How Bayer Leverkusen’s Florian Wirtz has lit up world football
On 26 November 2015, Julian Draxler received an unexpected message on his phone. Draxler had won the FIFA World Cup with Germany in 2014. One year later, his former youth coach Marc Dommer was getting in touch. “I have a boy here who could be some competition for you.” That boy was just 12 at the time. Dommer’s message was meant in jest, but he was also serious. The coach even sent a video to Draxler as evidence. It showed a boy with spindly legs, socks pulled up over his knees, doing keepy-uppies with a tennis ball. Right foot, right knee, head, left knee, left foot, back to the right…
Dommer, who has been working in youth football across Germany for over 25 years with Schalke, Cologne and now as the head of the academy at Werder Bremen, had practised that skill with countless talented youngsters. Draxler held the record with six rounds of foot, knee and head. Dommer had barely told the 12-year-old about the record when he did it seven times.
Nine years later, the now grown-up boy is leaning over a photo of that tennis ball exercise that I brought him. He smiles. He doesn’t remember that he broke Draxler’s record, but he does remember that he was exempted from his weekly specialised French class at school in Brauweiler to train with Dommer on the sports field next door instead. “But it was only one extra lesson that I missed, I didn't miss any of the regular French lessons,” he insists. “Do you know what the record was?” he finally turns to me. Seven rounds with the tennis ball. “I don't even know if I could do that today,” he says.
A source of "FOMO" in football
The thought that Wirtz couldn’t achieve something on a football pitch has probably never occurred to anyone but himself. At the age of 21, he was voted Bundesliga Player of the Season by fellow players and fans after helping Bayer Leverkusen to Bundesliga and DFB Cup glory without a single defeat in 2023/24. People watch football because of players like Wirtz. With an audacious dribble or a single pass, he can break up a defence that seemed impenetrable a moment ago. And what spectator hasn't been caught making uncontrolled noises as a result? Sounds of astonishment and disbelief. As Christopher Meltzer put it in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “When Florian Wirtz combines his game with Jamal Musiala from Bayern Munich in the Germany national team, ‘FOMO’ reigns among football fans. Fear of missing out.”
Wirtz was wearing a bright purple, loose-fitting tracksuit when we met for a chat in a box at the BayArena. The colour gives him a casual, youthful look. Talking to him inevitably brings to mind the contrast he is currently experiencing. On the one hand, he is simply a nice boy with pleasant manners who is taking his first steps into independent life. And at the same time, he is already a master of his trade on the football pitch. In autumn 2024, he’s playing in such a way that he’s in the headlines all over Europe. “Florian Wirtz is a number 10 like no other,” writes the French newspaper L'Equipe, and speculation is rife as to which of the most glorious clubs his future path could lead him to.
And how does Wirtz live in this media hype? On Sundays, often the day after Bundesliga matches, he likes to go to the sports ground in his hometown and watch Grün-Weiß Brauweiler men's third team play. The team plays in the lowest of all amateur leagues, Kreisliga C. “A few friends of mine play there,” says Wirtz, smiling again. “I don't expect to see any great sport there.” He is simply one of a group of long-standing friends there, far away from the outside world, which treats him as a phenomenon of world football.
Watch: The best of Wirtz and Musiala
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God-given talent or incessant practice?
How did Wirtz become what he is? For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why individuals are so much better at something than the rest of us, be they exceptional athletes, composers, inventors or self-made entrepreneurs. What is behind success? God-given talent or incessant practice?
The very question is wrong, London-based author Matthew Syed suggested in his eye-opening book ‘Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success’. Talent only really comes into its own through practice and - as we will see with Wirtz - it is also a talent to be able to train better than others. However, Syed explains in his book that something else is just as crucial as talent and hard work. The circumstances of life.
For example, if a boy has a table tennis table at home, if this boy has a big brother who plays table tennis with him for hours every day, then a great table tennis career immediately becomes much more likely. And if the table tennis table happens to be in a small, narrow room, this increases the boy's chances immensely. He can't dodge his brother's attacking shots backwards, because there's a wall; so he inevitably learns to react incredibly quickly to the shots directly at the table. Syed should know. He was a multiple-time British table tennis champion. If we examine Syed's thesis about the formative life circumstances of Wirtz, we see something astonishing.
