Highly Rated Spaniard vs Costa Rican: Who Would be the Better Choice for Manchester United?

The biggest transfer from the window didn’t take place, Manchester United and Real Madrid failed to agree a deal for the sale of David de Gea to the Spanish club, due to a raft of issues but this could have been avoided had the transfer negotiations taken place before the last day of the window. Nevertheless, the deal also had another player involved, Keylor Navas, who was expected to sign for United in a swap for De Gea.

With De Gea now in his final 12 months of his contract, it might seem unlikely that the Spaniard would sign a contract extension, he would move on a free to Real Madrid next season and more importantly United probably won’t sign Keylor Navas either. With that being said, we compare the two goalkeepers and find out just who would have been better for Manchester United using Squawka.com

Spanish superstar vs. Rising superstar

Everyone know how good De Gea was when he signed for Manchester United and we compare his 2013-14 season with that of Navas when he was at Levante. Both players played 37 games in that season and surprisingly it was Navas who outdid the Spaniard.

Navas kept 17 clean sheets compared to just 12 for De Gea. Navas, the Costa Rican goalkeeper was in brilliant form for Sociedad then and had 141 saves from 37 games, outdoing De Gea who only managed 83 saves from the same number of games. Navas also produced 21 punches compared to just 14 for De Gea, catching was also Navas’ forte compared to De Gea with 107 catches in 2013-14 to 87 for De Gea.

We even compare the two players in the 2012-13 season but they didn’t play the same number of games and thus we have to compare the per game averages for the above stated metrics.

In that season it was De Gea who kept more clean sheets with almost 40% clean sheets from his games while Navas managed just 22% of clean sheets in the games he played. De Gea though managed fewer saves than Navas with 2.54 compared with 3.89 for the Costa Rican.

De Gea just slightly edges the punches stat with 0.82 compared to 0.78 for Navas. But the Costa Rican had more catches with 3.89 compared to 2.39 for De Gea. The sad part of all this is that Navas is a better goalkeeper at least based on the stats and he could have been perfect for United as a replacement for De Gea but neither goalkeeper would be playing for United come next season.