Florian Wirtz | Der Fußballgott | Der Fluch ist gebrochen!
- Thread starter Invictus
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The open bus parade doesn't organise itself
You're not wrong. Billions of pounds spent to end up with the players we did is criminal really
Not wrong
That observation seems irreconcilable with the fact that Wirtz is the among the hardest working players in the league with an average of 11.8 km of covered distance according to the EPL in a position not exactly known for its high work rate.
He's done okay but some Liverpool fans are definitely hyping him up to try justify his fee. We did the same with Sancho when it was obvious this early he wasn't going to cut it.
I'd forgotten just how long it took for Sancho to register a goal. Didn't score one in any tournament until late November.
Incredible, the fact people are giving him credit for a shot that was going well wide is insane. If the player doesn't touch the ball it goes about 6 foot wide of the target!!
His first goal was a cracker to be fair to the little rat
Yeah, and he went on to get goals vs. Chelsea, Liverpool, City and Spurs during his time here. He had his moments, but what a huge letdown overall.
Tbf it's probably a coaching issue
Slot clearly forgot to tell him to shoot between the posts.
Slot clearly forgot to tell him to shoot between the posts.
Yeah, but doing well up until the final piece of the jigsaw still means that it’s unfinished. It truly was an egregious finish to what was a very good move. He was lucky with the deflection.
If I jog for 90 minutes, I will probably cover 15 kms. That distance covered says nothing about the intensity of his running.
3 pages since his denied goal contribution. I am sure all of it will be very level-headed and fair analysis of his performance!
Here’s some analysis for you: He was shite.
"For instance, on MD 1 of the 2025-26 season, Liverpool’s Florian Wirtz might have come in for some criticism from people for struggling to truly affect play during the Reds’ 4-2 win over Bournemouth. Whether that’s true or not isn’t for us to say, but we do know he was incredibly active on the pitch.
Firstly, his 35 off-ball runs while his team were in possession was the most of any player on MD1; he also covered more distance (1,054m) with his off-ball runs than anyone else, with Enzo Fernández closest to him on just 734m.
It probably won’t be too surprising, then, to learn his 429 intensive runs (that’s running at least 10.5mph or 17km/h) was comfortably more than any other player on MD 1. Tyler Adams (402) was next.
As such, Liverpool fans needn’t worry about Wirtz’s work rate or his desire to be visible to teammates in attack. When he finds his groove and combines this side of his game with his undeniable technical quality, he could be an absolute menace."
Source: https://theanalyst.com/articles/premier-league-md1-stats-off-the-charts
That's in line with Wirtz' Bundesliga performances. In 23/24, Wirtz was 19th in total distance covered, 6h in sprints and 5th in intensive runs among all Bundesliga players. In 24/25, 52nd, 8th, 21st.
The irony in you using sarcasm when you have made several over-the-top comments on his performances yourself.
There's also posts about his price not actually being his price, because it wasn't what the club valued him at initially or something - so a lot of quality content to join your, Zehner's and other Liverpool fans rare insights into this magnificent specimen of a player.
Nope, because distance run is utterly meaningless in the Premier League. It's all about intensity. I could run 11.8km in an hour, at a kind of fast jogging pace, any professional footballer could do, but that achieves nothing in English football. He spends most of his time jogging at < 80%, but when he has to sprint he gets gassed. Maybe he has higher aerobic than anaerobic threshold and just can't recover enough from high intensity efforts.
There is a huge difference physiologically between running at 17km/h and sprinting above 25km/h. He runs at 80%, he doesn't sprint.
That's him trying to recover his first touches.
At least it’s a better argument than kms covered. If intensity «sprints» is 17km/h or more, would you label that as intensive? What about aggression? Watching him play, he is neither aggressive nor intensive in his playing style. He may work hard though
The EPL is more intense than other leagues but you vastly estimated the extent of that. According to recent research, sprints in the EPL were a bit faster on average with 28.8 to 28.3 km/h (2% faster). The average number of sprints in the EPL was 8.7 to 8.2 in the Bundesliga (6% more). In terms of distances, that translates to 176 m to 151 (17% more) in case of sprints and 591 to 544 (9% more) in case of intensive runs.
So there's definitely a significant difference in intensity but by no means should one absolutely best runners of the Bundesliga in all three major disciplines of running (sprints, intensive runs, volume) be unsuited to the EPL. That vastly overestimates the required endurance. Not rating his performances is one thing since that is more subjective but these are hard numbers. His work rate is and has always been absolutely elite.
Always a funny stat that, I’m 45 and I can run 16km in the usual hour a ball is in play.
Totally meaningless stat.
