EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsYou can't defend him. He's the full package. He's world class. He loves to play. He's an outstanding technician. He's a huge asset with a carefree nature. He's mature of mind. He's one of the top players in the world.This is just a sampling of what a handful of top managers said about Florian Wirtz -- before he moved to Liverpool.The promise was, essentially, a perfect playmaker: someone who was equally adept at finding space without the ball between the lines and breaking the opposition apart once he got possession.He could dribble past you or split the defense open with a through ball. He could tee a teammate up for a tap-in or blast a shot past the goalkeeper. And he could do it all without requiring any trade-offs elsewhere. Unlike luxury playmakers of previous generations, he worked just as hard to win games with the ball as he did to win the ball back.This is why Liverpool spent a then-club record 117.5 million ($133 million) last summer for a player not already in the Premier League. For someone with such a diverse set of skills, the floor is incredibly high. Not everything needs to click for him to still provide value somewhere.But the ceiling was just as high. Wirtz was the best player in the Bundesliga as a 20-year-old. Not only could he become the best player in the Premier League -- he could become the best player in the world. Wherever his career went, this much seemed to be true: drop Florian Wirtz into your lineup, and he'd help your team win.But then, almost as soon as Wirtz arrived in England, Liverpool started losing: 12 times, in fact, after just four defeats the season prior. It was the club's most Premier League losses in over a decade. The Reds followed up their 84-point title-winning season with a 24-point decline. They finished last season closer to the relegation places on points than to winning the title.And who else to blame but the guy with just five goals and three assists since he joined from Bayer Leverkusen? Well, first there was the manager, Arne Slot, but Liverpool fired him. And then there was the sudden decline of superstar Mohamed Salah, but Liverpool agreed to terminate his contract.Now, with just a solitary assist to his name this season for a team with a stuttering attack, Wirtz's struggles have become the easiest explanation for Liverpool's inexplicable decline. The fanbase is divided, former players want him dropped, and barely-sourced transfer rumors have started to chase the scent.Florian Wirtz feels like a failure, but is it really time for Liverpool to give up?Who was Florian Wirtz at Leverkusen?Sure, managers Hansi Flick and Xabi Alonso say he's good at everything, but what does that really mean? How did Wirtz play at Leverkusen? And maybe more importantly, who did he play like?Looking back through every individual season in Europe's Big Five top leagues since about 2010 in the Stats Perform database, there have been 18 instances of a player who did the following on a per-90-minute basis: Touched the ball at least 80 times Completed 80% of his passes or better Attempted at least 2 shots Created at least 2 shots Played at least 7 passes into the penalty area Took at least 6 touches inside of the penalty areaWhy these numbers? They show a particular profile of a player: someone who is constantly on the ball, creating chances, taking shots, and getting on the ball near the goal -- but also not constantly turning the ball over.There are lots of players who touch the ball a lot and keep possession but aren't getting involved near the goal. There are fewer but still more players who get lots of shots and create lots of chances, but don't touch the ball often and do turn the ball over often.But it's incredibly rare -- and valuable -- to be able to do both. Here's the list: Lionel Messi: four times with Barcelona Neymar: twice with Paris Saint-Germain Michael Olise: twice with Bayern Munich David Silva: once with Manchester City Dsir Dou: once with PSG Eden Hazard: once with Chelsea Kevin De Bruyne: once with Manchester City Lamine Yamal: once with Barcelona Lorenzo Insigne: once with Napoli Ousmane Dembl: once with PSG Rayan Cherki: once with Manchester CityIf we get a little stingier with the minutes load -- say, 2,000 in a season -- the list shrinks even further: only the Messi, Olise, Insigne, Hazard, and Yamal seasons remain.Well, those and Wirtz's last two seasons with Leverkusen:What's still missing is anything accounting for the ability to beat a man off the dribble. If you've watched any of these players ever play soccer before, you know most of them have no issues dribbling past defenders. But if we introduce one more threshold -- at least two successful dribbles per match -- then Insigne drops off the high-minutes list, while Silva and De Bruyne fall off the lower-threshold list.So, what we're left with is this: since around 2010, across the best soccer leagues in the world, only five players have ever handled such a high-touch, high-minute, do-everything attacking load: the best player of all time (Messi), the current player most likely to challenge Messi for that title (Yamal), one of the Premier League's modern greats (Hazard), an attacker on a dominant superteam (Olise), and Wirtz -- twice, before his 22nd birthday, for a German club with the same financial resources as Crystal Palace.What's happened with Liverpool?First, let's look at the same collection of numbers from above.Here's what Wirtz did in his last two seasons in the Bundesliga and so far in the Premier League, per 90 minutes:Funnily enough, Wirtz almost hits all of the arbitrary benchmarks I created above in the Premier League. But still, almost everything is down: fewer shots, fewer chances created, fewer passes into the box, fewer take-ons.The biggest dip, of course, is the decline in touches -- nearly 20 fewer per game. That, then, goes a long way to explaining the drop off in everything else. Of course he's taking fewer shots, creating fewer chances, dribbling past defenders less often when he's not on the ball as much.Here's how his touch heatmap looks so far with Liverpool:The biggest difference in Wirtz's touch distribution across the two leagues is in the attacking third: 50 per game with Leverkusen, 35 per game with Liverpool. Most specifically, as you can see above, he's just almost never getting on the ball in the center of the attacking third.Tacticians and coaches refer to the area extended out from the top of the center of the box as "zone 14." The history of modern soccer can nearly be explained by teams first realizing how important this area was -- the second striker in the common 4-4-2 was replaced by an attacking midfielder who dropped into zone 14. And then by teams doing everything they can to prevent the ball from ever getting into zone 14 -- the high press and the focus on the half-spaces (the area between the wings and zone 14) and even set pieces have replaced the traditional playmaker.Wirtz took most of his touches with Leverkusen in the left half-space, and that's true with Liverpool, but he was still able to access that valuable zone-14 area much more often in the Bundesliga: 19 touches per 90, compared to 14 so far with Liverpool.That, perhaps, helps explain the biggest issue with Wirtz's Liverpool tenure so far: the lack of creativity.In his final two Bundesliga seasons, he generated 0.29 expected goals (xG) per game with his shots. That's dipped in England, but not by much: down to 0.25. He's only scored five goals, but he's generated 7.7 xG. In those final two seasons in Germany, he scored 18 non-penalty goals from 15 xG. Getting quality shots hasn't been an issue in England -- finishing them has, but there's no reason to think that'll continue.Rather, the quality chance creation hasn't travelled from Leverkusen to Liverpool. In Germany, he generated 0.37 expected assists per 90 minutes over his last two seasons -- tied for the most in the league among players with at least 3,000 minutes played. That number would've been second in the Premier League last season.Instead, across his first season-and-change, Wirtz has generated 0.18 xA per 90 minutes -- just 18th-best among players who have played at least 2,000 minutes.Why it's still too early to give up on WirtzWhile Wirtz hasn't been the potential Ballon d'Or winner that his record fee and prior performance suggested he might be, that doesn't mean that he's been bad, either.Since the start of last season, just seven players in England with at least 2,000 minutes of game time are attempting and creating at least two shots per 90 minutes: Rayan Cherki, Bruno Fernandes, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden, Anton Stach, Dominik Szoboszlai, and Wirtz. Only six players have taken more touches inside the box, only 10 players have completed more dribbles, and he's in the top 20 for passes played into the box.The, um, upside of the downside of Wirtz is that even without the goals and assists, he still is doing all of the other things that help your team win: progressing the ball up the field, finding space, and generating shots.In particular, his ability to find space in between the lines was a superpower in the Bundesliga -- and that's translated to the Premier League. Per Gradient Sports, he's tied for third in the league with 33 line-breaking passes received. No one else on the team has more than 18.He's vital to Liverpool's ability to move the ball up the field. But what is that worth?The player ratings from the stats app Futi look at how much everything a player does on the ball, including receiving passes, and then calculates how much it increases his team's chances of scoring and decreases their chances of scoring a goal. They then adjust the numbers based on whether the player is starting or not, what team they did it against, and how differently the team performs when he's on the field and off. Finally, they convert it all into an easy-to-understand 0-to-100 scale, where 50 is league-average.Last season -- even with 0.3 goals+assists per 90, a steep decline from the 0.68 he produced across his Leverkusen career -- Wirtz finished with a 60 from Futi. That was seventh among central attackers in the Premier League, after Cherki, Fernandes, Tijjani Reijnders, Cole Palmer, Enzo Fernndez, and Mikkel Damsgaard. As for this season? He's still at 60.You, of course, don't break the British transfer record for the seventh-best central attacker in the league. But you also don't break it for just one season of play. You break it for all of his prime years.Wirtz was only 22 last season, he's only 23 this season, and his peak stretch won't even start until next year.We've, of course, seen other attacking midfielders dominate the Premier League before they turned 24. Dele Alli was a star for Tottenham as a teenager. Philippe Coutinho joined Liverpool at 20 and performed right away. Cesc Fabregas was Arsenal captain by 21. Rayan Cherki might be the best player in the league right now, and he's a couple months younger than Wirtz.The difference is that Cherki still hasn't played a full, heavy minutes load at Manchester City, and he joined a much more stable, talented team. With all of the other players, they did it in a much less competitive Premier League.After the pandemic, the growing financial advantage of Premier League clubs reached escape velocity: personnel spending lapped the rest of Europe, and that eventually caught up with the product on the field over the past couple seasons. Per the site Pitch Rank, which estimates team strength by comparing betting odds across European competition, the Premier League has 18 teams currently in the top 50 of the world. The Bundesliga, meanwhile, has just six.Wirtz's dominance in Germany was both real and inflated by a domestic league that's steadily declined in quality over the past five years. Liverpool knew this, but they also knew that if you factored in his age, any decline that came from moving to a tougher league could be offset by the improvement that comes when most players enter their peak years of 24 to 28.Recently, we saw this happen with the captain the defending champs, a player who plays the same position as Wirtz. Martin degaard was a decent player for his first two seasons with Arsenal -- doing a lot of the small things but struggling to create goals and assists. Then, in year three, he turned into a superstar and made the Premier League's Team of the Year. The other top attacking midfielder in the league and the defending Player of the Year, Bruno Fernandes, didn't leave the Portuguese league until he was 25.Liverpool are clearly a team in transition -- with a new coach, a soon-to-be-new director of football, an unbalanced roster, and an amalgam of young, peak, and post-peak players. They're not trying to win everything right now. They're trying to win everything a couple years from now.However you want to interpret Wirtz's first year-plus in England, that star transformation in Germany still did happen -- he did things that only a handful of modern players have ever done, and he did it all across multiple seasons. There's a chance that it never comes together in the Premier League -- that the situation at Leverkusen was uniquely perfect, that the space and time afforded to him in England just doesn't align with his skillset.But then, there's the reason why Liverpool haven't given up -- and why Liverpool shouldn't be giving up. This team is building for the future, and in a couple years? There's still a chance that Florian Wirtz turns into one of the best players in the Premier League.
