How Darwin Nunez became the most wasteful striker in England and the stat which will be worrying the £85m man and Liverpool fans alike

When Liverpool announced the £85million signing of striker Darwin Nunez just a day after Erling Haaland joined Manchester City, it felt like it could be the dawn of one of the great Premier League rivalries.

Two young big-money front men, big in stature and big in reputation, ready to go head-to-head to fire their sides to glory.

Only, it never worked out like that. Haaland hit the ground running and never looked back, fired City to back-to-back titles and picked up two golden boots in the process.

Nunez, by contrast, is still fighting to prove he has what it takes. Haaland is the mainstay of City’s attack. Nunez has started fewer than half of Liverpool’s league games since his arrival. He’s shown glimpses of what he can do but, so often, showcases what he can’t.

Nothing did so more than his glaring miss in Liverpool’s draw with Aston Villa when he blazed a huge chance over the bar with the net open, unguarded and at his mercy.

That’s the frustrating thing about Nunez, lots of his game is superb. He’s rapid and stretches the play, his physicality causes constant chaos for opposition defences and his movement is so good it gets him into goalscoring positions more often than many other Premier League strikers.

The forward has become one of the most wasteful strikers in England and blazed over the bar with the goal at his mercy

When he joined Liverpool in 2022 alongside Erling Haaland, it looked as though they would have an all-time great rivalry

Only four players have racked up more ‘Big Chances’ than Nunez – what stats gurus Opta define as an opportunity that a player should reasonably be expected to score – during his time at the club – Haaland, Mohamed Salah, Ollie Watkins and Alexander Isak.

All of them, though, have played at least 1,000 more league minutes than the Liverpool striker. Haaland has played nearly 50 more hours of Premier League football than Nunez; Watkins and Salah near 60 more.

Nunez is an elite chance getter. The problem is, as he continues to show, he’s anything but an elite finisher. Of those 67 big chances, he’s missed 51 of them – more than three quarters, comfortable the worst finishing rate of anyone with 20 goals since his debut.

Since his debut, only Dominic Calvert-Lewin has underperformed his Expected Goals (xG) as drastically as Nunez. The Liverpool front man has scored almost eight goals fewer than he should have done based on the quality of his chances.

Of the 35 players to score 20 goals since Nunez and Haaland arrived in the Premier League, only two – Bruno Fernandes and Eberechi Eze, neither out-and-out strikers – have a worse conversion rate than the 11 per cent of Nunez.

All in all, Nunez scores one in every nine shots. Isak and Haaland, meanwhile, score about one in four.

That’s what makes them world-class strikers.

A stat did the rounds after the Villa game that Nunez has missed 0.99 Big Chances per 90 minutes since his league debut, the most of any player. Interestingly, it was Haaland second on the list at 0.95.

The City behemoth misses almost one a game too, it’s not just Nunez that squanders sitters.

Where that matters less for Haaland is that he usually buries the first one that comes his way. And, if he doesn’t, he’ll get another one.

In the 23 matches where Haaland has had just a single Big Chance, he’s converted it 15 times. In the 25 games in which Nunez has had just one, he’s missed 20 of them and Liverpool failed to win half of the games. It matters more when Nunez misses.

So, why does he miss more? For one, Haaland is simply more accurate. A look at his shot maps during their time at their respective clubs shows the City man is more able to find the corners when it matters while Nunez frequently shoots straight at the keeper – or misses the target completely.

Haaland regularly converts when he has one just big chance and does not let misses get to him

Nunez, however, does – Arne Slot criticised his work rate following the miss against Villa

No one with 20 league goals since his arrival does so at a higher rate, with Nunez putting 39 per cent of his shots – two in every five of them – either wide, against the post or over the top.

Haaland keeps things simple. Nunez often looks muddled, in his thoughts and his technique. His infamous miss against Manchester United last season, in front of an open goal, he couldn’t decide whether to tap it in or square it and, in the end, did neither.

Nunez’s misses appear to bother him more. Haaland is a robot. Nunez’s miss against Villa affected him so much, Arne Slot came out after the game to criticise how the striker’s work-rate dropped after the chance.

What this miss also clouded, however, was how much Nunez has actually improved this season.

Nunez has scored four goals this term from an xG of… four. His conversion rate is up to 15 per cent, still not great, but better. Despite his Villa miss, he’s converting around 43 per cent of his Big Chances.

He’s still got a long way to go and fluffing his lines at Villa Park appears to have set him back once again.

Thankfully, for Nunez, Liverpool still have a healthy lead at the top of the table. If it starts to narrow, though, that’s when Slot will need his strikers to be ruthless when it matters.