Darwin Nunez and the Lovable Affinity for Sports' Chaos Agents
Life would be a lot better if we embraced the mayhem.
Sports are beautiful.
I think we can all agree on that.
After all, sports are a microcosm of life’s struggles—both internal and external. The mental hurdles one must clear and the physical and psychological challenges presented by those who oppose you.
It’s what makes sports so goddamn enthralling.
Someone has to win; someone must lose. A titanic battle between What Is and What Could Be, and What Might Never Be stands off to the side, watching and waiting.
Sports, in a lot of ways, are alluring because they’re chaotic. Winning and losing are feelings that can be felt within the span of a few short seconds by the same person, the same team, the same fans. It all binds us together. And that chaos is beautiful.
That chaos is also fair. It always seems to play out that way. At least if you listen to Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” during the hospital scene with Aaron Eckhart.
Everything in life could conceivably come down to something as simple as a coin flip. Same with sports. A shot goes up in basketball, it’s either a miss or a make. A shot travels towards the goal in soccer, it’s either going in or not. A pass is thrown in football, someone’s catching it or it hits the ground. There’s very rarely a third option present.
And yet, despite all of that, there are players across sports who exhibit a certain chaos factor. One that breaks your brain and thinking. One that causes the analytical side of your brain to short-circuit and give up, thus allowing the more emotional side to take over.
That’s what makes Liverpool and Uruguyuan striker Darwin Nunez so enthralling to me. He challenges what I should like and forces me to enjoy the show. I’ll try to explain.
Darwin Nunez fails more than he succeeds. It’s an indisputable fact.
Last season for Liverpool, Nunez attempted 107 shots. Only 11 were goals. That means he failed 96 times. It wasn’t the most across the top five European leagues—Premier League (England), Bundesliga (Germany), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), and Ligue 1 (France)—but it was up there.
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia of Napoli in Italy’s Serie A had the most misses among any player in the top five leagues last season. Kvaratskhelia, whose name is quite easy to pronounce, attempted 128 shots. Like Nunez, only 11 found the back of the net. That means Kvaratskhelia, who plays for Georgia internationally, had a whopping 117 attempts that did not result in a goal.
Even the best goal scorer in the world’s top five leagues last season, Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane, missed the net 105 times. He scored 36 times on 141 shots.
By definition, these players are failures. That’s what makes scoring a goal so exhilarating. But for Nunez, it goes a bit deeper than that.
The 25-year-old—believe it or not, Nunez’s birthday is June 24; so consider this a birthday present—racked up 15.5 non-penalty expected goals (npxG) last season for Liverpool in England.
To make npxG simple to understand, I’ll phrase it like this: imagine any shot being weighted by a percentage chance of going into the net, but that percentage chance is based on historical data of similar shots taken from similar spots. Because penalty kicks are far more likely to be goals than not goals—for instance, the expected goal (xG) percentage on penalty attempts is 0.79, or as it should be read: 79 percent of the time they go in—they’re removed from the equation thanks to non-penalty expected goals in order to streamline things and give you a better understanding of who’s really overperforming or underperforming based on data.
Among players in those top five leagues, Nunez ranked 11th in npxG. In other words, Nunez got into great spots and got shots off. A lot. They just didn’t result in goals. As mentioned before, Nunez only scored 11 goals on a 15.5 npxG, meaning he underperformed by 4.5. That underperformance ranked 58th out of the 62 players in Europe’s top five leagues to rack up at least 10.0 npxG during this past season.
Yet the beauty of Nunez lies in one indisputable fact: the Uruguayan striker took more shots per 90 minutes than anyone in Europe’s top five leagues. Yes, even more than Paris Saint-Germain’s French superstar Kylian Mbappe. While technically they both tied at the top with 4.7 attempts per 90 minutes this past season, it was Nunez who overtakes Mbappe when you go more than one decimal place—4.71 to 4.67. Even when adjusting for every league with advanced data available, it’s still Nunez at the top. The man shoots. A lot. And misses. A ton.
However, that’s part of what makes him so captivating.
We can zero in on Sunday’s match between Panama and Nunez’s Uruguay.
The two sides met in each’s opening Group C match for the 2024 Copa America. The final score on the night? 3-1 in favor of Uruguay. It was a worthy scoreline. Uruguay dominated large portions of the match, playing a fluid style that routinely caught Panama off-guard. Yet, despite the 3-1 final scoreline, it was a 1-0 match until the 85th minute partly because Darwin Nunez did what he’s done so much in recent times: fail.
The combined xG on those four attempts? 0.62. The only clear-cut chance that Nunez missed was the third picture, the one that came at 28:47. That was a chance worth 0.41 xG by itself, meaning it had a 41 percent chance of going in. We’re talking quite nearly a coin flip.
Those failures could have derailed him. Nunez could have stopped trying. He could have become more passive, more lethargic, just a passenger in the game. But that’s not who he is. And that’s partly why I find him so fun even though the analytical portion of my brain tells me he underperforms to a great degree. This is where my emotional side comes in.
While the final product—putting the ball in the back of the net—is missing for large portions of time, it’s Nunez’s sheer ability to do everything right up until that moment which draws me in. It’s intoxicating.
But the universe would balance itself out on Sunday night. Just when you thought Nunez was going to walk out of this match without a notch in his ledger, Nunez did what he also does: score from an improbable situation.
Darwin Nunez bangs a left-footed volley through both a defender and the goalkeeper to give Uruguay a 2-0 lead and three crucial points. The attempt had a 0.19 xG attached to it—a 19 percent chance of going in. It took until his fifth try of the night, which came 85 minutes into the match, for Nunez to find the back of the net. That’s who he is. He perseveres.
And what was Nunez’s xG overall on the night? 0.81 on five shots. He overperformed. One goal to 0.81 xG. Five shots, just like he usually averages per 90 minutes. A coin flip that landed perfectly. The chaos was fair.
It was the 89th goal by Nunez that can be tracked with advanced data, such as distance, xG, post-shot expected goals (PSxG), and what body part he shot with—i.e. head, right foot, and left foot. Of the previous 88 goals, only 14 were scored with his left foot. That’s 16 percent. In fact, Nunez had scored more with his head (15) than with his left foot (14). He scored 59 times with his right foot.
Now this is the most Darwin Nunez shit ever. Miss four times? I’m coming back to score on the fifth with the wrong foot. If that isn’t chaos, I don’t know what is.
This is what makes sports so emphatically cool.
A star who fails more than damn near everyone else in his field can do something as remarkable as this. A person who does everything right except the one thing he was brought to the team to do can turn around and make you realize that sometimes nothing makes sense, and also that everything does.
Nunez fails. We all do. But he also succeeds. Just like us. The key is that he continues to fight against the inner demons that implore him to alter who he is and the naysayers and skeptics who shout at him to stop altogether. That’s why he’s flawed. That’s why he’s perfect.
And what is life if not a person’s struggle which tests their resolve in the hopes of eventually overcoming the obstacles in their way through sheer force of will and their indomitable nature to never give up in the face of great odds?
That’s why sports needs someone like Darwin Nunez. Because he’s all of us.
And I love him for it.