The bike story
At some point, in every conversation about Wirtz, the coaches and teammates who saw him grow in the youth teams of Cologne come to the subject of the bike. “You come by bike?” was what a shocked Simon Breuer, for example, recalls asking during his 10 years playing alongside Florian at Cologne. It was 13 kilometres from the Wirtz family home in Brauweiler to the training centre at the Geißbockheim. “And during training, I was already looking forward to the journey back,” says Wirtz with feigned sarcasm. “It was about 45 minutes by bike.”
Wirtz admits that he was taken by car much more often, and that he mainly cycled to training when he was a child and then mainly during the summer holidays. And yet the episode says a lot about his childhood. “My parents liked to take us kids everywhere by bike.”
Days in Brauweiler
Benedikt Hammans, who coached Florian in the children's teams at Cologne for three years, knows one way to describe his parents: “The Wirtz’s were an outdoor family.” His father Hans is still the chairman, a referee and youth coach at the football club in the village, Grün-Weiß Brauweiler, and always took Florian and his sister Juliane to the pitch, where they played for whole afternoons. Their mother Karin Groß saw youth coach Hammans one winter's day before training in Cologne in the midst of the children, fully involved in a snowball fight. As a sports coach, Hammans noticed straight away: “Ms Groß threw the snowballs really hard.” Because Florian's father was also a teacher, there was no television at home and he didn't have a mobile phone until he was 12. “So I couldn't do anything other than be outside and get some exercise,” says Wirtz now. “I'm very happy about that.”
When he joined the Cologne youth setup at the age of seven, he immediately stood out. “But that wasn't a God-given thing,” says coach Hammans in line with Syed's theory of formative life circumstances. “It was also the result of an early childhood football education, to put it in sports science terms. Florian always had a ball at his feet, not because there was a plan that our son had to become a professional footballer, but in a natural way. His father is involved in the football club, and so the village pitch becomes the boy's world.”
Watch: The story of Florian Wirtz
Family influence
The unpretentious nature of the family would pleasantly amaze the staff at Cologne a few more times during Florian's 10 years on the books. Youth coaches like Hammans and Dommer are used to parents worriedly calling because their son had to wear the No.9 instead of the beloved 10 in the last game. Wirtz's mother would occasionally drop by - by bike, of course - during her son's individual training sessions with Dommer, bring Florian a snack and told Dommer one lunchtime that a parcel had arrived for Florian from a player consultancy agency. Basically all outstanding young footballers already have an agent by the age of 14 or 15. So, another agency wanted to woo Florian with a gift, thought Dommer. “What’s in the parcel?” he asked the mother. Karin replied that she didn't know. She had sent the parcel back unopened. Her son didn't need an agent, at least until he was an adult, the father and mother thought. “The parental home was definitely the most important influence on Florian's upbringing and his football,” says his old youth coach.
The fact that Florian is not the first professional footballer in the house shows just how much sport has shaped family life. His sister Juliane now plays for Werder Bremen in the Women's Bundesliga. It’s regularly reported in the media that Florian has nine siblings, which is true. However, this conveys the false image that he had almost a complete football team of siblings in his house. In fact, he only lived with Juliane and his parents, “except straight after I was born”. The other eight came from his parents' previous relationships.
After games with Cologne’s children's teams on Saturday, the Wirtz family sometimes invited a teammate like Breuer over for the rest of the weekend. Then they continued to play and watch football at home in the Grün-Weiß clubhouse due to the lack of a television. However, his father didn't fully comply with the no-TV policy. “For World Cups or European Championships, he would bring a television set that he had borrowed from somewhere,” says Wirtz. One day, his youth coaches at Cologne found out from the local newspaper just how much football Florian played alongside his training. There, Hammans read that the 11-year-olds from Grün-Weiß Brauweiler had won an indoor tournament in Aachen - and on the photo of the winning team he recognised the three best players from the Cologne U11s, Wirtz, Breuer and Mehmet Ibrahimi in the Brauweiler jersey.
“Hans Wirtz simply said: ‘Come and play for me’.” The players' IDs were not normally checked at that age anyway. “Hopefully the statute of limitations has passed on that. Brauweiler can no longer be penalised for that, right?” asks a laughing Florian. It was an open secret at Cologne that Wirtz trained with Brauweiler on training-free days. But the people at Cologne didn't say anything.
