European report explains why Slot continues to snub Nunez – and it’s not to do with performance | OneFootball

If Darwin Nunez is to leave Liverpool in the summer, there’s a strong possibility that he does so having fallen one match short of reaching a notable milestone at Anfield.

The Uruguay striker joined the Reds from Benfica in 2022 for an initial £64m, with a further £21m in add-ons potentially being triggered (BBC Sport), and some of those have already been activated.

It seems increasingly likely that this’ll be his final season on Merseyside, with David Ornstein and Fabrizio Romano among the reliable sources to indicate that the 25-year-old could soon be on his way out of the club.

Liverpool on the verge of triggering Nunez transfer add-on

Nunez has only started one Premier League match since the beginning of January, and reports from Portugal explain one theory as to why that might be the case.

According to Tuesday’s print edition of A Bola (via Sport Witness), Benfica have already received €10m (£8.6m) of the prospective add-ons from Liverpool, with those clauses triggered when he reached a certain number of starts in the Premier League and Champions League.

The Lisbon club are due another €5m (£4.3m) whenever the Uruguayan makes his 50th top-flight start for the Reds…and he’s currently on 49.

(Photo by Lewis Storey/Getty Images)

Liverpool appear to have their mind made up on Nunez

Nunez has had a difficult campaign in front of goal, finding the net just seven times from 1,920 minutes on the pitch – last season he scored 18 goals in 3,026 minutes of game-time – but it now seems that his continued absence from the starting XI isn’t solely down to performance.

Given the rumoured likelihood of a summer exit, and that Liverpool thankfully have no injuries to their current forwards, it’s quite plausible that the 25-year-old might’ve already made his final Premier League start for the club.

He didn’t make it off the bench in the narrow win over Leicester on Sunday and missed the West Ham game due to illness, but he’s still featured in 42 different matches this season, so it’s not as if Arne Slot is completely snubbing him – certainly not to the mysterious extent to which Federico Chiesa has been overlooked.

A saving of just over £4m doesn’t exactly seem transformational for LFC, and if that’s the main reason why Nunez hasn’t been starting in the top flight, he could argue that he’s being hard done by.

If Liverpool were planning to keep him for another campaign, though, surely the 50-start add-on would be triggered at some point. It therefore suggests that he isn’t in the plans for 2025/26 and may well be on the move this summer if a satisfactory offer is tabled.