Is Darwin Nunez costing Liverpool? The numbers behind a maligned No 9 | OneFootball

Perhaps the most damning part of Darwin Nunez’s glaring second-half miss at Aston Villa on Wednesday night was that no one was really surprised. Earlier in the game Diogo Jota had bobbled the ball across the box for Mohamed Salah to finish and you just knew the net would bulge. But when Dominik Szoboszlai squared to Nunez, with the goal yawning wide, expectations were lower. As the ball sailed into the Holte End, the ironic jeers were all too familiar.

Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk put it diplomatically when he said after the 2-2 draw: “We should have scored a third goal.”

The pundits were more blunt. “He doesn’t think, does he?” said Robbie Fowler on TNT Sports. “It’s a really bad miss, up there with one of the worst we’ve seen this year. [Szoboszlai] played a great ball to him and he’s missed the target, criminally, from eight yards. That can’t be happening.”

Arne Slot criticised Nunez for lacking application after that moment – “it was not the usual Darwin who works his arse off” – before adding: “I was hoping he could have got another [chance], because a player like him probably wouldn’t miss two chances in a row.”

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Darwin Nunez missed a sitter for Liverpool (Nick Potts/PA) (PA Wire)

Which might not be entirely true. Since joining Liverpool in the summer of 2022, Nunez has scored 24 Premier League goals in 86 appearances, or once every 193 minutes. Yet he has accumulated 38 expected goals in that time, meaning he has squandered an eye-watering 14 goals in two and a half seasons. The chance against Villa was worth 0.89 xG alone.

Those numbers work out at an overall xG conversation rate of 63.3 per cent, which is the lowest among all of the 31 players to have scored at least 20 Premier League goals since Nunez joined Liverpool. It might not surprise Arsenal or Chelsea fans to see Kai Havertz (76 per cent) and Nicolas Jackson (71 per cent) on the more wasteful end of the scale, but Nunez is more profligate still. Incidentally, Phil Foden is falling off the graph at the other end, such is his apparent knack of turning half-chances into goals.

And so the impression of Nunez after two and a half years in England is of an enthusiastic forward with a blundering bull-in-a-China-shop energy, a striker with a highlights reel of misses every bit as awe-inspiring as his compilation of goals, who can carry the look of a man entirely unfamiliar with the orb at his feet.

Nunez was defiant, tweeting after tha game: “I wasn’t the best three weeks ago [he scored two against Brentford], and I’m not the worst now. If I fall, I get up. You’ll never see me give up. I’m going to give it my all until the last day I’m here in Liverpool.”

There are silver linings to the bleak picture of Nunez’s performance. The key to prolific goalscoring is the accumulation of chances rather than the efficiency of finishing: the top two scorers in the Premier League since August 2022 are Erland Haaland and Mohamed Salah, and they haven’t got there by converting difficult chances but by racking up bucketfuls of presentable ones. Nunez is at least finding shooting positions, and that should eventually yield rewards.

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Nunez missed a glorious opportunity with the match level at 2-2 (Nick Potts/PA) (PA Wire)

This comes back to the first law of expected goals – that over time, with bigger sample sizes, under and overperforming players and teams almost always revert to the mean. The gravitational pull of xG is strong, and history tells us that as Nunez continues his career and keeps on shooting at goal, his conversation rate should naturally trend upwards.

Indeed this season’s numbers are relatively stable: Nunez was actually slightly outperforming his expected goals before the Villa game, albeit from a very small sample size. He has been wasteful in his time at Anfield, but it has rarely been a blight on the current campaign.

Yet that is scant consolation for Liverpool right now, in the midst of a title race that just got a little bit tighter. Footballing history is often written in the margins, recast in the smallest moments. Nunez will hope this is not one Liverpool look back on and wonder.