During St. Louis CITY SC’s inaugural campaign in 2023, goalkeeper Roman Bürki was a driving force behind the club’s success.
In Year 2, Bürki is doing his part yet again.
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While CITY’s attack is finding it challenging to finish over these first few weeks of the season, Bürki continues to stand out among the league’s best keepers, helping St. Louis salvage points amid a winless drought that stretched to five consecutive games with Saturdays’ 0-0 draw against FC Dallas. Bürki represented the bright side of this past weekend’s otherwise frustrating result, posting his second clean sheet of the season and the 10th of his MLS career.
Although clean sheets are a metric that don’t always tell the whole story—good defense requires a total team effort, after all—the sheer amount of dangerous chances faced by Bürki across his first year-plus in North America paint a portrait of a keeper under fire.
With remarkable consistency, Bürki continues to pass the test. Even so, he’d much rather celebrate a clean sheet after a win than a draw—an all too familiar result for CITY, which now has as many ties (five) in seven weeks of MLS play as it did all of last season.
“It feels good to have a clean sheet,” Bürki said Saturday. “But on the other side, we should have definitely won that game.”
Say what you will about the toothless attack in recent weeks. The defensive approach also needs to improve if CITY is to find its way back to consistently winning this season. To understand just how good Bürki has been through the first few weeks of the year, look at how he’s faring in the category of post-shot expected goals per shot on target, a stat that measures expected goals based on how likely a keeper is to stop the shot.
Bürki is facing a league-high 0.48 PSxG per shot attempt, and while CITY isn’t giving up the most opportunities in MLS, it’s becoming clear that when opposing teams break through the lines, they’re finding scoring opportunities in high-danger areas. Perhaps that’s partly due to the injuries that have hit CITY’s lineup in key spots to start the year. At the same time, the defensive structure has allowed for chances when teams are able to break toward Bürki’s goal.
“We have to not give up the chances that we are giving up,” Bürki said. “Even if [on Saturday] we were the better team, we still could lose that game with the chances we gave up. We have to work on being a team that is difficult to play against.”
If the first seven weeks are any indication, Bürki’s 2024 season could be even better than his award-winning work in 2023. It’s up to CITY to make sure it doesn’t waste many more game-winning caliber efforts as the rest of the season unfolds. There have been signs that CITY has what it takes to be a good team and return to the MLS Cup Playoffs this fall. But to be a great team? Bürki believes it will take a higher level of execution in all areas of the field.
“We were dominating [Saturday] 100 percent,” Bürki said. “We had more from the game sometimes. We had a lot of phases where we put them under pressure. But to be a really good team we have to win games. We have to be crucial in front of the goal and we have to decide the games earlier because we have the chances to. If you don’t do that, the other team is still smelling a little bit of hope and tries to use that.”
