Most Premier League Clean Sheets: The Record and the List
Petr Cech's record for the most Premier League clean sheets, the single-season and consecutive marks, Golden Glove winners and England's own goalkeeping records.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Records & History21 min read
- All-time record
- 202 clean sheets
- Single-season record
- 24 clean sheets
- Consecutive record
- 14 matches
- Minutes without conceding
- 1,311
Two hundred and two. That is Petr Cech's total of Premier League clean sheets, kept for Chelsea from 2004 to 2015 and for Arsenal from 2015 to 2019, and it is the most in the competition's history by a distance. He is the only goalkeeper to pass 200. David James is next on 169, followed by Mark Schwarzer on 151, then David de Gea and David Seaman. The figures here are as they stood at the end of the 2024-25 season, and the active goalkeepers' totals move every week, but none of them was anywhere near Cech.
Three other records sit beside the all-time one. Cech also holds the single-season mark, 24 clean sheets for Chelsea in 2004-05. Edwin van der Sar holds the consecutive record, 14 in a row for Manchester United in 2008-09, covering 1,311 minutes without conceding. And the club record for a season is Chelsea's 25 in that same 2004-05 campaign. Most of what follows is about why those numbers were possible, why nobody has matched them since, and how much of a clean sheet a goalkeeper can really claim as his own in English football.
Petr Cech's 202: the all-time Premier League clean sheet record
Cech arrived at Chelsea from Rennes in the summer of 2004, the same summer José Mourinho did, and his first season was the most dominant defensive campaign the English top flight has seen. He was 22. Within two seasons he was considered the best goalkeeper in the world by plenty of people who were paid to judge such things.
The total was built in two parts. Most of it came at Chelsea across eleven seasons, and the rest in four seasons at Arsenal after a move across London in 2015. The Arsenal years matter more than they look: a goalkeeper in his thirties, behind a less settled defence, still kept a clean sheet in a large share of his matches and won the Golden Glove in his first season there. Without them his total would have finished close to James's rather than far ahead of it. With them, the gap became decisive.
The gap to the rest
Cech's lead over second place is 33 clean sheets. To put that in context, it is close to two full seasons of a Golden Glove winner's output in the modern Premier League, where the award has been won with totals in the mid-teens. A goalkeeper aiming to overtake him would need something like twelve seasons as first choice at a strong club, keeping roughly seventeen a season. Very few goalkeepers stay first choice at one top club for twelve seasons; those who move to a weaker side lose clean sheets they were not responsible for losing.
One more detail. Cech played the second half of his career in a protective headguard after a fractured skull suffered at Reading in October 2006. He missed three months of that season. That his total survived an injury of that severity, and that his rate held up afterwards, is part of why fellow professionals ranked the achievement so highly.
David James, Schwarzer, de Gea and Seaman: the rest of the clean sheet list
The four names below Cech each took a different road to the list.
David James is second, with 169, and he needed more matches than anyone to get there. James played 572 Premier League games for Liverpool, Aston Villa, West Ham United, Manchester City and Portsmouth, the most by any goalkeeper. He was never at a club that dominated a whole era. His clean sheets were spread across good sides, struggling ones and one, Portsmouth, that won the FA Cup in 2008. Longevity did the work.
Mark Schwarzer is third on 151. He spent most of his Premier League career at Middlesbrough and Fulham, neither of them clubs that expected to finish near the top, and added a few more late in his career with Chelsea and Leicester City. For a goalkeeper at mid-table sides, his total is the more impressive achievement in some respects: he was rarely protected by an elite defence.
David de Gea sits fourth, a total built entirely at Manchester United over twelve seasons from 2011 to 2023. He won the Golden Glove twice, and his best years came in sides that conceded more shots than United's teams of the previous decade, which gave his clean sheets a different texture from Cech's at Chelsea.
David Seaman is fifth with 141, despite playing only from 1992, when he was already 28, and despite Arsenal's defence being at its most famous in the first half of the 1990s, before the Premier League's records had settled into their modern form. Seaman's clean sheets came behind the back four of Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, Steve Bould and Nigel Winterburn, later with Martin Keown, and there was a good argument in those years that Arsenal's defensive record belonged to the unit rather than to any one man.
