Darwin Núñez has reached an agreement to leave Al-Hilal at the end of the current campaign, ending a spell in Saudi Arabia that will have lasted less than a year.
The 26-year-old joined the Riyadh club last August for an initial fee of £46 million but has not featured for Al-Hilal since February. In 16 league appearances he scored six goals and supplied four assists; those numbers, and the fact he has been omitted from match squads, underline how quickly the move unravelled.
Al-Hilal signed Karim Benzema in January and, under Saudi Pro League regulations that allow clubs to register only eight foreign players born before 2003 in their 25-man squads, the club chose to sacrifice Núñez from the registered list to make room for Benzema. The decision deprived Núñez of competitive minutes even as Benzema settled into the squad.
The arc of Núñez's career to this point sharpens the stakes. Liverpool signed him in 2022 for a fee that could have reached £85 million and he scored 40 goals in 143 appearances for the club across three seasons. He left Anfield for Saudi Arabia last summer; at Al-Hilal he earned a reported wage of £400,000 per week but never re-established himself in the team.
There are immediate consequences. Chelsea have been credited with interest in the forward, and Juventus have also been reported as monitoring him. With an exit agreed for the end of the season, Núñez will be available at a moment when both clubs and others are weighing summer options — and when his lack of game time is the defining fact of the second half of the campaign.
That decline has not gone unnoticed by coaches. Arne Slot called his work rate "unacceptable," a sharp public rebuke that followed inconsistent form in England and an uneven start in Saudi Arabia. Reports say Núñez has been training away from the matchday squad at Al-Hilal; that absence, and the resulting drop in visibility, has also cost him his starting place in Marcelo Bielsa's Uruguay team.
The tension in the story is concrete: a player bought for large fees at two separate points in his career — a move to Liverpool in 2022 that carried an £85 million potential price tag and a £46 million switch last summer — who now finds himself off the pitch and removed from registration to accommodate a new star signing. The statistics underline the contradiction: productive spells earlier in his career, including a season of prolific scoring that established his value, contrasted with a half-season of minimal involvement at his latest club.
The immediate next act is clear and narrow. Núñez will leave Al-Hilal when the season ends, and that creates a transfer window in which clubs including Chelsea and Juventus have been linked. For Núñez, who scored six league goals in his brief Saudi spell and went from regular appearances at Liverpool to months without a match since February, the forthcoming weeks will determine whether he can rebuild his career in Europe or whether the move to Saudi Arabia becomes a more permanent pivot away from the top European game.
