13-06-2025
Meet Florian Wirtz: Not allowed a TV but he has a passion for potatoes
What kind of environment produces an elite footballer? In the case of Florian Wirtz, it was one of parental support, accessible facilities and, perhaps most importantly of all, very few distractions. As a boy in the Cologne suburb of Pulheim, he was not even allowed a television at home.
Instead of sitting in their living room, Wirtz and his sister Juliane played football in it. Instead of video games, Wirtz went outside. Instead of travelling by car, the Wirtz family would often move around on bikes. 'I couldn't do anything other than be outside and get some exercise,' Wirtz told the Bundesliga Magazine last year. 'I'm very happy about that.'
Liverpool will be happy about it, too. Without this upbringing, Wirtz would surely never have become the playmaker he is today. He would never have become a genuine star of the European game, and he would never have moved to Anfield in one of the biggest deals in the history of the sport: a British transfer record that could rise to £116 million.
There is, of course, much more to Wirtz's story than a lack of television. It evidently helped his development as a boy, for example, that his father is the chairman of their local football club, Grün-Weiß Brauweiler. Hans-Joachim would allow Florian and Juliane (also now a professional, with Werder Bremen) to play on the pitch for hours on end.
Wirtz also has a mother, Karin, who knew how to keep her son grounded. When an agency sent the teenaged Florian a gift, in an attempt to convince him to sign with them, she returned the parcel unopened. The Wirtz family saw no need for an agent. Indeed, they still represent Florian now.
Wirtz has nine siblings (although eight of those are from his parents' previous relationships) and all of them would have known, from a young age, that their little brother was the most prodigious of footballing talents. This is not a tale of a player who defied expectations to reach the highest level. Wirtz was always ahead of the rest and always destined for the top.
'On my 18th birthday, my mother showed me a note from my time at primary school,' he once told Werks11 Magazin. 'We had to write down what we wanted to be. The only thing I'd written was: football player. I really did always want that and started early on to kick everything I came across: balloons, balls and anything else lying around the house.'
For much of his youth, Wirtz seemed certain to become a first-team player for Cologne, the club he had joined at the age of seven. But in 2020, he made a controversial switch to fierce rivals Bayer Leverkusen. Cologne claimed the transfer broke a gentlemen's agreement that the two clubs would not recruit academy products from each other. Leverkusen simply considered Wirtz, whose contract with Cologne was expiring, to be too good a prospect to ignore.
A source in Germany, who was involved in that transfer, tells Telegraph Sport: 'All the German clubs wanted Florian. They had all been in contact with his family, but the family wanted to stay in that region. That was the big reason why he didn't go to Bayern Munich.'
Wirtz initially moved to Leverkusen as a 16-year-old academy player, but within a few weeks he had earned a promotion to Peter Bosz's first-team. It then took only one training session for Bosz, who has also managed Ajax, Borussia Dortmund and Lyon, to be convinced that he had a special talent on his hands.
'At 16 he didn't lose the ball once,' Bosz has since told Polish magazine Asystent Trenera. 'I watched him and I couldn't believe it. What was this? Every difficult pass, he got out of it with one touch. Wow. Mark my words, he will be the best player in the world one day. He will win the Ballon d'Or.'
Wirtz made his Bundesliga debut at the age of just 17 years and 15 days, overtaking Kai Havertz as Leverkusen's youngest league player. A few weeks later, he became the youngest goalscorer in Bundesliga history. From there, he has effectively improved with each season that has passed.
Looking at his trajectory, it seems the only major obstacle Wirtz has overcome was a serious knee injury he suffered in March 2022. His recovery from that ACL tear – the sort of injury that can wreck a career – has been almost as impressive as his creativity on the pitch.
Over the past two seasons, Wirtz has made more than 100 appearances for club and country. In the eyes of many, he has been the best player in German football in that time: he was named Bundesliga player of the season for 2023/24 (when he helped Xabi Alonso's Leverkusen to their first ever league title), and was then voted the most impressive player in Germany by 216 fellow footballers in a poll at the end of 2024/25.
What, then, makes Wirtz so good? What makes him worth so much of Liverpool's money? These are questions that can be answered with basic statistics – 34 goals and 35 assists in his last two campaigns – but also by simply watching him play. As an attacking midfielder, it's all there: the relentless running, the delicate passing, the ferocious shooting, the intelligent movement and the silky dribbling.
Wirtz is one of those rare talents who play like artists with the ball but defend like animals without it. In 2024/25, he was the Bundesliga player who completed the most dribbles in the division, and also the player who won the ball the most times in the final third. This blend of offensive skill and defensive workrate makes him perfectly suited to Liverpool's system. 'Flo is now one of the top players in the world,' said Alonso last month. 'World class.'
Off the pitch, Wirtz is a quiet leader and unflashy. So unflashy, in fact, that he has occasionally been mocked for it. There is a running joke in Germany – of which he is not particularly fond – that centres on a social media clip in which he revealed a passion for plain potatoes.
This all stems from a video in which Wirtz was asked to rank different types of potato dishes, and he listed a plain boiled potato as his first choice (above more popular options such as chips or crisps). 'It gets to the point where it's not funny any more,' he said last year.
@rasmeskalin neue torhymne? @dfb @FloWirtz #kartoffeln #remix #fussball #florianwirtz #lustig #remix #song #fußball #em2024 ♬ rasmes normale kartoffeln - rasmes
Wirtz's potato preferences, it is safe to say, will not be of huge concern to Arne Slot or the Liverpool supporters. For those at Anfield, all that matters is that Wirtz demonstrates his extraordinary talent, and continues his seemingly unstoppable rise to the highest heights in the game.
