Current Best GKs in the women's game

This thread was actually inspired by some discussions that recently happened in the US boards, where people were wondering if, in the post-Solo era, USWNT can still be seen as the NT with the best GKs in the world:

Not sure about USWNT, where the discussion began, but in fact goalkeeping has historically looked to me like one of the most glaring weaknesses of the women's game and the crop of current GKs in the world-top NTs doesn't seem to stand out as really exceptional and could even be seen as a plain regression compared to players from the recent past like Solo or Angerer.

Many of them, by the way, are quite old, with no real replacement to be seen at the horizon. Let's browse through some of the top-ranked teams' #1s (apart from USA, since it's someway a discussion of its own, and people are not sure about the picking order between Naeher, Harris and Franch):
- Germany? Schult never seemed to give the same sense of confidence Angerer was offering.
- England? Bardsley is just OK, but she never seemed actually outstanding to me.
- France? Bouhaddi (everyone following women's football knows that) can save the game at any moment and completly mess up a whole match a minute after that. There were countless circumstances where a key-game was lost because of one of her blunders. The fact that, by about a decade, no-one looks enough qualified to take her place speaks volume about the general level of goalkeeping, not only in France.
- Canada? Labbé is good, although, as others in this list, she's not very young. She can make incredible saves, although she doesn't use to be really a game-changer. Anyway, one of the closest to an actual good GK in this list, from what I saw.
- Australia? Williams is another solid GK, probably well above average.
- Japan? Yamashita (if she actually won the race for a starting place) can be outstanding but at the moment she's unreliable (not Bouhaddi-like unreliable, but she can still make blunders you wouldn't expect from her): she can basically cause a PK and then go out and save it. She's still young and can get better but right now she's shaky at best. U-20 World Champion GK Stambaugh could become very good in the future.
- Brazil? Bárbara is quite good but not oustanding in my opinion.
- Sweden? Lindhal, in my opinion, is one of the most overrated GKs in the women's game and she's most often out of position.
- Netherlands? You don't even know if Van Veenendaal is currently their #1, since she doesn't start in her own club. Is Geurts better? Not sure, but you don't see a clear top-level GK here at the moment.

And with this we've covered the top 10 teams in the FIFA rankings. Do you see any name that could actually be seen as a world-beater the way Hope Solo had been? Which ones would deserve to be seen as the best ones? Which ones are merely decent instead?
We could look lower than the top 10 teams, since there are NTs that can have good GKs even if their somehow second-string teams at the moment (Poland's Kiedrzynek, Austria's Zinsberger or Chile's Endler come to mind), but I am not sure if the picture is changing much by adding those.

I hope I haven't bored anyone with the creation of this little thread: in my opinion the current level of goalkeeping in the women's football is an important and interesting point of discussion, not only to decide who's the best but in itself also.

But if no-one is interested to add their two cents, this thread will disappear as quickly as it's been created.

 

These are good names that I had in fact overlooked! I would like to add them to the poll, but it looks like, although I am the one who created the thread, I am not allowed to change the poll anymore: anyone knows if it's possible? Should I ask some moderator?

By the way, I am not even sure if this poll is an appreciated feature or about who really wants to browse through those names and vote, but it seemed a good thing to me to have it. There is no expiration date, so everyone is allowed to vote for his/her favorite, even months from now. I was not sure about allowing people to change their vote, but I decided against, at least in the first time; should this thread become popular, we could probably post another poll later to allow people to change their minds.
(Oh, since I see that someone has cast a single vote, I remind everyone that you are allowed to cast three votes, thus choosing your top three from this boatload of names, that I admit could be quite intimidating had people be supposed to only vote for one).

About Zhao Lina, I am actually not sure if you want to vote for the best GK or the prettiest one... (In that case, I admit she could easily be top 3, along with Christiane Endler).

Ingrid Hjelmseth is indeed probably one of the best GKs around these days! If I had forgotten her, it's probably because, since she's 38, I was inconsciously putting her in the previous generation already, although she showed in the recent qualifier vs Netherlands that she's still able to make outstanding saves and to be a deciding factor in a game.
Since I don't think she'll have many other seasons in her after WWC (and possibly Olympics), though, she somehow reinforces my impression that the best GKs in the women's game actually seem to belong to the previous generation. When the current crop of over-30 will retire, what will remain to us to choose from?

 

Well, since it's me who made that poll (and the whole thread), I guess we can quite safely say that I am not a "recency bias" kind of guy! An admittendly outstanding performance in a single name is not enough to me to call "best in the world": it is possible that Bailey soon becomes one of the "big names" of this game, and maybe, in the next days, we're going to see Panama ride her performances to an actual World Cup qualification, but at the moment it seemed too early to me to have her in this conversation (although I much respect @FanOfFutbol's opinion that she's one of the best set up young GKs around and that she's got a lot of potential).

Also consider that, since the CONCACAF's games were mostly in the night for me in Europe, I haven't actually seen Bailey's performance yet, apart from an one-minute-long highlights-video (and I had already complained about that on the CONCACAF qualifier thread).

Anyway, Bailey and others are currently covered in the poll at the voice: "Another GK".

 

I hope I'll somehow manage to add Zhao Lina and Hjelmseth to the poll. If someone can address me to a moderator who could help me to add a pair additional names to the poll, I'd be grateful.

