Mateusz Lis

Some goalkeepers get an academy medal and drift. Mateusz Lis got the medal, then spent four years being sent out to prove he could hold a first-choice shirt somewhere. Lech Poznań produced him, won the Polish title with him in the squad in 2014/15, and then loaned him three times running — to Miedź Legnica, Raków Częstochowa and Podbeskidzie — before he'd played his way past that stage.

A permanent move to Wisła Kraków in 2018 gave him a run of senior football, and a transfer to Turkey's Altay in 2021 took him abroad for the first time. The bigger jump came in 2022, when Southampton signed him as a free agent. It didn't lead to a Premier League career: Southampton loaned him straight out, first to Troyes in France, then to Göztepe in Turkey, and in August 2024 made the Göztepe move permanent rather than bring him back to England.

Göztepe is where Lis turned into a genuine number one. He held the starting job through the 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons, was made captain, and in 2025/26 played 34 Süper Lig matches, keeping 16 clean sheets as the club finished sixth. A January 2025 league match against Galatasaray brought a tense passage of play around a Victor Osimhen penalty, though nothing beyond that has been confirmed. His only real absence in that spell was a bout of flu in January 2024.

That form earned him a return to where he started: Lech Poznań brought him back in June 2025 on a contract running to 2029, and he added the Polish Super Cup to his 2014/15 league title. At youth level he was named in Poland's Under-21 squad, without playing, and has not been called up to the senior national team.