It can be easy to forget about the Bundesliga sometimes. Bayern Munich signs all the best German players and wins the league every year like clockwork. I’m exaggerating slightly — Borussia Dortmund legitimately scared them last season — but not by much.

This season might just be different. 

Dortmund had the opportunity to spoil Bayern’s season on the final day last year, but in 2023-24, Bayer Leverkusen appears to be the team who could steal the title away from the Bavarians. 

You can chalk their early-season success up to multiple factors. Their manager, Xabi Alonso, in his first full season at Leverkusen, certainly deserves credit. Various media outlets have suggested Alonso could take over for Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid next season, showing how highly he’s thought of as a coach. New star striker Victor Boniface — deserving of his own column — has earned a sizable share of the acclaim as well. 

But not enough people have acknowledged Florian Wirtz for who he really is: a top 10 attacking midfielder in the world at just 20 years old. 

Even more ridiculous: We’ve seen Wirtz coming for a long time. He broke onto the scene at just 16 years old, making his debut for Leverkusen with a start against Werder Bremen in May 2020. Just a couple of weeks later, Wirtz scored his first Bundesliga goal, becoming the youngest-ever Bundesliga goalscorer. That record didn’t stand long — thanks, Youssoufa Moukoko — but even temporarily being atop that list in a league that produces so much young talent shows his chops. He scored that goal against Bayern Munich, no less. 

When Wirtz first broke through, he played mostly as a right-winger. But his first Bundesliga goal displayed a classical winger skillset. 

In that sequence, Wirtz received the ball in the box as the widest attacker on Leverkusen’s right side. He faked a shot with his right boot, then cut the other way to favor his left. With no Bayern defender pressing him tight, Wirtz used the space and angle he created to unleash a shot toward goal, which beat Manuel Neuer in the goal easily. 

Despite his early prowess on the wing, he now marshalls the team’s attack from midfield. His success in that role suggests that former Leverkusen manager Peter Bosz moved Wirtz there because midfield is his best position, but I also suspect that the ACL tear Wirtz suffered in 2022 has kept him in midfield. Not having to isolate against a defender one-on-one down the wing helps prevent him from picking up further left-knee injuries.

For a player so young, such an injury could totally derail a career, especially when one has the momentum of breaking into the first team early and becoming a young superstar. But Wirtz’s output before the injury looks almost identical to his output before it. 

In the 2021-22 season, when Wirtz started 22 matches before the ACL tear, he averaged 0.64 non-penalty expected goals plus assists per 90 minutes, or npxG+xA for short, meaning that he created chances and shots worth a goal about every other game.  He actually exceeded his expected tally with 17 combined goal contributions that season.

Post-injury? He’s averaging 0.63 npxG+xA per 90 minutes. And beyond his raw output, the data shows that Wirtz has improved the volume of his beneficial plays. For a player who scores a decent number of goals — or at least he did pre-ACL — Wirtz has never taken shots at a high volume. In his age 17 and 18 Bundesliga seasons, Wirtz averaged 0.60 shots on target per 90 minutes. It’s physically impossible to score unless you place the shot within the boundaries of the goalposts, and Wirtz was only doing that every other game or so. 

However, in admittedly a small sample size (roughly six matches), Wirtz has already more than doubled that figure, posting 1.35 shots on target per 90 minutes. His key passes per 90 have improved to 3.56 this season, up from 2.86 prior to the ACL injury. It’s the same story for his passes into the penalty area per 90, which have increased to 3.90 compared to 2.43 pre-tear.

Even more ridiculously, Wirtz’s dribbling has remained top-notch. FBref’s data has Wirtz in the 65th percentile for progress carries — a nice supplement to his 96th percentile progressive passes — but he dribbles past defenders with ease. The young German averages 3.60 successful take-ons per 90, in the 97th percentile.

And for those who aren’t sure how FBref tabulates their data, Wirtz’s percentiles for game data display his output as a comparison against the rest of Europe’s top five leagues, the Champions League and the Europa League. His “similar players” section compares him to Riyad Mahrez, Jack Grealish, James Maddison and Paulo Dybala, among others — some of the best inside-looking wingers and attacking midfielders in the world. Those comparisons would flatter anyone. 

But Wirtz has the potential to exceed all of them. 

If this Leverkusen team wins a trophy under Alonso, Wirtz’s ability to pull the strings of the attack will be the reason why. And if he moves to Bayern Munich or the Premier League or Barcelona, he will become a title-winning mainstay in those lineups. 

The German national team already relies on Wirtz as well. In the last two international windows, in which Germany made a major coaching change, Wirtz still started all four matches, signaling he will be a key member of Die Mannschaft going into the Euro 2024 tournament on their home turf. 

Can Wirtz lead Germany and his club side to glory? I definitely wouldn’t bet against it.

Jack Hallinan is a junior writing about the top wunderkinds in men’s and women’s soccer in his column, “Rising Ballers,” which runs every other Thursday.