Who is Antonin Kinsky and can he solve Spurs' goalkeeping problems?

With Antonin Kinsky eligible to make his Tottenham Hotspur debut tonight in the EFL Cup semi-final first leg against Liverpool, Ali Tweedale of Opta Analyst takes a closer look at how the 21-year-old goalkeeper is positioned to help solve their goalkeeping issues. 

Six months is a long time in football.

In the summer of 2024, Antonin Kinsky was set to leave Slavia Prague on loan to Slovan Liberec. It was going to be his fourth consecutive season out on loan.

The 21-year-old did not like the prospect of remaining at his parent club to play second fiddle to Czech Republic international Jindrich Stanek.

Having just had a successful season fighting relegation with Pardubice further down the Czech First League, he wanted more first-team football.

But then Stanek suffered a serious shoulder injury playing at UEFA Euro 2024, and Slavia Prague decided to keep Kinsky on. Half a year later, he is the great hope for Tottenham Hotspur fans looking for a solution to their goalkeeping crisis, having completed a move worth a reported £12.5 million this week and eligible to make his debut tonight in the EFL Cup semi-final first leg as Spurs host Liverpool. 

But that might be jumping the gun a little. Kinsky only made his top-flight debut in July 2023and moves to Spurs with just 37 top-tier appearances to his name – all in the Czech First League.

He has made 10 appearances in Europe this season – four in Champions League qualifiers and six in the Europa League group stage – but the Premier League still represents a big step up for a player who would be playing for a mid-table Czech side were it not for that sliding doors moment at Euro 2024.

But he comes with bags of potential, and his half-season as Slavia Prague’s No 1 as well as the previous campaign at Pardubice have convinced Spurs to make their move.

Reports from his home country suggest Kinsky is so confident and ambitious that he will back himself to make an impact on the first team before long.

So, what will he bring to north London? And can he really solve Spurs' goalkeeper crisis?

First of all – and most crucially, obviously – Kinsky is an excellent shot-stopper. In 19 Czech league matches this season, he conceded only seven goals at a rate 0.37 per game, keeping 12 clean sheets and saving 83.3 per cent of the shots on target he faced.

He ranks first in all three metrics among every goalkeeper in Europe’s top 10 domestic leagues in 2024/25 (the Czech First League is Europe's ninth-best league according to UEFA’s coefficient system, sandwiched between the Belgian and Turkish top flights).

We can get a better idea of his shot-stopping ability by taking into account the quality of the shots on target he has faced using our Expected Goals on Target (xGOT) metric, which tells us how likely a shot is to end in a goal based on the Expected Goals (xG) of the chance and the end location in the net.

Shots headed for the corners of the goal (which are harder to save) are therefore given a higher score.

The total xGOT that a goalkeeper faces can tell us the number of goals the average goalkeeper would concede from those shots on target.

Compare that to the number of goals a goalkeeper actually concedes (excluding own goals) and we can calculate how many goals they have prevented with their saves.

In the Czech First League this season, Kinsky ranks second for goals prevented, with 4.9, suggesting that without his shot-stopping ability, Slavia Prague would have conceded around five more goals than they did.

However, playing for a team as dominant as Slavia Prague – they are seven points clear at the top of the league, averaging more possession (61.4 per cent) than every other team and having faced at least 79 fewer shots (136) than any every team – naturally means he is tested less. What’s more, the average quality of the chances Slavia Prague concede is lower than every other team, at 0.06 xG per shot.

He certainly won’t have that luxury playing for Ange Postecoglou’s defensively leaky Spurs.

Only four teams have allowed their opponents shots worth more xG in the Premier League this season than Spurs' 34.3, with each shot they have faced worth, on average, 0.14 xG. In other words, each chance Spurs concede is more than twice as good in quality as those conceded by Slavia Prague.

But Kinsky also has experience playing for a less dominant side.

At Pardubice in 2023/24, he ranked fourth in the Czech top flight for goals prevented (2.2) and second for save percentage (78.9 per cent) playing for a team that ended up narrowly avoiding relegation. Each shot they conceded that season was worth 0.11 xG, and Kinsky still maintained one of the best save success rates in the league.

At that level, he has excelled when it comes to keeping the ball out of his net, so it will be interesting to see how he fares when up against better-quality finishers in the Premier League.

There’s much more to his game that Spurs will have looked at, though, and it’s no surprise given how Postecoglou wants his team to play that he has chosen a goalkeeper who is exceptional with the ball at his feet.

The inadequacies of their current back-up goalkeeper, Fraser Forster, with his feet have been exposed since Guglielmo Vicario broke his ankle, while third-choice keeper Brandon Austin simply chose to go long rather than play out from the back on his Spurs debut against Newcastle United at the weekend.

Kinksy, though, is very comfortable on the ball. Only six goalkeepers have made more passes than his 645 in the Czech league this season, but his 81.1 per cent passing accuracy is higher than any of those players. In Europa League matches, meanwhile, his passing accuracy of 83.9 per cent is the highest of any goalkeeper to make five or more appearances.

He is happy to take his goal-kicks short – something Postecoglou insists upon – with only one other Czech First League goalkeeper having taken more goal-kicks which end inside their own penalty area this season than Kinsky (35).

His confidence and competence on the ball means he is happy to leave his penalty area – something that will be particularly important playing behind Postecoglou’s high line.

Among goalkeepers, Kinsky has had the highest proportion of his touches outside his own box in both the Europa League (37.9 per cent) and the Czech First League (32.6 per cent) this season.

One area of concern for Spurs fans, however, may be corner kicks – where Vicario has struggled more or less ever since coming to England.

In general, Kinsky is happy to come for crosses and is often successful when he does so. He has made the most catches of any goalkeeper in the Czech top flight this season, with 48.

But the season before, while at Pardubice, Kinsky conceded a disproportionately high number of goals from corners, glued to his line all too often as the ball came into the box.

Despite playing just 18 of a possible 30 matches in the regular Czech league season, only three goalkeepers conceded more goals from corners than his six. That made up 32 per cent of all the 19 goals he conceded that season – the highest proportion of every goalkeeper in the division.

Defending corners is obviously a team effort, and those goals won’t all be entirely his fault. He may even argue that none of them were, particularly given he only let in one goal from a corner with Slavia Prague this season before his move to Spurs.

But given Spurs' problems from corners and the fact some opponents crowd their six-yard box to make life as difficult as possible for Vicario, that might be an area that Kinsky needs to work on.

Early on in particular, he’ll need to show as much confidence as possible underneath crosses in order to persuade teams this isn't a weakness to his game that they should go after.

He is clearly a hugely talented player, as well as a great prospect for Spurs to have on their books. It’s certainly reasonable to expect that he can at some stage challenge for Vicario’s No 1 jersey.

But Spurs are in dire need right now. They were forced to field Austin last weekend with Vicario injured and Forster ill. And, if we’re honest, even if he had been available, Forster hasn’t been entirely convincing of late.

Austin acquitted himself well enough in tough circumstances, making a couple of decent saves and pleasing the home crowd by cleanly claiming a couple of crosses when under pressure, but his lack of ability with the ball at his feet is a massive problem for Postecoglou’s football.

They can’t play out from the back with him in goal, and give up possession time and again by going long. If Kinsky is deemed ready, he will give Spurs a huge boost on that front.

Putting him straight into the first team would be an enormous risk for Postecoglou. It's hard to think of any big Premier League club signing an unproven goalkeeper and throwing them straight into action, partly because it's such a pressured position that doing so requires a very strong mindset as well as ability.

But Spurs could really do with him now, so could playing him be a risk worth taking? We may well soon find out.

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