Darwin Nunez
- Thread starter SummerOnions
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
- Status
[article]
All three of Uruguay’s striking legends of the 21st century have lobbied on behalf of Darwin Núñez.
Only months ago Cavani was reported to have told the United hierarchy to purchase his compatriot to replace him at Old Trafford, while Forlán also said a United move for Núñez would be “good for him and for the club”.
Suárez’s lobbying goes back much further. In 2020, when Núñez was at Almeria in Spain’s second tier, Suárez told Barca officials to sign him, “I told them, ‘pay attention to this one, he’s very good, he has very interesting things’,” he said. Barcelona reportedly tried to sign him too, but lost out to Benfica while at the peak of their financial crisis.
Since moving to Portugal, Núñez himself has never looked back. The 22-year-old has 48 goals in 85 games along with 15 assists. In 2021-22 alone he netted 34 goals in 41 games, including six in 10 Champions League appearances. Across Europe’s big five leagues and Portugal, only Robert Lewandowski (35), Kylian Mbappé (28), Karim Benzema (27) and Ciro Immobile (27) scored more league goals last season, and it’s this ferocious appetite for goals that has put Europe’s top clubs on high alert.
It’s a hunger noticeable with all of Uruguay’s recent star strikers. It’s not just their ability that makes them stand out, but also the intense desire to score which makes them so deadly. Cavani and Suárez in particular possess that in abundance, and it’s no surprise that Núñez recently said that the former is his idol. The matching headband is probably not a coincidence.
Like Suárez and Cavani, Núñez has deadly penalty-box instincts, magnificent movement and great power. That power is something that Núñez has had since making his breakthrough at 17 for Peñarol back in his homeland.
Some players gain that power and frame when they hit their early 20s and can sometimes struggle to maintain their technical ability as the extra weight becomes a burden. With Núñez though, he has already had five years of playing senior football with his current physical stature, and over the past couple of years with Benfica, you can see how refined his touch is becoming already.
Across the two Champions League appearances against Liverpool in April, he did look a bit untidy in this regard, sometimes struggling with his technique in tight spaces, especially upon physical contact, but that is a work in progress for Núñez.
His intelligence though, in knowing his role for the team, is something that can’t be questioned.
He can roll players with his strength if defenders get too tight, can lay off the ball with an intelligent first touch, and likes to drift wide to act as a creator on occasion using his impressive intuition to create chances for others. In the Primeira League this season he’s created 30 chances for team-mates and assisted four times.
He also has the ability to beat a man and has impressive acceleration which allows him to pull away from defenders if his touch stays true.
However, that ‘if’ is his drawback right now. Though he has the intelligence to do the right things when linking play, it’s his consistency with his touch that can desert him in high leverage situations.
Having said that, this is the only real side of Núñez’s game that lets him down. It’s something he must work on, especially when he moves to a league where he has less time on the ball, but it’s his qualities elsewhere are what excite most.
These qualities mostly relate to his ability in and around the penalty area. Though you need to be a great link man to be a top striker for a top team – something the Uruguayan will undoubtedly improve at – he can already make up for that area of weakness by doing what all great forwards do: score goals.
With a goal every 76 minutes for Benfica in the league last season, he led all forwards to play at least 1,000 minutes across Europe’s big five leagues and Portugal in this category. Just look at the players he’s beating.
When running in behind, Núñez is a menace. He has the positional intelligence to create perfect receiving angles from a through pass, and the pace and strength to steamroll his way towards the goal when the pass is played. Núñez’s sharp movement and adept positioning gets him into great scoring positions.
Not only are the quality of his non-penalty chances high – 0.19 xG per shot – but he accumulates these chances at a very high rate. He averaged more non-penalty goals per 90 than any other player in the top six ranked European leagues in 2021-22 (1.00), while his 0.69 non-penalty xG per 90 was only bettered by four players.
Questions will remain as to whether he’ll be able to replicate those numbers in a more competitive league, but they are nonetheless very impressive.
Once he gets into scoring positions, his finishing is exceptional. Núñez’s non-penalty shot conversation rate last season stood at 27.2% – none of the 162 players to attempt more than 55 shots from non-penalty situations across the top six European leagues in 2021-22 could match that. That rate of finishing unsurprisingly saw him overperform his expected goals tally by a lot – seven in total – more than any other striker in Europe. It’s unlikely he can maintain this rate, but it’s a clear indication that this elite level of scoring is in his locker.
As his goal map shows below, he is adept at finishing well with either foot, and is more than capable in the air too.
It’s a mix of composure and technique that makes Núñez impressive in front of goal. He has the patience to wait for the right moment to get his shot away and the ability to find the right spot and power to beat the goalkeeper. It’s a skillset that is reminiscent of his idol Cavani.
His ability in the air is something that has rapidly improved too. At 6-foot-2 and 80kg, Núñez matches up to most defenders physically and can outjump them to meet the ball first. His seven headed goals in all competitions were six more than he scored in 2020-21.
But more than that, Núñez’s overall ability is something that has rapidly improved, and his meteoric rise this season has been the main cause of the scepticism that surrounds him. On paper, his goalscoring record before this campaign is pretty average.
In 2020-21, Núñez scored just six league goals in 29 games and underperformed his xG by nearly four. He notched 16 goals in 32 games the season prior to that for Almería in LaLiga 2, but even that is a far from spectacular return. His international career has been slow to take off, too. For Uruguay U20s he netted just four times in 14 games while for the senior side he has just two in nine.
But all signs point to that fact we’re seeing the emergence of an enormous talent rather than witnessing a one-season wonder. Throughout 2020-21, Núñez played through physically-limiting knee pain dating back to an injury he suffered when was 18. In the summer, Núñez missed the Copa America to have knee surgery and has been a different player since.
