and made the 23-year-old Spaniard the  most expensive goalkeeper of all time.

But four seasons later Kepa is  only Chelsea’s second choice.  

He has started just eight Premier  League games in two years and,  

with a high wage and a damaged reptutation, he  has become one of the game’s white elephants.

So, what happened?

That transfer fee is an  important factor in this story,  

so it’s important to understand  why Chelsea ended up paying it.

In 2018, their relationship with long-term  goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois had begun to fracture.  

The Belgian had long desired a move  to Madrid, where his children from a  

prior relationship lived, and where  he had first made his name on-loan.  

Following the 2018 World Cup, he was entering  the final year of contract – and, unfortunately,  

he began it by reporting back  late for pre-season training  

and with his agent briefing that he was  desperate to leave Chelsea for Real Madrid.

He would get his move and it would leave Chelsea  

urgently needing a new goalkeeper  – an in a market with few options.

They’d land on Kepa and just three  days ahead of the new season,  

agreed to activate the release  clause in his contract.

The fee was startling. Kepa also had only two  full top-flight seasons to his name by 2018  

and had only recently made his  senior international debut.

It would be the first of many problems:  

Kepa likely wasn’t quite ready to cope with  being associated with such a large fee,  

less to shoulder that burden at a very visible  club where, since 2004, incredibly reliable  

goalkeeping – through Courtois, but also  Petr Cech before him – had been the standard.

But he still suited the  project at Stamford Bridge.  

Maurizio Sarri had just been appointed as  their head-coach and his new goalkeeper was  

known for his eye-catching reflexes but,  more importantly, his abilities with his  

feet and his excellent distribution. So, he was  expensive, but theoretically perfect for Sarri.

In practice, not so much – although the issues  only began quietly at first. Kepa’s first season  

at Chelsea ended with a third-place Premier  League finish and a Europa League winner’s medal.  

Aside from two humiliating defeats at  Manchester City and Bournemouth and a strange,  

public disagreement with Sarri at the end of the  Carabao Cup final, Kepa’s year was unremarkable.

An unwelcome trend had begun though. Kepa had  a save percentage of 67.5% in the league that  

season, good enough only for the 39th percentile.  A greater concern showed in the finer detail.  

Post-Shot Expected Goals minus Goals Allowed  is a metric which measures how likely,  

on average, a goalkeeper is to save a shot on  goal and, in that first season, Kepa’s PSxG-GA  

was already negative. Arsenal’s Petr Cech  managed a +0.32, the highest in the country,  

and Kepa fell below average, at -0.05.

Some of the goals he conceded also had  a familiar and troubling aesthetic:  

headers scored by Dele Alli at Wembley and Paul  Pogba at Stamford Bridge, also a low drive from  

Henrikh Mkhitaryan and a similar effort by Ilkay  Gundogan. Shots seemed to go through Kepa too  

often; like there was something wrong with his  weight distribution or – more likely his timing.

In an article written for  The Athletic in August 2020,  

Dom Fifield and Liam Twomey made reference to  a technical issue with Kepa’s shot-stopping,  

observing his habit of swinging his arms back  behind his body before springing to make a save.  

It may help to generate momentum, they reasoned,  but at the cost of crucial split-seconds.

Former goalkeeper Richard Lee was also  quoted in the article, saying that:

“There’s an argument that you can have a  slightly bigger arm swing when the shot is  

from further out, but the closer it is, there’s  always going to be a slight lack of coordination.  

There have been a couple of times,  with headers or shots close in,  

that he’s still doing quite a big arm swing, and  then to execute the save is quite difficult.”

If 2018-19 had had its difficult moments for  Kepa, 2019-20 would be an outright disaster.  

His PSxG-GA would fall further, down  to -0.29 and the 9th percentile,  

and he would also lose his place on more than  one occasion to understudy Willy Caballero,  

most notably in the FA Cup, where Chelsea  would reach the final before losing to Arsenal.

There were certainly lowlights. Two ugly goals  conceded at Goodison Park, a fatal reticence to  

leave his line against Valencia, and more trouble  at corners in a loss to West Ham. If the arms-wing  

was one of his hallmarks, then a failure to  be aggressive or commanding was unfortunately  

another. At just 1.86m Kepa wasn’t tall for  a Premier League goalkeeper. Courtois, his  

predecessor, is 2m in height, Manchester United’s  David De Gea is 1.92m and Liverpool’s Alisson is  

1.91m. Whether height was a contributing factor  or not, Kepa certainly seemed timid at times.

Again, though, context is important – across  both seasons. Maurizio Sarri spent his year  

in London engaged in a culture war with  the club’s fans and unable to truly impose  

his style. His successor, Frank Lampard, had a  reign blighted by terrible defensive problems.  

They were vulnerable to the counter-attack  and dreadful at defending set-pieces.  

During that 2019-20 season, Chelsea conceded  goals from 8.2% of the corners they faced,  

almost double that of any side in the division.

Was Kepa to blame for that or was he  a victim of it? Likely both. He was a  

flawed and increasingly fragile goalkeeper who  suffered to much scrutiny and made mistakes,  

but who also wasn’t adequately protected by the  players or system ahead of him. That represents a  

failing on his part, of course, but also those who  coached him, who were unable to remedy his issues.

Either way, when Chelsea signed Edouard Mendy  in September 2020, it was no coincidence that  

they had identified a more physically dominant  and commanding goalkeeper to take Kepa’s place,  

or that the stability Mendy offers  has made him virtually immovable.

What next for Kepa? The damage to his  reputation and confidence has made a  

move to a similar-sized club unlikely, and  his reported £155,000/week wage puts him  

out of reach for a lot of clubs with whom he might  rebuild his career and realise his obvious talent.