Darwin Nez is living out a ‘dream’ situation at Liverpool. The Uruguayan should have a clear path to Golden Boot territory as the Reds surpass Real Madrid.
Even though it has struggled, Liverpool was leading the top five European leagues in anticipated goals per 90 minutes before the international break. The Reds started off with one of the most difficult schedules in the Premier League, and things got much worse when they received a Premier League record four red cards in only seven games.
And yet, statistically speaking, they are an even more potent offensive threat than the likes of Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. It’s the best possible situation for a striker like Darwin Nez. His predatory behavior does provide him lots of chances, but he also benefits from a very desirable supply chain.
This is a major factor in the widespread expectation of a “explosive” improvement in the Uruguayan’s play, since his 12 Premier League goals are decent but not particularly impressive. Continue waiting for now.
Nez has had 36 high-quality opportunities in the Premier League since moving to England, scoring 10 goals while missing on 26 others (a conversion percentage of 27.7%). According to data provided by A Visual Game, the average conversion percentage among players with at least 50 major opportunities in the Premier League since the 2010/11 season was 41.25 percent. It would be great if Nez could achieve the same heights as his countryman and Anfield predecessor Luis Suárez (47.6 percent) or the man he’replaced’ in Sadio Mané (44.8 percent), but it is not necessary.
If he had scored on just 41.25 percent of his huge opportunities last year, he would have had 15 goals. You’d be looking at a forward with a strike rate near the top of the league, as he has scored 17 goals in 22 Premier League starts, over 22.3 complete matches.
Nez just has to be an average finisher overall, not even at the level of a typical excellent forward. Since he first arrived at Liverpool, he has averaged 0.68 xG per 90 minutes played. In a full season, that’s equivalent to scoring 26 goals, which would have gotten you the Golden Boot four times in the last five years (until Erling Haaland showed up at Manchester City, of course).
Even if he only played 75% of the potential minutes, which is more likely considering Liverpool’s extensive rotation and the chance of the occasional injury, he would still score 19 league goals, which would likely place him in the top five. The expected goals statistics shows that Nez doesn’t have to be very clinical to ‘explode,’ since it calculates the possibility that the average player will score a certain opportunity based on thousands of opportunities over a number of years.
Liverpool likely expected to get a striker who could routinely score more goals than expected after agreeing to pay Benfica up to $106m (£87m/€100m). Given the abundance of opportunities available to Nez, a mediocre return on investment is sufficient.
