Kepa Arrizabalaga has now stood in goal for three EFL Cup finals. He has lost all three. Each one has left a different scar, a different meme, a different question about how a goalkeeper’s career can keep circling back to the same painful stage.
The latest chapter came with Arsenal in 2026, a club chasing a quadruple, a team trying to prove it had finally grown into serial winners. Instead, it added another line to Kepa’s unwanted cup résumé. To understand how grim this trilogy looks, you have to go back to where it all began.
3) 2019 – Chelsea: The Refusal
Wembley, extra time ticking away, Maurizio Sarri fuming on the touchline. Kepa on the turf, apparently cramping. The board goes up. Substitute ready.
And then, the moment that would follow him for years: he refuses.
Sarri wants him off. Kepa waves him away and insists he can continue. The image of a manager raging, of a goalkeeper standing his ground, became the defining shot of that final. Not the football. Not even the result. Just the standoff.
Chelsea took Manchester City all the way to penalties and lost 4-3. Kepa did save one – from Leroy Sane – and he had kept a clean sheet over 120 minutes. On the numbers alone, it was hardly a catastrophe.
But this was his debut season in English football, fresh from becoming the world’s most expensive goalkeeper after leaving Athletic Bilbao. The price tag already carried weight. The mutiny against Sarri turned that weight into a burden.
The questions grew louder: was he worth it? The spoiler has long since been written. The lasting memory of that day is not a save, not a goal, but a goalkeeper defying his manager in front of the watching world.
2) 2026 – Arsenal: The Flap
Fast forward seven years and a different shirt, but the same competition and the same opponent. Arsenal, Premier League leaders, walked into the 2026 final against Manchester City with a chance to underline their supposed dominance over their closest rivals. This was meant to be a statement.
Instead, it became another entry in Kepa’s EFL Cup file.
Chosen ahead of David Raya, he was trusted for the occasion. That trust lasted until City’s first goal – and it was his mistake that opened the door. Rayan Cherki swung in a cross, Kepa came to deal with it, and got nowhere near enough on the ball. He flapped, it dropped, and Nico O’Reilly pounced from close range.
City do not need gifts in finals. They got one. They never handed it back.
Kepa’s afternoon might have turned even worse. When he charged out of his area and grappled with Jeremy Doku, he was shown only a yellow card. The angle of the chance spared him a red and the ignominy of leaving his team a man down in a showpiece final. The margin was thin.
To be fair to him, Arsenal’s defeat was not solely about the man in goal. Their collective failure to respond, their inability to wrest control back from City’s familiar, ruthless grip, told its own story. But the first blow, the one that gave City their foothold, came from his misjudgment.
In a final framed as a test of Arsenal’s authority, Kepa’s error helped flip the narrative. City, with that serial-winner mentality, simply tightened their grip and walked away with the trophy. Arsenal’s keeper, again, walked away with regret.
1) 2022 – Chelsea: The Specialist Who Missed
If 2019 was about defiance and 2026 about a costly mistake, 2022 was pure, unfiltered disaster.
This time Kepa did not start. Edouard Mendy had already taken his place as Chelsea’s first-choice goalkeeper. Thomas Tuchel turned to Kepa for one reason only: penalties. He was the specialist, the shootout card to be played at the death.
He came on from the bench in the final against Liverpool specifically for that moment. The plan was clear. The execution was brutal.
Liverpool scored. Then scored again. And again. Eleven times they stepped up; eleven times the ball flew past Kepa. He did not save a single penalty.
Then came his turn.
In sudden death, the goalkeeper sent on as the penalty expert blazed his own effort over the bar. Liverpool celebrated. Chelsea stared at the turf. Kepa had conceded every Liverpool penalty and missed the decisive kick himself.
In terms of being brought on to do a specialist job, it was an epic failure.
By then, he had already been eased out of the starting XI. This was his chance to justify the faith, to remind Chelsea why he was once the most expensive goalkeeper in history. Instead, it only cemented the sense that his time at Stamford Bridge was slipping away.
Chelsea would never have planned for him to take a penalty that day. They would, though, have expected him to save at least one. He did neither. His performance did nothing to strengthen his case for reclaiming the No.1 shirt.
He did claw back more minutes the following season, a brief resurgence before his Chelsea story wound down. But the 2022 final remained the starkest example of his EFL Cup torment: the night the specialist became the symbol of everything that had gone wrong.
Three finals. Three defeats. Three different kinds of calamity.
For Kepa Arrizabalaga, the EFL Cup has not been a competition. It has been a curse.
