Barcelona goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen aspires to continue his brilliance this season in the Spanish League and achieve more records.
Stegen kept clean sheets in 25 out of 34 matches he played in the league, thus ensuring that he won the Zamora Award, which is awarded annually for the best goalkeeper in La Liga, for the first time since joining Barcelona in the summer of 2014.
And the Spanish newspaper “Sport” stated that Stegen set his eyes on another achievement, and he will start chasing him during the remaining matches of the Catalan club.
The German goalkeeper seeks to surpass the number of his counterpart, Paco Liano, former goalkeeper of Deportivo La Coruña, which he achieved in the 1993-1994 season.
In that season, the Deportivo goalkeeper came out of 26 matches with a clean sheet, which means that Stegen now needs to protect his goal in 2 matches out of the remaining 4, to surpass what Liano did.
Super Stegen 🔥🔝🧤#LaLigaSantander #ElClásico pic.twitter.com/wcVkGNO880
– LaLiga (@LaLigaArab) March 15, 2023
Liano played 38 matches at the time, which is a total of 3420 minutes, and the number has still stood for 29 years, but he is now under the threat of Stegen.
For this reason, Ter Stegen may participate in two of the remaining four matches (Real Sociedad, Valladolid, Real Mallorca, Celta Vigo), and this will not be in favor of Iñaki Peña, Barcelona’s second goalkeeper, according to Sport.
At the same time, Stegen wants to be the best goalkeeper to win the Zamora Award in terms of the best rate of conceding goals.
Stegen scored 13 goals in 34 games, the last of which was two from Espanyol in Barcelona’s last match, as the German seemed angry about this, especially from the second goal that came in the last minute.
The Slovenian Jan Oblak, the goalkeeper of Atletico Madrid, along with Liano, is considered the two best goalkeepers in the history of the Spanish League, who won the award with the best goal reception rate.
Liano did this in the 1993-1994 season, and Oblak repeated that in the 2015-2016 season, with an average of 0.47 goals per game, and it is remarkable that the two goalkeepers at that time did not help their teams win the league.
😎 Clean Stegen#LaLigaHighlights pic.twitter.com/5t1uEFBnv0
– FC Barcelona (@fcbarcelona_ara) February 10, 2023
Given Stegen’s current numbers, he conceded approximately 0.38 goals per game, which is close to becoming the best goalkeeper ever to win the “Zamora” award.
Stegen is considered one of the elements that contributed strongly to Barcelona’s recovery of the La Liga title for the current season 2022-2023, which is the 27th in the club’s history and the first since the 2018-2019 season.
The newspaper “Sport” describes Stegen as a player with a huge amount of competition, and mentioned that he did not accept playing the role of the second man when he guarded Barcelona in the King’s Cup and the European Champions League in the 2014-2015 season, while the Chilean Claudio Bravo was the first goalkeeper for the Catalan club in the league.