Understanding of the game
And that brings us to the next factor that boosted Wirtz's career, which has nothing to do with talent or hard work. He consistently met coaches who pushed him to his limits with systematic training, but who never restricted him by rigidly insisting on rules or tactical concepts.
Youth coach Hammans explains this with a remarkable sentence: “Florian knew better than me early on which decisions he should make in the game.” Hammans and his colleagues certainly trained Wirtz in the thousands of details of the game, looking over his shoulder before receiving the ball and so on. And yet Wirtz was lucky that all his coaches believed that development was as important to him as instruction. “My coaches have always given me the freedom to change positions in the game according to my own interpretation. I give them credit for that. I've never had anyone telling me where to stand or that I shouldn't dribble so much.”
Today, Wirtz has two world-class coaches, Xabi Alonso at Leverkusen and Julian Nagelsmann with the national team, who are famous for their tactical tricks. Of course, he receives clear instructions from them on how he should play a part in the team's tactics, but ultimately they give him just as much freedom to find his own ways in attack as he was given when he was 10 years old, because it is one of his great strengths.
Watch: The best of Florian Wirtz
“I'm on the move a lot, from the left wing to the right or into the centre to find the good spaces.” The good spaces are the small gaps. If none are found, Wirtz deliberately does the most difficult thing. He then positions himself amidst the opponent's solid defence. On average, he is pressed 53 times per Bundesliga match and still creates 2.2 shots on goal per game from those seemingly impossible situations – more than any other Bundesliga player. With his fine technique and quick perception, he can free himself from tight spaces. His play then looks bold, but it is more strategic. He starts 56 percent of his dribbles from the left wing, for example, because his stronger right foot gives him a better chance of moving inside. Wirtz scores a remarkable number of goals (48 in his first 169 senior games for Leverkusen), creates just as many assists, 51 in those 169 games (as of 9 November 2024), is very active defensively, sprints and is also one of the five strongest running Bundesliga players. His youth teammate Breuer, who now plays for Schalke’s U23 team, summarises it in the language of youngsters: “Florian Wirtz is a player with horse lungs.”
Extreme willpower
And despite this almost unique footballing ability, his coaches prioritise another skill in Wirtz. It is probably called mental strength: an extreme ability to concentrate coupled with a brilliant will. The moment Dommer told him that Draxler's tennis ball record was six rounds, he wanted to see if he could beat it: “a car accident could’ve happened next to him. Florian would’ve stayed focussed on the exercise.” Occasionally, this willpower became too vehement for Wirtz's own good. Dommer remembers a youth tournament in which he substituted one or two players, and a 1-0 lead for Florian's Cologne turned into a 1-1 draw. “Why did you make a substitution?” the young Wirtz hissed. “He was seething, he wouldn’t look at me anymore,” Dommer described of the 11-year-old scowling at his coach.
Hammans believes that this extreme willpower must be the reason why Wirtz “gets better and better the more difficult it gets”. He immediately established himself in the Bundesliga at the age of 17 after moving from Cologne to Leverkusen. And in his first game in the UEFA Champions League at Feyenoord in September 2024, where others would be nervous, Wirtz said: “I was tapping along to the anthem before kick-off, I was really tingling.” And then he scored two magnificent goals.
“I'd love to hear from a Bayer player whether Florian's competitive spirit also drives up the intensity of his training,” wonders Hammans. Let's hear then from Granit Xhaka, a leader of Leverkusen's title-winning team: “When you see him every day, you realise why the boy is so good. Huge professional, super mentality.”
God-given talent or all hard work? That was the question. Half of the answer is that Wirtz's special talent for constantly working in a highly focussed manner allows his talent to shine. The other half of the truth is that it was the circumstances of his life; a childhood in which he played football incessantly under expert guidance and with a great deal of freedom. This is how Wirtz became the footballer everyone looks up to. And at the same time, he is still a 21-year-old boy who is only just discovering adult life. That's why we're stopping the interview now. Because Florian still has to take his dog to the vet.
Interview conducted by Ronald Reng for Bundesliga Magazine
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