‘You will always be family’ – Bayer Leverkusen give the classiest of farewells to Florian Wirtz | OneFootball

While Liverpool fans were gleefully revelling in the signing of Florian Wirtz on Friday evening, Bayer Leverkusen were bidding an emotional farewell to the 22-year-old.

The Germany international has joined the Premier League champions in a record-breaking £116m deal which’d make him the most expensive signing by a British club if all add-ons are triggered (The Athletic), with several months of relentless work by Richard Hughes ultimately paying off.

If anybody had been in any doubt as to how highly the playmaker was regarded at the BayArena, a series of social media posts from the Bundesliga runners-up openly conveyed the impact he made there.

Leverkusen bid poignant farewell to Wirtz

The tweet in which Leverkusen confirmed Wirtz’s exit to Liverpool thanked him for ‘five-and-a-half magical years’ and wished him ‘nothing but the best’, with a follow-up post containing a poignant video captioned ‘Dear Flo, you will always be family’, with black and red hearts (their club colours) used abundantly.

Another tweet contained several pictures of the 22-year-old and Jeremie Frimpong – who’s also swapped the BayArena for Anfield this summer – with the caption ‘Inseparable. Make sure they keep laughing together, LFC’ followed by a face-holding-back-tears emoji.

The emotional posts kept coming on Saturday morning as Leverkusen shared a photo of their ex-number 10 with the DFB-Pokal trophy that he helped them to win in 2024, describing him simply as a ‘legend’.

(Photo by Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)

Wirtz leaves Leverkusen as one of their all-time greats

Amid our jubilation at pulling off such a blockbuster signing, we can fully understand why the transfer would be so hard for the Bundesliga club and their supporters to take, given the impact that Wirtz has had at the BayArena.

He had a starring role as they romped to an unbeaten domestic double in 2023/24 (also winning their first top-flight title in the process) and he also helped them to reach the Europa League final in that season, ending Die Werkself’s greatest-ever campaign with 18 goals and 19 assists.

The 22-year-old scored 57 goals and set up another 65 in his 197 appearances for Leverkusen, where he arrived as a prodigious 16-year-old in January 2020 and left having become a ‘generational talent of rare intelligence and technical ability’, in the words of German football expert Ed McCambridge (FourFourTwo).

Their fans can console themselves with the nine-figure fee that they’ve banked from selling him, part of which looks set to be invested in Jarell Quansah from Liverpool as Erik ten Hag seeks to put the Wirtz windfall to good use this summer.

Just as Richard Hughes executed a masterclass in bringing him to Anfield, Leverkusen’s social media team have played a blinder with their classy farewell messages to one of their club’s greatest-ever players.

You can view some of Leverkusen’s tweets below, via @bayer04_en on X: