Yes or No? Will Liverpool ever see value from the £116m invested in Florian Wirtz? | OneFootball

When you pay more than £100m for an attack-minded player, you’d expect them to have a few goals and assists to their name from their first 10 league appearances. But that hasn’t been the case for Florian Wirtz at Liverpool.

Now 11 games into his Premier League career after his big summer move from Bayer Leverkusen, which set Liverpool back up to £116m, Wirtz remains without a goal or assist in the competition. He has assisted a few goals in the Champions League and Community Shield, but the wait for his first Premier League goal contribution will go on beyond the November international break.

In the meantime, the debate is raging on about whether or not Wirtz was worth the big money. Some are convinced he’ll come good for Liverpool with a bit of time; others are already alarmed by his lack of measurable impact.

What side of the debate do you stand on? Our writers have had our say on whether we think Liverpool will ever get value from Wirtz…

It was an awful lot of money to invest on a player in the first place and, from what I have seen so far, I do have serious doubts if he’ll ever justify that fee.

The player has obvious talents and an eye for a pass, as his formidable record in the Bundesliga showed. But the tempo of the Premier League seems to be passing him by, and the physicality of opponents also looks a level above him. On the flip side, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his best performances for the Reds have come in the Champions League.

But in the Premier League, I’m just not sure and I do fear Liverpool will never get full value from his signing, nor ever get anywhere near the same return on the price they paid. He won’t be on ‘Antony at Man Utd’ levels of failure, but I do think Liverpool may live to regret spending such huge sums on him.

It’s hard to say any player is worth £116m – money is becoming increasingly crazy in football, but the early signs from Florian Wirtz aren’t great.

Liverpool made Wirtz their top target early in the summer window, and that was justified given his sensational form for Bayer Leverkusen, but he hasn’t replicated that in the Premier League. He has shown some positive flashes, but zero goals or assists in a team of Liverpool’s quality means questions must be asked.

He’s still only 22 and, of course, has the potential to improve and adapt to English football, but when Everton centre-back Michael Keane is outscoring you, if Wirtz continues to draw blanks this season, we could look back at this as a wasted spend from Liverpool.

Harvey Elliott notched five goals and three assists for Liverpool last season, despite limited minutes. Arne Slot might have been better off keeping him rather than splashing a mammoth fee on Wirtz.

If Florian Wirtz was worth £116million, then the likes of Real Madrid and Bayern Munich would have spent it on him before Liverpool did. Madrid are the biggest club in the world and Bayern are the biggest club in Germany, and they would have seen Wirtz from the time he made his first-team debut back in 2020, but clearly, they did not think that he was worth £116m.

Of course, there are other factors at play – such as whether Madrid or Bayern needed Wirtz in their team, whether the player himself wanted to leave before, whether Bayer were ready to sell him before the 2025 summer – but surely there were some doubts. It was ONLY Liverpool who were willing to cough up that much cash on him.

Whether Wirtz proves that he is worth £116m will depend on what he wins for Liverpool and the impact he makes at the Merseyside club. Still only 22, Wirtz has time on his side to win major trophies, such as the Premier League and the Champions League, with Liverpool also boasting a very strong squad.

It is too early to write off Wirtz – after all, it has only been a few months since he made the move from Bayer Leverkusen. The likes of Joao Cancelo, Patrice Evra and Luis Suarez did not make an immediate impact in the Premier League when they first arrived, but they eventually went on to star for their respective clubs.

I do think Wirtz will become more effective before the end of the season. Right now, he’s adapting to a role in a system where some of the players around him have changed as well. His role seems to have disrupted how Liverpool play too, so he’ll need to find his place.

But it might just be a confidence thing and once the penny drops, he could pick up pace. That said, he seemed to have a breakthrough in the Champions League and that hasn’t translated yet.

So, whether he’ll ever be worth the money Liverpool paid is another matter. Not many of the players who’ve gone for £100m or more have turned out to be worth it, so he’ll have to become something special in the long run.

Liverpool will absolutely see the value of Wirtz. He’s actually been good in many parts of the game, but in the statistics-based works of football it’s going unnoticed.

He’s a supreme talent but that doesn’t make him less human than other players who take time to settle at a new club. He’s also joined the club after the death of a player and there are still major shockwaves being dealt with from that.

Not only that, he is part of a new cycle at the club and there are always growing pains. Liverpool will see the best of Wirtz and he will recoup his value, he is still young and I believe will show how good he really is.