He’s looked quicker and more agile, but he’s also benefitted from a more prominent role in the Benfica side and another year of adjusting with his team-mates and a new league. With his imposing frame, it’s easy to forget that he’s just 22 years old, a mere year older than Erling Haaland, another superstar young talent who’s already secured a huge transfer to Manchester City ahead of 2022-23.
Núñez had more league goals than Haaland last season. He had more Champions League goals than him too. Despite that, he’s not nearly as hyped.
There are reasons for that, of course. Haaland has performed consistently for three seasons now in a more competitive league, but it’s hard to argue that Núñez is all that far behind Haaland at this point. They also have strikingly similar qualities in terms of pace, power and finishing.
The price tags being floated about are similar too. It’s rumoured that Núñez has a £100m release clause on his head, and with a raft of Premier League clubs including Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle United and West Ham United all rumoured to be in for him, Núñez would not be a bad runners-up prize now Haaland is out of reach.
Jurgen Klopp praised the Uruguayan after Liverpool’s draw with Benfica at Anfield last week, saying he’s, “physically strong, quick, and calm with his finish when he finished the goal off. Good, really good. If he stays healthy, it’s a big career ahead of him.”
Liverpool of course signed a player from the Portuguese league in January who hit the ground running in no time at all. It’s worth noting that, like Núñez, Luis Díaz also scored just six goals in his first season in the Primeira Liga. Diaz scored just six in his second season too, but Núñez then grabbed 26 in his second campaign at Benfica. He’s also three years younger.
With the enormous price tag that’s being suggested, a Premier League move seems the most likely, and his qualities seem perfectly suited for the league. The fit is important, but Núñez has a lot of strings to his bow and isn’t necessarily a systems player.
In that regard again, he’s eerily similar to those 21st-century Uruguayan legends gone by: adaptable and intelligent if a little bit rugged.
Now with those two legends on the wane and with Sosa, Recoba, and Forlán all long gone, Uruguay themselves need a new star to step up to the plate.
In Darwin Núñez, they appear to have just the man.
[/article]
This.. only reason he goes to Utd for is Money. Not saying Ten Hag won't be a success, but they are further away than us at the moment.
News from the matt is Utd are deffo in for him and all of this has been orchestrated by Mendes. LFC (and particularly Klopp, Ward, Edwards, FSG) hate this kind of agent posturing. Benfica and more importantly the player himself are fine about the deal on the table. Mane to Munich has absolutely no bearing on this. BUT Mendes is not popular with the LFC hierarchy, and they don't like being fucked around. A potential problem but still cool. Hold.... HOld..... HOLd....HOLD!!!!!! 😎
We didn't beat a top 4 side. Christ.
Didn't lose to one either.. but yeah 6 draws in the PL is kinda frustrating.
Well we are ONE of them so that’s already 25% better
One win and the league was ours. Bonkers
He's not going Utd peeps, it's all gamesmanship from Benfica to get more ££££ up front. We've got a good relationship with Mendes after all he's the agent for Fabs and Jota, so why would he want to destroy the relationship with us? We've agreed terms with Nunez, he wants to join us, we've done all the hard work. Ignore the noise
He also sorted the Bebe to Utd deal..... 😀
Not arsed about this deal. Not because I don’t see Núñez as a good striker, but more because it stops us from getting the midfielder that we need pretty clearly.
From a Guardian article re the Bebe deal (when it was picked up for review by Portugal's anti-corruption police):
...Mendes had been paid 10% agent's commission, and had also bought, presumably very shortly before, 30% of the player's "economic rights" for an undisclosed amount, which earned him a further €2.7m when United signed Bébé.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2012/may/10/bebe-manchester-united-portuguese-police
So best guess is that Mendes probably wanted to charge United a fee for something else he'd done for them but couldn't do so under the FA / FIFA regs, so they put this deal together instead to get the cash to him. The regs sometimes prohibit stuff which, on the face of it, isn't that dodgy (e.g. (from memory) sometimes an agent can't act on two consecutive deals for the same player if he was on the sell side for the first deal and then on the buy side for the second deal).
Something is usually cobbled together to weigh in the fee he would have got on the deal. Sometimes it's just a simple as paying a bigger commission on the next deal the club does with that particular agent. Other times agents will do a reciprocal arrangement with each other where they "front" for each other on the paperwork for similar value deals (NB this is against the regulations but it goes on and I never saw anyone punished for it). Obviously these kind of options are less suspect than what happened with Bebe.
We need both.
He was a secret double agent then.
That whole story about Bebe still makes me laugh..
I wish we had a super bastard action hero in the middle... of the midfield. Instead we have an artist who recently learned to run.
If we don’t sign a top drawer up and coming (nearly there) CM this season I’d be surprised. Hendo, the man the captain the legend, can’t really do a full season. Thiago is injury prone and prone to the odd bad game. Keita is an enigma to say the least. Milly is a legend but is cracking on a bit. Jones and Elliott are unproven as of yet.
Keita is not an enigma, he's a flat track bully. He looks fine in games where we boss weak opponents, goes hiding when we need to dig in. If Klopp wants to keep him that's fine, he's a sunk cost at this point but he's never turning into a world class midfielder no matter how much we want him to.
Not excited at all. Maybe just a wee bit. Meh.
Yes, exactly this. World-class talent doesn’t always equal world-class player.
All that said, it has to be acknowledged that Keita took a step forward last season with his fitness and availability as well as some strong performances that earned Klopp’s trust. He rose to 3rd or 4th in our CM pecking order on merit.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
