Re Jota - why are you still saying this? He's doubled his xG this season. No one does that once you get to a decent sample size. It's not that being over his xG is an outlier (he's been over and under for us), it's being double his xG which is the outlier. Jota's output, over a large enough sample size, will revert towards the mean. That's just xG being xG. Some players will marginally outperform it (Jota for us and perhaps over his career) and there will be some outliers who overperform it significantly. But plenty of great goal scorers will basically hit their xG over a large enough sample size. Nunez's numbers, like everyone elses, will tend towards the mean. It's no surprise that his have done that over a large enough sample size. I'm not saying his season overshooting his xG is representative. I'm saying his performance over his career is representative. You're saying that we can ignore a part of the data sample as an anomaly whilst focussing on other parts of the data sample. But that's not how data works. And of course if you want to get into finishing skill etc you're going to have to explain how Nunez over performed that season in Portugal - presumably you think it was luck? That is, the intangibles that you're deriding me for relying on. In reality variance really matters in goal scoring, chances which 'should' be taken are actually less likely to be taken than we think and the biggest predictor of high scoring output is high value shot output.
Nunez takes lots of high value shots because per 90 his xG is high and per 90 his shot numbers are high. He's less efficient with the shots he does take than Jota (who is unbelievably good at shot selection, I can't recall seeing him shoot from outside the box, like ever) but he's getting lots of good chances to score goals. He absolutely needs to score more of them in the future but it's not going to change his numbers that much even if he does. His goals per 90 numbers are already really good. This has been said a million times by multiple posters in this thread and has fallen on deaf ears (and hasn't stopped silly comments like the one from collytum above) but anyway, there it is.
As for the comments about finishing - who's arguing Nunez is a better goalscorer than Jota? That's not the conversation being had in comparing them.
Nunez doesn't take a such a high volume of high value shots as you think, on average. A good metric for that would be to look at the average xG per shot a player has had. There are 57 players who have at least an xG 5 in the PL this season. If you rank them by that metric, he falls 24th - just behind Keane Lewis-Potter and above Beto and Salah, with an average xG of 0.143 (the average across all 57 players is 0.138). The top scorers this season in the league are all above him on that metric - although ours arent (Salah is at 0.149, Jota at 0.129, Diaz at 0.126, and Gakpo at 0.121).
For reference - Here is the top goal scorers in the league (non-Penalty), ranked by this metric (and for npxG + A per 90) - everyone who has at least 10 league non-pen goals (plus Diaz/Alvarez/Jota) as useful points of comparison. If ranked by Expected Goals + Assist, it shows Darwin as the 2nd best (behind only Haaland) - ranking by actual puts both Haaland and Darwin down to 5th and 6th - and thanks to Watkins/Brennan Johnson/McBurnie and Hwang MASSIVELY outperforming their expected goals. Mo Salah, another on here that many have criticised, is 3rd in the Expected metrics, and 8th in the overall - hardly poor.
| Player | Mins | npxG | Shots | xG/Shot | npG | A | Over/Under Performance xG | xG+A/90 | G+A/90 |
| Ollie Watkins | 2970 | 16 | 103 | 0.155 | 19 | 12 | 18.8% | 0.848 | 0.939 |
| Brennan Johnson | 1648 | 8 | 42 | 0.190 | 10 | 7 | 25.0% | 0.819 | 0.928 |
| Oliver McBurnie | 1280 | 5.3 | 31 | 0.171 | 10 | 3 | 88.7% | 0.584 | 0.914 |
| Hwang Hee-chan | 1882 | 6.1 | 41 | 0.149 | 10 | 9 | 63.9% | 0.722 | 0.909 |
| Erling Haaland | 2211 | 20.1 | 99 | 0.203 | 17 | 5 | -15.4% | 1.022 | 0.896 |
| Darwin Núñez | 1995 | 14.9 | 104 | 0.143 | 11 | 8 | -26.2% | 1.033 | 0.857 |
| Richarlison | 1399 | 8.8 | 58 | 0.152 | 10 | 3 | 13.6% | 0.759 | 0.836 |
| Mohamed Salah | 2264 | 13.2 | 93 | 0.142 | 12 | 9 | -9.1% | 0.883 | 0.835 |
| Cole Palmer | 2162 | 8.5 | 79 | 0.108 | 11 | 9 | 29.4% | 0.728 | 0.833 |
| Son Heung-min | 2487 | 8.9 | 71 | 0.125 | 14 | 9 | 57.3% | 0.648 | 0.832 |
| Phil Foden | 2518 | 9.3 | 93 | 0.100 | 16 | 7 | 72.0% | 0.583 | 0.822 |
| Chris Wood | 1555 | 9.1 | 37 | 0.246 | 12 | 1 | 31.9% | 0.585 | 0.752 |
| Cody Gakpo | 1405 | 6.9 | 57 | 0.121 | 10 | 1 | 44.9% | 0.506 | 0.705 |
| Jarrod Bowen | 2839 | 9.9 | 73 | 0.136 | 16 | 6 | 61.6% | 0.504 | 0.697 |
| Alexander Isak | 1942 | 13.3 | 61 | 0.218 | 14 | 1 | 5.3% | 0.663 | 0.695 |
| Kai Havertz | 2364 | 10 | 57 | 0.175 | 11 | 6 | 10.0% | 0.609 | 0.647 |
| Diogo Jota | 1145 | 5.3 | 41 | 0.129 | 7 | 1 | 32.1% | 0.495 | 0.629 |
| Bukayo Saka | 2753 | 9.9 | 94 | 0.105 | 10 | 9 | 1.0% | 0.618 | 0.621 |
| Leon Bailey | 1888 | 6.1 | 50 | 0.122 | 10 | 3 | 63.9% | 0.434 | 0.620 |
| Luis Díaz | 2410 | 11.1 | 88 | 0.126 | 8 | 8 | -27.9% | 0.713 | 0.598 |
| Dominic Solanke | 3113 | 16.1 | 99 | 0.163 | 16 | 3 | -0.6% | 0.552 | 0.549 |
| Nicolas Jackson | 2351 | 14.8 | 64 | 0.231 | 10 | 4 | -32.4% | 0.720 | 0.536 |
| Rasmus Højlund | 1953 | 7.3 | 34 | 0.215 | 8 | 2 | 9.6% | 0.429 | 0.461 |
| Julián Álvarez | 2628 | 11.1 | 95 | 0.117 | 8 | 5 | -27.9% | 0.551 | 0.445 |
| Yoane Wissa | 2357 | 10.1 | 62 | 0.163 | 10 | 1 | -1.0% | 0.424 | 0.420 |
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