The appearance figures make the point the totals alone hide. Cech's 202 came in 443 Premier League matches, a rate of 0.46 a game. James needed 572 matches for his 169 and Schwarzer 514 for his 151, both around 0.3. James and Schwarzer kept a clean sheet in fewer than one match in three. Cech kept one in almost every second match.
Cech's 24 in 2004-05 and Chelsea's 15 goals conceded
The Chelsea side of 2004-05 conceded 15 goals in 38 league matches, still the fewest in a Premier League season at the start of 2025-26. Cech kept 24 clean sheets. Carlo Cudicini, his predecessor, kept one more in the matches Cech missed, which takes the team total to 25.
Mourinho's first Chelsea team was built to make that possible. It played a 4-3-3 with Claude Makélélé screening the back four, a central defensive pairing of John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho, and full-backs who were told to defend first. The midfield three were picked for their work without the ball as much as for their passing. Opponents were often held to a handful of shots, and most of those from distance.
A clean sheet run inside the season
That season also produced the record Van der Sar later broke. Cech went 1,025 minutes without conceding a Premier League goal across the winter of 2004-05, a run that set the competition's record at the time and stood for four years.
The figures look less like a record and more like a different sport when set beside modern Golden Glove totals. The 2024-25 award was won with 13. Raya, who won it, was playing behind one of the best defences of his era. Times have changed, and the reasons are set out further down.
| Season | Club | League matches | Goals conceded |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978-79 | Liverpool | 42 | 16 |
| 1990-91 | Arsenal | 38 | 18 |
| 1998-99 | Arsenal | 38 | 17 |
| 2004-05 | Chelsea | 38 | 15 |
Liverpool's 1978-79 total, set over 42 matches before the Premier League began, remains the best goals-against record in a top-flight season of that length. Chelsea's 15 is the Premier League mark, and it came over four fewer matches. Comparing them directly flatters Chelsea slightly. Both are extraordinary.
Edwin van der Sar's 14 consecutive Premier League clean sheets and the 1,311 minutes
Van der Sar's run began in November 2008 and ran into the following March. Fourteen matches, 1,311 minutes of league football without conceding, for a Manchester United side that went on to win its third consecutive title. Peter Løvenkrands ended it for Newcastle United at St James' Park on 4 March 2009, scoring early in a match United still won.
He was 38. It is worth saying again because it confounds the usual assumptions about age and goalkeeping: the record for consecutive clean sheets in the Premier League was set by a man close to his 40th birthday, behind a defence of Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidić. Van der Sar's longevity is covered on our page of the oldest Premier League players.
- 14Consecutive clean sheets
- 1311Minutes without conceding
- 1103Steve Death's previous record, minutes
The Premier League record for consecutive clean sheets and minutes without conceding, compared with Steve Death's earlier Football League mark of 1,103 minutes for Reading in 1979.
How a run is measured
A run of consecutive clean sheets and a run of minutes without conceding are related but not the same. The minutes run starts from the last goal conceded, which may have come early in a match the team went on to win, and ends with the next goal conceded, whenever in a match it comes. So a run of 14 clean sheets can account for more minutes than 14 times 90, because it includes the tail end of the match before the run began and the start of the match in which it ended. That is how 14 clean sheets became 1,311 minutes rather than 1,260.
The minute count is the purer measure, because it does not depend on where the goals happened to fall. It is also the one Van der Sar's run is compared with when it is set beside the Football League record, which was kept in minutes. Steve Death, Reading's goalkeeper, went 1,103 minutes without conceding in the Fourth Division in 1979, the season Reading won the title. That record had stood for nearly thirty years.
A stretch of matches without defeat, rather than without conceding, is a different record entirely, covered in our guide to the longest unbeaten runs in the Premier League.
What counts as a clean sheet and where the phrase comes from
A clean sheet is a match in which a team concedes no goals. That is the whole definition, and it is a team statistic first. The goalkeeper is credited with it because he is the player most associated with stopping goals, but the scoreline is the team's.
The phrase is usually traced to the sheet on which a match's goals were recorded: when a side conceded nothing, its column on the sheet stayed clean. The exact origin is not firmly documented. Similar expressions turn up in other sports and in ordinary English, where a "clean sheet" has long meant a blank record, and the football usage may have drawn on both. What is certain is the meaning, which has not changed.
