Golden Glove winner Raya's incredible rise to the top

With David Raya's move to Arsenal having been made permanent, Ben Bloom explains how the 2023/24 Golden Glove award winner has not had an easy journey to the top.

Player analysis: David Raya (Arsenal)

Each part of Raya’s body provides a chapter in the story of a remarkable journey from futsal-playing teenager to Premier League runner-up and Golden Glove winner.

Most famous are the Spaniard’s giant hands, which are so crucial to his exceptional shot-stopping and now have their own mural on a north London wall near Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

There are his ball-playing feet, with Raya's distribution once prompting former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp to suggest the goalkeeper could “wear the No 10 shirt”.

His legs provide the phenomenal spring to counteract his relatively short stature that some coaches believed would prevent him from reaching the top of the goalkeeping world.

Raya's reconstructed nose serves as a permanent testament to his unwavering resilience after suffering a horrific facial injury early in his career.

Then there is his rapid-firing brain, programmed to foresee events almost before they happen and the catalyst behind Arsenal’s dangerous high-speed attacks from the back in 2023/24.

Together they have combined to defy the odds in creating one of the world’s best goalkeepers, whose 16 Premier League clean sheets last season were unrivalled.

As Raya, 28, told the Guardian last year: “My story isn’t the typical footballer’s story”.

It all began with those fast-moving feet, honed on a futsal pitch located minutes from his childhood home in Palleja, a small village just outside Barcelona.

A young Raya originally dreamed of playing outfield, and his technical football skills quickly developed in regular matches alongside friends and his older brother, Oscar.

It was Oscar who unwittingly sowed the seeds for Raya’s future career, ordering his younger brother to go in goal, where he quickly excelled and was scouted by third-tier club Cornella when he was nine.

Yet he was not even a starter in Cornella’s youth team when, aged 15, he formed part of a group invited for a trial at Blackburn Rovers, who had a player talent agreement with the Spanish club.

Afterwards, Raya was the only one invited to return to England's north west, having overcome the immediate hurdle of one coach instantly deciding the Spanish youngster would never make the grade due to his height.

“The coach said he was never going to be 6ft,” Andres Manzano, Cornella’s general director told the Telegraph. “But I told him, ‘Why are you taking his size from his head? Take his size from his hands.’”

The presence of such large hands on a player so young prompted a change of heart that would lead to Raya plying his trade in England ever since.

And the Spaniard would go on to prove the coach doubly wrong.

Among elite goalkeepers, Raya remains one of the shortest, but he did eventually reach exactly 6ft tall.

Difficulty settling in England

He has admitted those early years alone in a foreign country were “very, very tough”.

Raya told The Times: “You miss your friends, your family, your routine. I didn’t speak English, zero, and I missed my mum’s food.

“My mum and dad used to come over every month and they brought my favourite things. They brought jamon, like Spanish ham, all chopped up, and Choco Flakes, because it was my favourite cereal.”

After quickly impressing in Blackburn’s academy ranks, he was promoted to first-team training and soon sent on loan to then fifth-tier Conference Premier side Southport for his first taste of match action.

Raya made 24 appearances for the club in the 2014/15 season, where he caught the eye with his ball-playing prowess and age-defying commanding presence, almost helping to knock Championship side Derby County out of the FA Cup third round with a string of saves.

It was also a time of significant personal development off the pitch.

“Those three months at Southport were among the best of my career because they taught me so much,” he told the Guardian.

“It was like a taste of the real world. We trained at the local university and you took your kit home to wash, came with your bag, towel.

“I was used to that, I’d lived alone since I was 15, but it grounds you, teaches you not to take things for granted.

“There were players for whom the win bonus could be the difference between making it to the end of the month or not, having a bit of money for their kids or paying the water, the gas, electricity, mortgage.”

Raya made his Blackburn debut that same season, but it was not until the 2017/18 campaign, after the club had been relegated to League One, that he established himself as first-choice goalkeeper.

Recovering from facial injury

Early the following season he suffered the injury that would leave a lasting physical mark.

Late on in a game against West Bromwich Albion, Raya dived to gather the ball and his face connected with Jay Rodriguez’s boot.

The result was a gruesome broken nose that left his team-mates visibly shaken.

Despite receiving oxygen on the pitch and being rushed to hospital for stitches, Raya courageously delayed the necessary reconstruction surgery until the end of the season so as not to miss many weeks of recovery.

Months later, in February 2019, Raya conceded five goals in a heavy defeat at Brentford.

It was not the obvious performance to impress potential suitors, but his speed of thought and abundant confidence was enough to convince the Bees to sign him at the end of the season.

International honours

Having helped Brentford secure promotion to the Premier League at the second attempt, Raya then received his first international call-up for Spain in early 2022, just 15 appearances into his top-flight career.

That selection prompted widespread bemusement in his native country, but Raya brushed it off as “normal that lots of people know nothing about me” having not played a match in Spain for almost a decade.

When Mikel Arteta decided to sign Raya on loan at the start of last season, there were sceptics aplenty questioning why the Arsenal manager would seek to replace Aaron Ramsdale, the goalkeeper named in the PFA Premier League Team of the Year only months earlier.

But after earning a starting spot in mid-September, Raya was ever-present outside of the two matches against his parent club Brentford, for which he was ineligible.

Despite making only 32 appearances, his 16 clean sheets were three more than his nearest challenger, Everton's Jordan Pickford, and the Premier League Golden Glove was secured with two matches to spare.

Those two goalkeepers faced off on the final day of the season when Arsenal beat Everton, but the Gunners were pipped to the title by Manchester City, who denied Arteta’s team what would have been a first league triumph in 20 years.

Raya’s role was pivotal throughout the campaign, employing all of his best attributes in launching countless Arsenal attacking moves, as well as putting those disproportionately large hands to use by collecting a higher percentage of crosses (12.9 per cent) than any other Premier League goalkeeper.

Arsenal exercised their option to sign Raya permanently on Thursday, but he has already achieved so much more than he might ever have dreamed when he initially boarded the plane to Blackburn as a teenager.

“It’s the story of a boy who leaves his country at 16, alone, and fulfils his dreams,” he told the Guardian.

“Who ends up playing for his national team, in the Champions League, and for one of the biggest clubs in the Premier League and the world.”