Florian Wirtz: £116m fee agreed for transfer to Liverpool – BBC

Liverpool agree £116m fee with Bayer Leverkusen for Florian Wirtz
Attacking midfielder's fee includes a guaranteed £100m and a further £16m in add-ons
Fee could be a British record if add-ons are met
Is this a good signing for Liverpool?
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Written by Adwaidh Rajan, Craig Nelson, Grace Wheeler, Alastair Telfer & Holly Bacon.
Sami Mokbel
BBC Sport Senior football correspondent
Tottenham are interested in signing Brentford striker Bryan Mbeumo.
Cameroon international Mbeumo scored 20 times for the Bees in the Premier League last season.
The 25-year-old's former manager at Brentford, Thomas Frank, was named Spurs boss on Thursday.
Earlier this month, Mbeumo was the subject of a bid from Manchester United of £45m and £10m in add-ons.
However, no agreement was reached between the two clubs with the offer falling well short of Brentford's valuation.
Craig Nelson
BBC Sport reporter
We started the day talking about Thomas Frank's appointment as Tottenham manager before veering off to bring you the news that Liverpool have agreed a fee with Bayer Leverkusen to buy Germany forward Florian Wirtz that could rise to a British record £116m.
Well, let's combine all those elements by bringing you a potential Tottenham transfer line before we close this page…
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Football and money are now so intertwined that the signing of Wirtz for over £100 million will not create the stir it might have done in the past. When Alan Shearer went to Newcastle for a then record £15 million, that made headlines around the world. These days, that sum doesn't buy a decent left back! Football clubs today clearly know the price of everything, but the value of nothing, hence these crazy fees going ever upwards. The bubble will burst, eventually.
Jonathan
Constantin Eckner
German football writer
What separates Florian Wirtz from so many others isn't just his touch or vision, it's his mentality.
Even early in his Bundesliga career, he carried himself like a leader. He's not the loudest voice in the room, but his presence is felt.
Some mistake his quiet, understated demeanour for simplicity, and Wirtz doesn't go out of his way to change that image. His team-mates, however, appreciate the way Wirtz keeps things simple.
"He's a great baller and a bit cheeky, that helps him," said Leverkusen keeper Lukas Hradecky, who once summed up the midfielder's flair with a now-iconic phrase: "Flo is doing Flo things."
"Florian is just a huge asset with his care-free nature," said former Germany boss Hansi Flick. "He's simply an outstanding technician, loves to play, is very creative, has a good shot, runs hard and is quick. He's the full package."
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I have no doubt that senior players at Liverpool won’t let standards slip so Wirtz will only get better. As for the money, if we have him for potentially 10 years and he brings much success and trophies could you really argue that £100m is too much?
Oliver
Fara Williams
Former Arsenal midfielder for BBC Sport
Signing Florian Wirtz for such a large fee I feel would mark a sea change for Liverpool.
Fans would argue that they rarely invest big money into signings and even the Mohamed Salah contract situation came down to salary. It is stark if you think how long that and Virgil van Dijk's deal took to resolve – it was an issue of finances.
With Trent Alexander-Arnold going, if they had lost all three, that would have been most of the spine of the team gone, so it is great that they are showing the ambition after winning the league to really kick on and establish themselves as a side to compete for the title year on year.
After they won the title five years ago, they did not really push on from that. They did not really show the ambition they probably should have in order to carry on winning or at least competing up there every year.
It looks like there has been a shift in their approach to it.
Anon making reference there to the players bought by British clubs for £100m+.
There is a list at the top of this page and you can choose the one you believe represented the best value for money.
Arsenal's purchase of West Ham midfielder Declan Rice is currently leading the way with 54%.
Florian Wirtz, whose bumper fee has been agreed but the deal is yet to go through, is in second place on 38%.
Have your say now by taking part in the poll.
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Let's hope Wirtz doesn't flop like all the others on the £100m list and he wins something and is still of value in three-years' time.
Anon
Ask Me Anything
BBC Sport’s Ask Me Anything team have been asking for your questions…
Here’s one on transfers, answered by BBC Sport's chief football news reporter Simon Stone.
How do add-ons work in football transfers?
Liverpool have agreed a deal worth up to £116m for Germany forward Florian Wirtz – but it is still not entirely clear when the transfer would become a British record.
The basic fee is £100m and the transfer includes add-ons of £16m. These payments are often complex and usually kept secret.
Add-ons are often performance-based and can include things like appearances, goals and winning trophies.