When the goalkeeper is substituted
The awkward case is a goalkeeper replaced mid-match. Under the convention most compilers use, a clean sheet is credited to a goalkeeper who played the whole match without conceding, so a keeper taken off injured at half-time with the score at 0-0 does not receive one even if his replacement also keeps the opposition out. In that case the team has a clean sheet that no single goalkeeper owns. Compilers do not all treat the shared case identically, which is one reason totals for the same goalkeeper occasionally differ by one or two between sources.
Fantasy's different rule
Fantasy Premier League has its own definition, and it confuses people because it uses the same words. In the game, a goalkeeper or defender earns clean sheet points only if he played at least 60 minutes and his team did not concede while he was on the pitch. A defender who comes on in the 70th minute of a 0-0 draw gets nothing for the clean sheet; one who plays 65 minutes and is taken off before a late goal keeps his points. That is a scoring rule for a game, not a record of football, and it has no bearing on the totals on this page. The full scoring table is in our explainer of the FPL points system.
Clean sheets per match: Cech, Reina, Ederson and Alisson
Totals reward longevity. Rates reward quality, or at least the quality of the team in front of the goalkeeper. Divided by appearances, the list changes shape.
Cech's rate of 0.46 clean sheets per match is the benchmark among goalkeepers with long careers. Pepe Reina, Liverpool's goalkeeper from 2005 to 2013, kept clean sheets at a rate close to that in his best seasons, especially the three in a row in which he won the Golden Glove. Over his full Premier League career his rate was lower than Cech's but well above the long-serving names below Cech on the totals list.
The modern pair
Ederson at Manchester City and Alisson at Liverpool are the interesting comparison. Both arrived in the Premier League in the late 2010s, both played for sides that dominated possession and both were valued as much for their distribution as for their saves. Their clean sheet rates through the 2018-19 to 2021-22 period, when City and Liverpool were contesting titles with points totals near 100, were at the top end of what the competition has seen. Their totals are lower than Cech's because their careers in England started later. Their rates, for a stretch, were comparable.
That comparison has a catch. The modern goalkeeper behind a possession side may face very few shots, which makes clean sheets more likely and saves less frequent. A Reina or a Cech in the 2000s faced a different kind of attack, with more crosses and more long-range shooting, and the clean sheets came from a different mix of positioning and shot-stopping. Rates across eras are useful. They are not a ranking of goalkeepers.
Setting a fair minimum
Any per-match table needs a floor on appearances, or it fills up with reserve goalkeepers who played a dozen matches for a title-winning side and kept clean sheets in half of them. A sensible list uses a threshold of a hundred matches or more, which removes the short-career outliers and leaves only goalkeepers who were first choice for several seasons. Even then the table rewards the club as much as the man. A goalkeeper who spent his whole career at one dominant side will out-rate an equally good one who moved between mid-table clubs. That is not a flaw in the arithmetic. It is the arithmetic telling the truth about what a clean sheet measures.
Golden Glove winners since 2004-05
The Premier League's Golden Glove was introduced for the 2004-05 season and goes to the goalkeeper with the most clean sheets in a league season. Cech won the first, with his record 24. The award has been shared when two goalkeepers finished level: in 2021-22 Alisson and Ederson both kept 20, at the end of a season in which their clubs finished a point apart.
| Goalkeeper | Golden Gloves | Seasons won |
|---|---|---|
| Petr Cech | 4 | 2004-05, 2009-10, 2013-14, 2015-16 |
| Joe Hart | 4 | 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2014-15 |
| Pepe Reina | 3 | 2005-06, 2006-07, 2007-08 |
| Ederson | 3 | 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 (shared) |
| Alisson | 2 | 2018-19, 2021-22 (shared) |
| David de Gea | 2 | 2017-18, 2022-23 |
| David Raya | 2 | 2023-24, 2024-25 |
Hart's four are often overlooked beside Cech's. They came during Manchester City's first period as a title-winning club, from 2010-11, and his 2014-15 award came in a season when City finished second. Reina's three in a row came at a Liverpool side that did not win the league in any of those seasons, which is a reminder that a goalkeeper can top the clean sheet table without his club topping the main one.