 

No need to having seen them all to cast a vote. I don't have a solid grasp of everyone of them either.

But I guess if everyone here would cast a vote based on his/her personal knowledge, we'd get some meaningful results anyway (at max there could be some overlooked names that no-one really knows enough, but we'd anyway get a rough idea of respective levels of various GKs). So, please, cast your votes anyway.

 

I am trying to contact a moderator to have Zhao Lina added to the poll and votable.

By the way, since I am at that and I am not sure that I had everything right (it's one of the first times that I open a poll here on BigSoccer), please tell me, guys: can everyone see the current votes that have been cast or you can only see your own vote? I really hope everyone can see all of the votes: if not, please PM and I'll try to correct that also.

At the moment Lydia Williams is ahead of everyone else with 7 votes.

 

Well, is she still considered somehow active? What I wanted to do with this thread was making a chart of "current" best GKs, not some sort of historical "hall of fame".

I could be wrong, but it looks to me that Solo should be considered retired. Or can she come back somehow?

Anyway, I guess everyone would agree that, if still playing, Hope Solo would be above the whole pool, but this is actually not the point of this thread.

 

Very interesting. I am indeed interested in an elebaoration about the names that weren't included in your chart.

Also, don't take it as an offense please, but isn't your chart a little US-centric? I do get that US soccer is probably the one you know best, but I sometimes get the feeling that some American-based GKs that aren't very well-known internationally are preferred in your list to other GKs from other parts of the world. Mind, you could be absolutely right: those GK could be much better than everyone of us outside USA could know...

 

I agree that I saw countless times European teams recur to US GKs, even relatively unknown ones, and usually being happy about the result. I am not completely sure that the gap is so wide between US GKs in general and the real high-end crop from the rest of the world, but I agree that the quality drops down quite fast as soon as you look at mid-table teams in non-US countries. In general, as I pointed out at the beginning of this thread (and you did too!), I don't see Solo-level GKs around these days, and this reinforces my notion that rest of the world could be closer than you're representing it: but I highly respect your competence and it's very likely that you're right in your analysis.

There is not much that I see missing from your chart, actually. I just wonder about the following ones:

- Christiane Endler: I can't say that I actually saw her play a lot of matches, but in the few I saw her play, since youth level, she looked quite impressive to me. Of course, playing for a quite marginal NT as Chile doesn't help her, but if her team qualified for WWC 2019 it's also due to her effort;

- Manuela Zinsberger: she was really outstanding for Austria at Euro 2017; she didn't follow up with an equally strong 2018 season, but she's anyway Bayern München's starter and maybe she can squeeze in somewhere at least in a top 50 chart;

- Ingrid Hjelmseth: you mentioned some Norwegian GKs, but she's the mama of them all and, at age 38, she stopped Netherlands FWs in their tracks to carry her NT to the WWC!

- Bárbara: nothing to write home about, but probably a decent GK, that I'd expect to appear somewhere in top 50.

I'd probably also mention Hannah Stambaugh in the Under-24 category: it's true that she didn't have much to do for most of U-20 WWC in France, but the day of the final she deserved the main stage with some very impressive saves that greatly contributed to Japan's title. Ok, she wasn't even Golden Glove of the tournament (England's Maciver was instead), but I can actually see a bright future for Stambaugh.

Also, since you have basically Canadian NT picking order reversed (correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that these days Labbé is starting over McLeod) could you explain what makes you think that McLeod is currently #1 in the world? Do you think that, apart from injuries stopping her back and forth, she keeps being Canadian #1?

Edit: I just realized that you made your chart in June, when U-20 WWC was far from being played and most of the WWC qualifiers I was referring to were still underway! Sorry for that, it's obvious that you couldn't consider performances that hadn't even happened at the time when you made the list. The fact that your list was referring to "2018" and that we're approaching the end of the year blinded me about the fact that you were only considering the first half of 2018!

 

Thank you, very interesting analysis. Of course, it helps a lot when you can see a GK play in a match in real life, at the stadium, especially if you sit just behind her goal. But in general, even if you happen to sit in the standings at the middle of the pitch, you can gather a lot of invaluable info that's almost entirely unavailable when you just see the matches on TV.

I had the chance to see a very little number of these GKs in real matches at the stadium (Bouhaddi, Schult, Stambaugh... I even watched Solo, once, at Algarve 2012); I watched most of them on TV (or streaming) only. Some of them, I even admit to have watched them just in highlights, not even full matches!!! (Although they're very few: in general I watched at least a little number of full matches from almost everyone of the GKs I mentioned in this thread).
About your top 50, I'll admit that I wasn't even aware of the existence of some of them, so you surely have so much more info available, both for number of GKs that you had under your eye and for the number of matches you saw (directly or through TV/PC).

So, even from just a statistical point of view, it's very likely that you have most of your assessments right and I thank you very much for the insight you added to this thread.

By the way, did you bother voting in the poll at the beginning of it? It would be precious to have your top three, even if you'd end having to click on "Another GK, not included in the poll"! (By the way: it was not my intention to close the poll after just one month, but apparently I did something wrong when I created it and the mods told me there was actually no easy way to change it, unless I wanted to open another thread).