Florian Wirtz transfer: Liverpool signing the best in the market shows benefit of buying from a position of strength

Of all the deals made by Premier League clubs this summer, Liverpool included, it is the imminent arrival at Anfield of Florian Wirtz that feels different. The best player in the Bundesliga, he is as close as it gets to a sure thing. The best team in England is just about to get better.

That is reflected in the transfer fee, of course. These are extraordinary numbers for an extraordinary player and there is an opportunity cost to committing so much money on just one man. But this is the advantage of recruiting from a position of strength.

Arne Slot had to reinforce the team’s right side in the wake of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s exit and has done so by bringing in Wirtz’s Bayer Leverkusen colleague Jeremie Frimpong. There could be more movement in the attacking positions this summer too.

But with Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah staying it is a relatively stable squad, so the Premier League champions are tweaking rather than overhauling. That is a luxury that some of their rivals, however wealthy, cannot afford ahead of the coming campaign.

Expect to read plenty – some of it written not a million miles away from here – about how the exciting Rayan Cherki could prove to be a revelation at Manchester City. But the Frenchman had long been offered to various Premier League clubs and comes with risk.

“Magic or tragic” is how one senior Premier League scout sees Cherki’s future prospects at City, while another, speaking to Sky Sports on condition of anonymity, suggests the gambles even elite clubs are taking reflect the difficult market.

The hope is that Cherki is a hit, in which case spreading the budget around to solve other issues in Pep Guardiola’s squad could be smart business. Instead of Wirtz, City have been able to bring in Rayan Ait Nouri and Tijjani Reijnders too, with funds to spare.

But they arrive tasked with improving what was already a strong squad and with Guardiola in the rare position of playing catch up. Perhaps the City coach already regrets not refreshing things earlier, anticipating the problems before they emerged.

“In the summer, the club considered it,” acknowledged Guardiola. “And I said, ‘No, I do not want signings. I have a lot of trust in these players’. I thought we could repeat our successes, but after the injuries we have had, maybe we should have signed players.”

The message that the signing of Wirtz sends is that Liverpool have no intention of making the same mistake. They know he will make a difference. It is a squad-building lesson that Michael Edwards, the club’s chief executive of football, has already learned.

Speaking to Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former director of research, following the release of his book How to Win the Premier League, he told Sky Sports: “The prerequisite for understanding a transfer is understanding the strength and depth of your own squad.”

Graham and his colleagues recognised that when that version of Liverpool peaked, winning the Champions League and then the Premier League, it become difficult to strengthen. “There was often this argument about signing squad players,” he explained.

“You are spending money on an insurance policy, basically, and there are arguments for that. It is a quality problem to have to be able to say none of these transfer targets are actually as good as our current players. Most teams would kill to have that problem.”

In other words, you cannot just stash players. “I mean, you can,” replied Graham. “But you cannot expect them to improve if they are not playing. They might become world class by the time they are 25 but they just do not get that chance if they do not play.”

Better to get the guaranteed game-changer.

Graham cited two famous examples of this at Liverpool. They had wanted to sign Salah in 2014 but were beaten to the player in the January transfer window by Chelsea. “The player we signed in 2017 was much more the finished product than that 21-year-old.”

Similarly, Graham had wanted to sign Sadio Mane before he went to Southampton. “Two years later, we paid Southampton £30m – and we were supposed to be the smart team. But the difference in price reflected a lower risk and a higher reward. Mane was proven.”

Wirtz is an extreme example of that phenomenon, the precocious playmaker having been the chief creator and a genuine leader in a Bayer Leverkusen side that went unbeaten domestically when doing the double and starred again this past season.

During Graham’s time at Liverpool, there was a policy of signing players around the age of 24 – not so young that their future progress was unclear but not so old either. “All of the big successes were in that age range.” Wirtz is younger but the principle applies.

At 22, with almost 200 appearances for Leverkusen and 31 caps for Germany, his pedigree is apparent. This is a best-in-class signing reminiscent of Alisson Becker and Van Dijk before him, future-proofing this Liverpool squad for the challenges ahead.

And there will be challenges. Replacing Van Dijk and Salah is daunting and will need to happen eventually. But Wirtz moves the needle. Liverpool, perhaps surprisingly given Paris Saint-Germain’s achievements, are favourites to win the Champions League.

They will start as favourites to retain their Premier League title too. Because while there will be a sense of anticipation about how the plethora of new arrivals might possibly transform their rivals, there will not be a better player than Wirtz bought this summer.