FC Porto lead Europe in clean sheets and fewest goals conceded | OneFootball

FC Porto finished the recently concluded league campaign with 21 clean sheets in 34 matchdays, a hugely impressive record that puts Francesco Farioli’s side at the top of Europe when it comes to defensive consistency.

That means the Dragons did not concede a single goal in 62% of their league matches. Looking at the continent’s major leagues, no other team comes close to this mark. The numbers speak for themselves.

At the top of the table for the strongest defences are the blue and whites, with a clear advantage over second-placed PSG. The French champions and two-time European champions (53%) still managed to keep a clean sheet in more than half of their Ligue 1 matches. The same cannot be said of Como (exactly 50%) and Inter (47%), both from Serie A, or Arsenal, Premier League champions (50%).

Interestingly, another Portuguese club also appears in the top 10: Famalicão. The Minho side, which ended the league in a historic fifth place, kept clean sheets in 17 of the 34 matchdays, in other words, half of their matches.

Only 18 goals conceded

As for the number of goals conceded across Europe’s six main leagues, FC Porto once again tops the list.

It is true that the Portuguese league has fewer teams than the Premier League, Serie A and LaLiga, all of which have 20 clubs, meaning the championship has 34 matchdays rather than 38. Even so, the 18 goals conceded allow the national champions to claim, by a wide margin, first place in a table that includes Arsenal (27), PSG (29), Como (29) and Roma (31).

Alongside Farioli and Diogo Costa, the main figures behind this achievement were the three defenders most used by the Italian coach throughout the season: Jan Bednarek (32 league matches), Alberto Costa (29) and Jakub Kiwior (26).

Francisco Moura (21), Martim Fernandes (20) and Zaidu (17) also played an important role in the blue and whites’ outstanding defensive record, one of the decisive factors behind winning the title in the first year of the Farioli era.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.