at the rest of the numbers – he’s one of the league’s best when it comes to claiming high balls, for instance. The accuracy of his long-distance distribution is the only core statistic in which he falls below the league average.
It’s worth noting that none of the data suggests that Sánchez is the best of the best – just better than most. He was, for instance, behind Gianluigi Donnarumma is almost every important area last season. Chelsea can do better. But perhaps not as much better as some pundits might assume.
Sánchez might have undermined Chelsea on Monday night, but he most likely helps them more than he hinders them over the course of an entire season. The questions is whether their fans – and new manager – can tolerate the costly blunders and be patient with all the unconscionable howlers. As he proved once more, they’re part and parcel of the Robert Sánchez experience.
An apt comparison for Sánchez might perhaps be Nicolas Jackson – a striker who scored a healthy number of goals for Chelsea and was more productive than most Premier League forwards, but whose bad misses and frustrating performances created the perception of a player who was less effective than he actually was.
Admittedly, nobody has ever suggested that Jackson was the best of the best. Sánchez isn’t, either. Chelsea could do better – but if things go south for them yet again this season, it’s unlikely that the Spaniard will be the reason. Not on his own, at least...