How the award is decided
The rule is simple: most clean sheets in league matches across the season, counted by the Premier League's own records. Cup matches do not count, and a clean sheet shared after a substitution is treated the same way as in the all-time totals. The awkward cases come at the end of a season, when two goalkeepers at different clubs go into the final round level or a single goal apart, and the last afternoon decides the award as well as the table. Rotation also matters. A goalkeeper who misses a run of matches through injury loses clean sheets that his deputy may keep, which is why the winner is nearly always a keeper who played almost every league match.
The award sits alongside the Golden Boot and the season's player awards, which are set out in our guide to Premier League awards.
Clubs rather than goalkeepers: Chelsea's 25 and the club totals
Chelsea's 25 clean sheets in 2004-05 is the team record for a Premier League season, one more than Cech's individual total because Cudicini played and kept a clean sheet in one of the matches Cech missed. That is the general relationship between club and goalkeeper figures. A club's total is always at least the sum of its goalkeepers' totals and can be higher when a clean sheet is shared after a substitution.
Over the whole history of the competition the clubs with the most clean sheets are, unsurprisingly, the clubs that have spent the most seasons near the top: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool, with Manchester City climbing quickly since 2010. The precise all-time club figures move every weekend and are not reproduced here. The order is the point. Clean sheets follow league position closely, and the clubs that have won the most titles have kept the most.
The other end
The longest runs without a clean sheet belong, predictably, to relegated sides, and they are a grimmer record to compile. A team that goes a whole season keeping only a handful is almost always relegated. The relationship between goals conceded and final points is strong enough that the record points totals in a Premier League season were all set by sides that also kept clean sheets in large numbers. Chelsea's 95 points in 2004-05, a record at the time, came from the same defence that kept 25.
Why droughts happen
A run without a clean sheet usually has a structural cause rather than a goalkeeping one. A side that plays a high line without the pace to defend it concedes regularly on the counter-attack. A side that defends deep without a reliable centre-back pairing concedes from set pieces and crosses. A newly promoted club stepping up from the Championship often finds that the defending which kept it out of trouble in the second tier is not enough against forwards with more pace and better finishing. In each case a change of goalkeeper rarely ends the run. A change of defensive shape, or of the players in front of him, usually does.
How much of a clean sheet belongs to the goalkeeper
Not all of it. Probably not most of it.
A clean sheet depends first on the number and quality of chances the opposition creates, which is decided largely by the ten players in front of the goalkeeper and by the manager's tactics. A goalkeeper behind a defence that allows two shots on target in a match will keep many more clean sheets than an equally good goalkeeper facing six. That is why clean sheet totals cluster at dominant clubs, and why Schwarzer's 151 at Middlesbrough and Fulham can be read as the more remarkable achievement than numbers alone suggest.
The goalkeeper's own contribution comes in three parts. There are the saves he makes, especially from good chances. There are the chances he prevents by coming for crosses, sweeping behind his defence and organising the line in front of him. And there are the errors he avoids, because a single mistake ends a clean sheet as surely as a great goal.
Measuring it properly
Analysts now try to separate the goalkeeper from the team by comparing the goals he concedes with the quality of shots he faces, using expected-goals models built from shot location and type. A goalkeeper who concedes fewer goals than the model predicts from the shots he faced is adding value; one who concedes more is costing his side. Those models have their own weaknesses, especially with deflections and shots that are saved but would have been easy to save. They are still closer to measuring goalkeeping than a clean sheet count is.
The records-holders mostly do well on both. Cech's peak at Chelsea combined a dominant defence with exceptional shot-stopping, and Van der Sar's run included several important saves. The record books reward the combination.
Why clean sheet totals have fallen
The Golden Glove was won with 24 in its first season and with 13 in 2024-25. Several changes have pushed the numbers down, and the goalkeepers are not the main reason.
Goals per match have risen. The 2023-24 season set a record for goals scored in a 38-match Premier League season, and the trend across the preceding decade had been upward. More goals across the league means fewer matches finishing with one side on nil.
