Darwin Núñez beat Lionel Messi and Erling Haaland in a key statistic which could be a sign he is about to explode next season for Liverpool as he has done before.
Darwin Núñez hasn’t exactly met the heights many expected him to reach in his opening season with Liverpool. But there have been little sparkles hinting at an extremely exciting player, and with time Liverpool might just see that more often.
One particular underlying Núñez stat definitely should give Liverpool fans encouraging hope ahead of next season.
A season that already promises to be a much better campaign for the Uruguayan who has always taken a little time to get going at every club he has been to in his early career. At Benfica, he only scored 14 goals in his first campaign before going on to hit 34.
In his first season, he wasn’t quite as mentally sharp. Carrying the burden of Benfica’s most expensive transfer of all time, perhaps just like he has done at Liverpool, he buckled under the weight of expectations a little bit.
But that changed in his second season when those pressures lifted off his shoulders and the Uruguayan was like a man unleashed showing a completely different side to his game, and even showed his destructiveness against Liverpool in the Champions League.
This season, Núñez at times has looked a little out of focus. He’s carried a big burden needing to fulfill excessive expectations at Anfield. And at times he has looked almost too determined to prove himself, losing his cool to get sent off early on in his Liverpool career and often scuffing clear chances in front of goal.
But there’s a lot of potential there.
Núñez’s explosive speed and energy make him a real nuisance and he’s got a knack for finding the right positions to put himself in goal-scoring chances.
It’s no surprise therefore that when it comes to certain underlying metrics, Núñez has been one of the best-performing forwards in Europe’s top five leagues in his first Liverpool season.
For example, for shots on target per 90 minutes in 2022/23, only one player averaged more in all of Europe’s top five leagues than Núñez (1.86). That was Kylian Mbappé (2.38) with others like Lionel Messi (1.70) and Erling Haaland (1.72) rounding up the top 15 players and performing below Liverpool’s Uruguayan star.
That’s quite a distinction for Núñez, who is supposedly a ‘bad finisher.’ On average, he’s getting more shots on target than the vast majority of players in Europe’s top five leagues, and while those shots are not always necessarily ending up as goals just yet, his high volume is a sign that he at least knows how to put the ball on target to test the goalkeeper.
This is a sign that despite Núñez’s turbulent first season at the club, his future at Anfield is far from over. It’s often common for strikers coming for record fees and with big expectations to not hit the ground running immediately.
Even Victor Osimhen, who helped deliver a sensational scudetto to Napoli this season becoming one of the most prolific forwards in Europe in the process, struggled in his first season at Napoli hitting only just 10 goals.
Núñez still has all the ingredients to explode next season, and his ability to hit the ball on target with a better frequency than the likes of Haaland and Messi, who are renowned for their goal-scoring, is just another sign of what is about to come. The Premier League is not ready.
