Erling Haaland bagging two goals on his Premier League debut; Aleksandar Mitrovic bullying Liverpool in his return to the English top flight; Lionel Messi scoring an overhead kick in the first game of the Ligue 1 season.
It’s hard to believe the 2022-23 season has already kicked off. It feels like just yesterday that Manchester City won the Premier League on the final matchday of the season, and Real Madrid, Eintracht Frankfurt and AS Roma clinched some historic European silverware.
Now it’s time to do it all again: to watch new teams write history, new players make a name for themselves and new stories come to life. To celebrate the start of a new European football season, I’ve compiled a list of some of my goalkeeper predictions for the 2022-23 season — but with a twist. Instead of going the safe route, I’ve added a little bit of spice to my predictions. From a star goalkeeper losing his starting position to a World Cup record getting broken, here are some of my boldest goalkeeper takes for the new season.
The prediction: After a short loan spell at Galatasaray, Inaki Pena is back with Barcelona, replacing Neto as the club’s backup goalkeeper. But the promotions won’t stop there for Pena. I predict that by the end of the 2022-23 season, Pena will have supplanted long-time starter Marc-Andre ter Stegen as the club’s No. 1.
Why it’ll come true: There was a point in time when Marc-Andre ter Stegen was undisputed as one of the world’s top goalkeepers. But since his career season in 2017-18, the German’s performances have dipped. His league save percentage has dropped each season since his Barcelona career high of 79.7% in 2018, down to 70.9% last season; he’s failed to keep more than 11 league clean sheets in each of his past two seasons; and his expected league goals saved…
Source : espn