If you don't see the difference, I can't help you
Interestingly, in his book quiet leadership, ancelotti said that costa used to run 8km for atletico a lot of games and when he did atletico won. When he ran significantly less distance atletico lost. They were runs in the space behind the opposition fullbacks . Ancelotti made his fullbacks drop deeper to stop this. He said they didn't always beat atletico but they stopped costa a lot, supposedly.
As he is a big star and a much focused on player, perhaps teams in the pl have similarly figured out wirtz runs, positioning and movement and know how to stop him. As his team is playing poor like he is it makes it even more difficult. If Liverpool start playing well consistently and wirtz still plays bad for a good while then it would be much more worrying imo.
As he is a big star and a much focused on player, perhaps teams in the pl have similarly figured out wirtz runs, positioning and movement and know how to stop him. As his team is playing poor like he is it makes it even more difficult. If Liverpool start playing well consistently and wirtz still plays bad for a good while then it would be much more worrying imo.
Why is that a meaningless stat? At the very least, it demonstrates work rate, something some of our players are lauded for constantly.
I think his positioning is very weird in a lot of matches but that rather seems to be instructions than teams finding him out. When Liverpool is in the final third, he's often one of only two players who constantly occupy the box. For us, he was one of the players who played at the edge of the opponent's shape, trying to find passing lanes, one twos and dribbling opportunities. Against West Ham, he dropped deeper a lot more. Interestingly, in that match (which likely was his best in the EPL yet) he ran ~10% less than before. Some EPL analyst dived deeper into that on the league's website.
I guess it's save to say that they are still in the process of figuring out the details of his role. IMO he should be much more involved and come short much more often. Far too often, the final pass/cross is played by players who are quite poor at that.
And/or running away from the ball
The difference here is, 80% of the distance covered on a football pitch is at nothing more than a jog, it’s fecking meaningless.
No it doesn’t demonstrate work rate at all.
A player can run 8km and put a feck tonne more work in doing so.
I don't think his issue has anything to do with workrate, effort or "footballing brain" but just speed of execution. He often looks a second late in what he wants to do wether it's passing or shooting. He hasn't grasped the speed/physicality of the league and revert to safe mode.
He will need a full season to adapt but i can't see him ever reaching the potential that matches his pricetag. Was it Slot that pushed hard for him or did it came more from the club ?
He will need a full season to adapt but i can't see him ever reaching the potential that matches his pricetag. Was it Slot that pushed hard for him or did it came more from the club ?
The club obviously wants him, as the fee shows and Slot must have wanted him at least enough to be able to present Wirtz with a concept, that he liked so much, that he chose Liverpool over Bayern. So both wanted him and apparently had a plan for him, that is impossible to comprehend as of right now.
It doesn't actually make it less worrying. It is like the kid who gets notified on his report card that he is trying hard, but has trouble with the stuff he is learning.
After his first pre-season game I said he looked decent and really reminded me of Lingard when he was playing well in the 10.
Amusingly when he was playing crap Lingard's defenders would always eventually get to the point where they started saying "yeah but he runs a lot"
Amusingly when he was playing crap Lingard's defenders would always eventually get to the point where they started saying "yeah but he runs a lot"
Yeah, I understood that argument the first time around as well. Thing is, it's obviously not the case so why even bring it up?
Its not entirely meaningless.
There's no way you could run 16km on a football pitch during a game, unless you had zero positional sense and were running literally everywhere...
I regularly put in 10km plus in games which is a fairly standard amount for a midfielder/attacker.
Where it becomes less meaningful is when it's not taking into consideration things like sprints. Ozil was consistently at the higher end of distance covered, mainly because he took every corner for arsenal, and so put in extra yards when tracking back from the corners.
If we could get his sprint details that would go further as to showing how hard he works.
It objectively does. We're not talking about a treadmill here. This is a professional game of football at the highest level, where you're running with the ball, changing directions quickly, staying focused and scanning the field as you run.
I am all for laughing at Wirtz being underwhelming for Liverpool, but he has great work rate. Against Real Madrid he "outperformed" Valverde in terms of high speed running and running in general, slightly behind on sprints and covered more kilometres. Valverde is known to be one of the hardest working players in the world with incredible stamina.
So what you’re saying is that if we signed Pogba as Champions and the result was us losing more games, conceding more goals, looking less of a threat and dropping to 10th in the league getting battered every home game with him being average at best every week….He would get criticised LESS than when he came into a side and the next season we scored more goals, conceded less, lost half as many matches and won two trophies?
I’m not sure I agree at all.
The issue isn't' his work rate - he's obviously trying hard. It's just that he isn't a great athlete, unlike the vast majority of PL players these days. He can run a lot, but he can't repeatedly sprint at high intensity, and then recover sufficiently enough for it not to affect his technique.
Just a bizarre signing for a team whose dominance in recent years was built up on an aggressive pressing game and transitions.
In general, low socks was quite a sign of proper footballer in the old days, potrero in full mode.