There are a few reasons why Liverpool striker Darwin Núñez hasn’t quite hit the goalscoring heights you would expect from a $106m (£87m/€100m) number nine just yet, chief among them his wastefulness in front of goal. While Reds supporters have been patient with the Uruguayan, there’s no hiding from the fact that he’s missed 26 big chances in the Premier League alone.
Núñez, however, might argue that the reason he hasn’t been able to compete near the top of the scoring charts is that his minutes have been limited. As we covered yesterday, he’s only started 22 of the 47 league matches Liverpool has played following his arrival, for various reasons. That doesn’t help with integration.
He might also point out that he hasn’t been used in his best position as often as he expected. Many critics have overlooked the fact that Núñez played 16 of his 42 games last season — that’s just under 40 per cent — on the left wing, rather than through the middle (as per Transfermarkt). While he did have experience slotting in out wide from his days at Benfica, it’s clear that the number nine position is his favored role.
The retort here, in this entirely hypothetical conversation, may be that he hasn’t done enough to nail down the starting striker spot when given the chance. Equally, though, we can’t expect to see the best version of Núñez when he isn’t enjoying consistent minutes in his preferred capacity. In that sense, it can become a self-perpetuating cycle without sufficient patience from the manager.
If we look at the data, we can see that Núñez, somewhat surprisingly, actually scores at a higher rate when starting as a left winger, but crucially, that’s unlikely to be sustainable because he posts a considerably higher xG from a central berth. Yes, the positions of Liverpool’s front three are fluid to a degree as they rotate to pull the opposition defense apart — you’ll often see Núñez drifting out to the left even when he is the striker — but it’s still no shock that he enjoys clearer sights of goal as a nine.
And that doesn’t come at the cost of creativity either. In fact, both his assists and expected assisted goals averages are higher at center-forward. Perhaps the most important number of all is that xGC figure at the bottom, which demonstrates that he’s simply a greater overall threat in his primary position — no surprise there.
The good news, then, is that Jürgen Klopp appears to have scrapped last season’s left wing experiment, playing Núñez as a striker in all 10 of his appearances so far this term. He is, in this sense, embarking on a similar trajectory to Anfield predecessor Luis Suárez, who split his minutes between the center and the wing in his final year at Ajax before Kenny Dalglish and Brendan Rodgers established him as a fully-fledged nine. He’d play there in all but two games during his Liverpool career.
It seems Klopp has now made a similar call with Núñez, facilitated by the return of Luis Díaz. Indeed, a big part of the reason he played wide last year was that both Díaz and Diogo Jota were missing from October until the spring, although that’s not the whole explanation given that January signing Cody Gakpo could also have played there.
Díaz is clearly the first choice on the left, having started eight of Liverpool’s first nine league games (it would potentially have been all of them but for a late return from international duty in September). As such, Núñez has no longer been needed as a winger.
Based on the underlying numbers, the 26-year-old’s comeback could finally unlock the full all-round potential of his fellow South American. Now the question is whether Núñez can turn that highly promising data into tangible rewards.
