Grace Robertson's avatar
Grace Robertson's avatar
Stats are from Fotmob unless stated otherwise.
It’s hard to overstate just how excited people were about Florian Wirtz.
He arrived at Liverpool at age 22, having already won the Bundesliga players’ player of the season twice and the Footballer of the Year award (voted by German journalists). When Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen won their first Bundesliga title in the club’s history, breaking Bayern Munich’s eleven-year winning streak in the process, Wirtz was widely considered the star man.
Liverpool had to beat significant interest from Bayern and Manchester City to sign Wirtz. Bayern believed they had been in the driving seat to sign the player until Liverpool successfully managed to turn his head. There was even talk of interest from Real Madrid. So you can see why Liverpool signing him was viewed as a fairly major coup. They were getting arguably the best player in Germany, the man who was likely to be the central figure for the national team. Yes, the Premier League is harder than the Bundesliga, but at a young age he should continue to improve and become an obvious star in English football.
That… isn’t quite happening.
Jamie Carragher outright called for Wirtz to be dropped from the side. I think this is overly harsh, but the pro-Wirtz arguments have been much more “he’s quietly doing useful things” and “he needs time” than “he’s one of the best players in the league”. I haven’t seen anyone particularly argue that he’s been playing every bit as well for Liverpool as he did at Leverkusen.
So as far as I can tell, there are three potential things going on here: he’s not being used properly, he’s struggling to adapt on and off the pitch, or he was never that good to begin with. Let’s interrogate this and see what we find.
We’ve come to associate Wirtz with Alonso’s title win, but before then he actually earned the plaudits playing a pretty different style of football. Alonso’s predecessor Gerardo Seoane played more of a transition-heavy style in a 4-2-3-1 shape. Wirtz really became the core of that attack. He was how Leverkusen moved the ball into the penalty area. If he had a signature move in this era, it was breaking forward into space on the counter and playing a killer through-ball for another attacker. Seoane’s other attackers really became foils for Wirtz to do this as often as possible.
Wirtz tore his ACL in March 2022. When he returned to the side ten months later, Seoane had been replaced by Alonso and a very different style of football. Alonso went against the dominant Bundesliga counter-pressing style and enforced a structured possession game on Leverkusen’s opponents. The shape was 3-4-3, with Wirtz playing that in-between role that’s neither a classic number ten nor a left winger. He had freedom to drift within his side of the pitch while being harder for opponents to pick up. He often seemed to be the player allowed to break Alonso’s positional structure. So much of Alonso’s success in Germany was by doing something radically different in a tactically homogenous league. Teams didn’t quite know what to do against them.
Wirtz shined in a different way here. He started taking more shots, and added more quick movements to get the ball out of his feet, without really taking anything away from his previous game. He was largely playing against compact mid-block sides that were getting stretched out wide because Leverkusen’s wing-backs were playing high up the pitch, but at the same time pinned back by a dominant striker. None of this is to suggest Wirtz didn’t excel in this period. He was the best player in a team that won the title. But this team was very much geared to get the most out of him.
Then he moved to England. It is not his fault that Liverpool had no coherent plan. It’s also not his fault that his main competitor for the number ten role, Dominik Szoboszlai, went on to have the best season of his career (perhaps because he had competition in Wirtz). But there was never any predictable rhythm to what was happening in attack. Arne Slot was less of a highly structured systems manager and let his players figure things out a bit more in possession, which is not innately a good or bad thing, but it requires the pieces to naturally fit together. There was never a sense of how Wirtz, Mohamed Salah, Cody Gakpo and Hugo Ekitiké were supposed to move together, while Szoboszlai seemed to play a different position every week. It was the worst possible environment for a new signing to come into.
So what we saw was… inconsistent. He had a period from late December until the end of January when he delivered six goals and three assists in 849 minutes (all competitions) when it started to look like he might be getting to grips with it. But then he closed out the season with just one goal and two assists in 1193 minutes. It looked less like progress than a purple patch.
In the aggregate, we could see what was down in the data. He was getting around 20% fewer touches of the ball per 90 than his last season at Leverkusen (this time league-only), even as his touches within the box only went down by 2%. So he was a bit more of a passenger in the build-up. He went from taking about three shots per 90 to just two, taking a dent out of his xG and thus his goalscoring threat in the process. Most notably, his volume of dribbles more than halved. This is where the stats feel like they fit something I could see: he was taking fewer risks on the ball. He’s deciding not to do the hard dribble or through ball and play it safe instead.
I can think of a few main reasons why this might be the case. The first could be that he’s simply low on confidence. It’s entirely natural to avoid taking big risks when you’re not feeling confident. I’m not suggesting this isn’t a meaningful problem, but it’s something that can be resolved with good man-management. And if Liverpool collectively play well, Wirtz probably starts feeling more confident anyway.