The REAL solution to Liverpool's Florian Wirtz problem

A lot of Liverpool fans feel like they've been lied to about Florian Wirtz.

And who can blame them? The German international is not what was promised. Liverpool fans were told they were going to get a world-class talent.

A player who can become one of the best on the planet, and evolve Arne Slot's style of play to the next level.

Instead, Wirtz's start to life at Anfield has been tepid, ineffective and frustrating.

But all of the above is still true. The promise Wirtz arrived with still exists. Slot simply has to unlock it.

Wirtz has not become a 'bad' player overnight. Sure, he may have some teething problems adjusting to the Premier League but this is not the main factor behind his struggles.

There's something much bigger at play.

It all comes down to structure.

There were a lot of changes at Liverpool during the summer. We got new full-backs, a new no.10, and new forwards.

Over the course of the last few months, Slot has been trying to grapple with how to integrate all of them into the system.

During pre-season he seemed to have an idea. Through most of those friendly matches in the summer he instructed his full-backs to push high up the pitch and hold the width in the middle, while his two midfielders formed a double pivot.

It allowed Florian Wirtz to operate in the half spaces, and we saw how effective he can be in that role against Crystal Palace in the first-half of the Community Shield game.

But then something changed. Slot tweaked his system. All of a sudden he asked Wirtz to drop deeper, and got Milos Kerkez to do the same.

From the outside looking in, it feels like Slot was trying to achieve more control. But what has happened is Liverpool playing a weird dysfunctional purgatory caught between his old system and new system.

Wirtz has been a victim to this. He's been asked to play different roles ever since. Sometimes as a no.10, sometimes even as a no.8, false nine and more recently as a winger.

Liverpool's lack of shape has meant when Wirtz is on the ball, either he's not in the areas where he is most effective or he doesn't have the support for him to thrive.

I just want to highlight two screenshots of games against City and Eintracht Frankfurt where Wirtz has the ball in isolation against a full-back.

Normally at Leverkusen, Wirtz would thrive in these situations. He's good at taking players on and he's good at then finding teammates and linking-up with them.

But the problem in these screenshots is that unlike at Leverkusen, where Wirtz was surrounded by support, at Liverpool he doesn't have that.

In both of these instances, he's been limited to one or at best two options, which makes it easy for the defender to predict what he's going to do and take the ball off of him.

It's exactly what happened in both scenarios. Against City, they went on the counter attack. Against Frankfurt, the German side ended-up scoring.

Now let's take a look at a similar example with Wirtz picking up the ball in isolation for Leverkusen.

In this game against Eintracht Frankfurt, Wirtz is surrounded by a myriad of his teammates.

The German is a master of deception. It's what makes him so good. He's unpredictable on the ball. But he can only be unpredictable when he has teammates to 'sell' his feints and moves of deception.

If he doesn't have the structure in place, like any other player in the world, he becomes very easy to read. He's not superhuman.

So, in the above instance, Wirtz makes it seem as if he's going to play the 'obvious' pass back to the defender for a cross. But instead of doing that he actually turns his opponent and goes down the byline.

Once he gets inside the box, he again feigns to square it across to his teammate but instead chops back, cuts onto his stronger foot and scores.

It's an example of how effective he can be when he has the structure in place for him to thrive.

At Liverpool, he's isolated and predictable, and the only way that is going to change is if Slot finds a structure that is compact and stable just like the example above.

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