The next three, St. Clair, Freese, and Lloris, are all on 12 clean sheets, but their CSE/CS values expose how differently those shutouts were earned. St. Clair leads the group at 0.53, indicating that Minnesota’s clean sheets required notable individual input from the goalkeeper. Freese is close behind at 0.52; when NYC did keep a clean sheet, Freese was actively pulling his weight. His season-long Goals Prevented (1.68) is modest, but that reflects a relatively quiet overall workload (few shots, or low‑quality shots, across the full season) not a lack of contribution on the days that mattered. Lloris sits lowest at 0.36. His similarly modest Goals Prevented (0.80) tells us that LAFC’s defense regularly limited opponents to low‑quality shots on target. On clean sheet days, Lloris was primarily the beneficiary of that structure rather than its primary engine.
The contrast between Kahlina and Takaoka at the top, 0.63 versus 0.30 CSE/CS, paired with St. Clair, Freese, and Lloris shows that CSE separates goalkeepers with identical clean sheet totals by isolating how much of each shutout they personally earned, accounting for both shots stopped and chances snuffed out before a shot ever happened.
The correlation between total CSE and Goals Prevented across the dataset is 0.45, and between CSE/CS and Goals Prevented is 0.28. Both are moderate at best. This suggests that while CSE and Goals Prevented both respond to shot difficulty, they are not measuring the same thing which is expected, given CSE is conditional on clean sheets while Goals Prevented is not.
At the team level, CSE/CS correlates with team xGA at just 0.13 and with xGA per game at 0.11, meaning even when you aggregate across goalkeepers on the same team, CSE/CS has almost no relationship with how much defensive pressure that team faced overall. A high CSE/CS is not a sign that a goalkeeper faced a lot of dangerous shots across the season in general, it purely reflects the defensive environment on the specific days a clean sheet was kept.
For context, across the 2023-2026 MLS seasons, the mean and median CSE/CS both sit at approximately 43%. A goalkeeper consistently above that mark is earning their clean sheets under above‑average difficulty.
Appendix
What CSE Is
CSE is a clean sheet credit allocation metric. For any match that ends in a clean sheet, it measures what share of that shutout the goalkeeper personally earned, based on the difficulty of the shots faced and the preventive actions they successfully executed. Across a season, it accumulates into a total that reflects both how many clean sheets a goalkeeper earned and how difficult those contributions were.
What CSE Isn’t
CSE is not a measure of a goalkeeper’s overall ability or shot-stopping quality. It does not reward goalkeepers for outstanding performances in games they ultimately concede in. That role is better filled by Goals Prevented (PSxG-G), which evaluates shot‑stopping across all games, regardless of the final scoreline. It’s better understood as reflecting the effort a goalkeeper had to exert given the strength of the defense and the quality of opposition attacks on clean sheet days.
Kahlina and Takaoka both kept 13 clean sheets in the 2025 MLS Regular Season, but Kahlina owned 63% of Charlotte’s clean sheets on average while Takaoka owned 30% of Vancouver’s. Both performed well, with positive goals prevented values, but given their individual circumstances, Kahlina was carrying his team on clean sheet days while Takaoka was working with a more organized defensive unit behind him. Takaoka conceded fewer goals and faced 50.31 xGA compared to Kahlina’s 61.67, which reflects just how different their defensive environments were.
