Florian Wirtz Faces Pressure at Liverpool: Time for Change?

Florian Wirtz arrived at Liverpool as a statement signing, the kind of talent a club builds a team around. A year on, the questions are getting louder and the patience thinner.

The German playmaker has started the 2026-27 season still searching for a spark, and former Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann believes the clock is already ticking loudly on his Anfield future.

“He's got to start playing well. He has to start influencing the game,” Hamann told GOAL, speaking in association with Betinia NJ. The message was blunt: reputation and transfer fee will only carry Wirtz so far on Merseyside.

Hamann’s main criticism cuts to the heart of Liverpool’s dilemma. Wirtz, he says, “floats”. The 21-year-old has not yet earned the kind of internal status where teammates are happy to do the dirty work for him, trusting that when he gets the ball, he will turn matches.

“You've got to give him certain liberties and a certain freedom,” Hamann said. “The players don't mind doing it if when he does get the ball 10 times, six, seven, eight times, something's going to happen. That's just not the case.”

Instead, Wirtz has been seen tracking back, chasing, plugging gaps. Admirable, but not what Liverpool bought. Hamann even suggests the balance of his game has tipped the wrong way.

“Now he's working very hard going backwards. I think sometimes he's doing too much. He wants to help the team because he sees that he can’t influence the game going forward,” Hamann added. “He will only get the respect of the players when he starts influencing the game going forward. He's not there to win balls, he's there to set up goals and score goals.”

That was always the plan. Liverpool paid big money for a difference-maker, not a pressing specialist. Yet Hamann says there were “maybe a handful of games” last season where Wirtz truly delivered. For a player of his cost and profile, that is “simply not enough”.

The Premier League’s physicality is an easy explanation, but Hamann refuses to hide behind it. He referenced Juan Sebastian Veron, another lavishly gifted midfielder who arrived with huge expectations and never fully adapted before returning to Italy after a single season.

“Yes, it's more physical,” Hamann said. “Some of the best players took some time to adapt. Some just can't do it or don't want to do it.”

Hamann initially urged patience. “The first two or three months, give him time. I said he's too good to fail.” That stance has shifted. “Once it went past Christmas, I said, I don't think he's going to crack it anymore because it's too long now. Because expectations are not getting any less.”

This season has started in much the same vein. Wirtz was substituted again after an hour in Liverpool’s opening game, and Hamann believes the next few weeks could be decisive.

“I think if he doesn't start influencing games in the next three or four weeks, I think by the time we have that international break, which is longer this year, I think we have a lot of paper talk, a lot of discussions, whether the club should have bought him,” he warned. And not just external noise. “Maybe him thinking, ‘well, maybe this is not for me’.”

Hamann is convinced something will have to give if the current pattern continues. “For a player of that magnitude, of that stature, the amount of money he costs, it's simply not enough. You've got to find a solution somehow, maybe even in winter, if things don't get better.”

The debate over Wirtz’s best position only clouds the picture. Is he a classic No.10, pulling strings centrally, or a forward starting from the left, drifting in to combine and shoot? Liverpool have not settled the argument, and the uncertainty has become part of the story.

Hamann, a Champions League winner with Liverpool, is not convinced that tactical nuance is the core issue.

“He was bought to be the main man. And I wouldn't blame it on the position that he plays on the left,” he said. “If you've got a number 10 who doesn't create the chances or doesn't score enough goals, then obviously somebody else has to play - especially with [Bradley] Barcola coming in.”

Hamann believes a harder conversation should already have taken place inside the club.

“I know everybody said how well he does in training and all this. And there does come a point, and I think the point was last year after Christmas, where somebody should have said, ‘listen lad, either you do it or in the summer, we see what's happening in the World Cup, maybe we've got to find a solution’. Because they can't wait forever.”

Liverpool now stand exactly there: between the original dream and a very real dilemma. Wirtz was supposed to be the centrepiece. If he doesn’t start playing like it soon, the winter window may bring decisions this club never expected to face so quickly.