Playing out from the back has changed the risks. A side building through its goalkeeper and centre-backs against a high press concedes some goals that a side kicking long would not, either from errors in possession or from turnovers in dangerous areas. The manager accepts those goals as the cost of the attacking benefits. Goalkeepers now need to be accomplished with their feet, a demand that began with the back-pass rule of 1992 and has grown ever since.
More substitutes and more added time
The permanent move to five substitutes means fresher attacking players in the last half-hour, when tired defences used to hold on. Longer added time, counted more strictly since 2023-24, has given attacking sides more minutes at the end of matches. Neither rule was designed to increase scoring. Both have made clean sheets harder to keep in the final stages.
Penalties and VAR
Video review, introduced to the Premier League in 2019-20, added another small pressure. Handballs and fouls in the area that a referee might once have missed are now reviewed, and a penalty awarded on review ends a clean sheet just as surely as an open-play goal. The effect on any one goalkeeper's season is a goal or two. Across the league, it is another reason a total in the mid-teens now wins the Golden Glove.
The middle of the table
The last factor is the strength of the mid-table sides. With broadcast income spread across all twenty clubs, fewer teams in the modern Premier League are as weak in attack as the bottom clubs of the mid-2000s. A title contender that could expect to keep clean sheets in most of its matches against the bottom half now faces more teams able to score.
Before 1992: Ray Clemence, Liverpool and Steve Death
Liverpool in 1978-79 conceded 16 goals in 42 First Division matches and kept 28 clean sheets, with Ray Clemence in goal for the whole league campaign. Neither the goals-against figure over that many matches nor the clean sheet total has been matched in the top flight since. Bob Paisley's side won the title by eight points, at a time when a win was worth two.
That was a different football world. A 42-match season gives more opportunities for clean sheets than a 38-match one, but the scale of the achievement is clear even after adjusting for that. Clemence played behind Phil Thompson and Alan Hansen, with Phil Neal and Alan Kennedy at full-back, and a midfield that kept possession in a way few English sides then did.
Death at Reading
Steve Death's 1,103 minutes in 1979 is the other pre-Premier League landmark. Reading were a Fourth Division club, Death was a goalkeeper of modest height who had come from West Ham, and the run carried them to the divisional title. That it was the Football League's record for minutes without conceding until Van der Sar went past it in 2009 says a lot about how rare such runs are, at any level.
The full list of league title winners across those years, Liverpool's included, is on our page of English football champions.
England's own clean sheet marks: Shilton, Banks and Pickford
Peter Shilton kept 66 clean sheets in 125 appearances for England between 1970 and 1990, the record for an England goalkeeper and the product of the longest international career of any England player. His 125 caps are themselves the record, covered in our guide to England's most capped players.
Jordan Pickford took a different record from Gordon Banks at the European Championship in the summer of 2021. Banks had gone 720 minutes without conceding for England in 1966, a run that led into the World Cup and lasted into the tournament itself. Pickford passed it during Euro 2020, played a year late because of the pandemic, and his run reached 726 minutes before Mikkel Damsgaard's free kick for Denmark in the semi-final at Wembley ended it.
Comparing the two
The records are not the same kind. Shilton's is a total built over two decades; Pickford's is a run across consecutive matches, more like Van der Sar's than like Cech's. Both depended on the defence in front, as every clean sheet does. Banks's 1966 run came behind a back four that included Bobby Moore and Jack Charlton. Pickford's came behind Harry Maguire and John Stones, in a side whose manager, Gareth Southgate, built the tournament around not conceding.
What counts for England
England's clean sheet records count full internationals only, the matches for which a cap is awarded. Friendlies count alongside competitive matches, which matters for Shilton, whose career included many friendlies in an era when England played them more often. A goalkeeper substituted at half-time in a friendly, which happened routinely when managers wanted to look at more than one keeper, is usually not credited with a clean sheet for the match even if neither keeper concedes, though compilers differ on it. That convention, where it is applied, cuts into the totals of goalkeepers from eras when half-time changes in friendlies were routine.
International clean sheet records also move more slowly than club ones, because a goalkeeper plays far fewer international matches in a season. That is why Shilton's total has lasted since 1990 and why it would take a goalkeeper with an England career of comparable length to approach it. The rest of the site's coverage of the English game is gathered on the football hub.