An extreme example of this is the add-on in Anthony Martial's move to Manchester United, where Monaco would have been entitled to extra money if Martial had won the Ballon d'Or.
Read more on the world of add-ons here.
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Mark, Blackpool: Not sure what Keith @11:33 means by Liverpool having to spend big to keep up with the likes of Chelsea, City and United. Who won the league this season? And who finished 15th?!
Last month Manchester City cooled their interest in Florian Wirtz due to the soaring costs of any deal for the 22-year-old, BBC Sport understands.
The midfielder has also been linked with Bayern Munich.
German football expert Constantin Eckner told BBC Sport he believes Wirtz is choosing Liverpool over Bayern Munich because he will be the star playmaker at the club.
Why have Liverpool agreed to pay a club-record fee for Florian Wirtz?
Here are the 22-year-old's key stats for club and country:
Honours
It's just gone 13:00 BST. Anyone just joining us on a lunch break, let us bring you up to speed.
Florian Wirtz is set for a move to Merseyside after Liverpool and Bayer Leverkusen agreed a fee that could rise to a British record £116m.
Where will he play? Who could leave Liverpool this summer?
Click the key points below for what you might have missed:
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Didn't Liverpool make £97m from this year's Champion League, so A pays for B. I'm glad that the club are putting the money to good use.
Will, Halesowen
Florian Wirtz's rise to the top of European football has firmly been a family affair. He is the youngest of 10 siblings; sister Juliane plays for Werder Bremen and mum Karin is a handball coach.
And then there is Florian's father, Hans-Joachim (pictured above with Julian Nagelsmann), who continues to act as his son's agent whilst in his early 70s, negotiating an £116m transfer deal at the same time as running an amateur football club in the family's hometown of Pulheim, just outside Cologne.
"It's a bit different when you are running a Sunday league team basically as opposed to leading negotiations with Liverpool," German football writer Constantin Eckner told 5 Live Sport.
"It's of course not typical in today's world but it might give you a different sense of how things should work for you in your career, as opposed to when you have like a really cutthroat agent who is looking for the highest profit."
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I remember when Barcelona spent £105m on Coutinho as the player to take them to the next level. Doesn’t always work. Wirtz, though, is clearly a brilliant player.
Gordon, Surrey
Liverpool
One player whose future is looking increasingly uncertain at Liverpool is Darwin Nunez.
The Reds completed the signing of the Uruguay striker from Benfica on a six-year deal for an initial £64m in 2022.
And before the news of Florian Wirtz broke today, Nunez was on course to become Liverpool's record signing, with the fee potentially rising to £85m with add-ons.
In his last season at Benfica, he scored 26 goals in 28 league appearances and Liverpool fans have yet to see that level of consistency.
Across three seasons at Anfield, Nunez has scored just 25 league goals. After a nine-goal debut campaign, he bagged 11 goals and 10 assists in his second season but his output dropped considerably under Arne Slot with only five top-flight goals in 2024-25.
"His composure in front of goal has never been good," BBC Sport columnist Fara Williams wrote in February.
"When you are at a big club, it is what you are measured on. Is he good enough to be in a Liverpool team that is competing on all fronts? Probably not.
"Nunez does not have that composure. His mind is going one hundred miles an hour and he cannot slow down his thought process. If I am being honest, I cannot see him even being there past the summer."
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Wirtz joining as Trent leaves reminds me of Moneyball and the idea of replacing a player ‘in the aggregate’. We were never going to find a like-for-like replacement for Trent but it’s possible to replace his skills between 2-3 players. The creativity that Wirtz brings helps achieve that.
Stef
Luke Reddy
BBC Sport Senior Journalist
Many fans think Florian Wirtz will operate from a false nine position – dropping to receive passes, creating room for runs into central spaces for the likes of Mohamed Salah, Cody Gakpo and Luis Diaz.
It would be a style Kopites have seen before, when Roberto Firmino built his legacy by retreating from forward positions into areas where he could link play, thus allowing the relentless Salah and Sadio Mane to prosper from wider berths.
It is hard to envisage Arne Slot tinkering too much with his midfield three, though Wirtz could feature in that area too.
Perhaps what points to his likely use in the forward line most is that the output of Diogo Jota and Darwin Nunez points to the central-attacking area being the spot where Liverpool lack a man in form.
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Wirtz is a fantastic signing. It's a lot of money to pay for someone who has had an ACL injury. However, he is still only 22. We have missed a real playmaker and Wirtz is an upgrade to what we have had in that position. The last real playmaker was Coutinho and we turned him in to an exceptional talent. Exciting times ahead!
Kurt, Liverpool fan
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