Florian Wirtz’s “alarming” Liverpool stat comparing him to ex-Arsenal star should worry Andoni Iraola

When Florian Wirtz joined Liverpool for £116 million, a short-lived Premier League record fee, the hope was that he would be the best player in the Premier League. Across his final two seasons at Bayer Leverkusen, he accumulated 34 goals and 35 assists, which equates to a goal contribution every 99 minutes across all competitions.

In the 2023/24 season, die Werkself went through the entire Bundesliga season unbeaten, securing the club's first-ever Meisterschale, also winning the DFB-Pokal and reaching the Europa League Final in Dublin. Well, while former Liverpool man Xabi Alonso received most of the plaudits for this jaw-dropping achievement, but Wirtz was undeniably die Schwarzroten's star man on the pitch.

Well, we have seen almost none of that since the 23 year old swapped North Rhine-Westphalia for Merseyside, and a new statistic has underlined just how disappointing he has been.

As noted by Paul Hawksbee on Talk Sport, Wirtz has created just three big chances across his first 39 Premier League appearances for the Reds. For comparison, that is the same number as right-back Héctor Bellerín racked up in one game for Arsenal against Stoke City during the 2015/16 season.

That afternoon, Arsène Wenger's team beat Mark Hughes' side 2-0 at the Emirates, thanks to goals from Theo Walcott and Olivier Giroud. Bellerín created four big chances that day in North London from full-back, while Wirtz has just the same number to his name across 2,860 Premier League minutes to date.

This is obviously a trivial and arbitrary statistic, but is also very damning. So, just how bad are Wirtz's Premier League statistics to date?

Florin Wirtz Premier League statistics

Note: Statistics courtesy of Squawka.

Overall, Wirtz's numbers are generally underwhelming. He has scored just five goals, while squandering eight big chances. Meantime, his expected assists number is only marginally higher than his actually tally of five assists. This underlines that his numbers are not suffering because team mates are failing to convert chances.

The German has lost possession 475 times, thereby doing so more than 16 times every 90 minutes, just simply not offering enough. Wirtz did score during the international break, on target as Jürgen Klopp's Germany beat Serbia 2-0 in Munich. Taking the ball expertly and impudently dancing around Srđan Babić, before calming sending Đorđe Petrović the wrong way, this was not the action of a man lacking confidence.

Nevertheless, we've almost never seen anything like that in a red shirt, so can the German spark his season into life against LASK on Wednesday?

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow