Liverpool's two big signings still aren't firing

The No 10 who isn't producing

Florian Wirtz arrived at Anfield from Bayer Leverkusen for a fee north of £100 million and spent his first year being described, charitably, as tidy but toothless. This season was supposed to be the correction. He has been given the role he reportedly wanted, operating centrally as Liverpool's No 10 rather than drifting from a wide channel, and the early signs pointed to him finally getting the platform to show what made him one of the Bundesliga's best players. Instead he has barely registered. Across seven starts in all competitions this term he has a single assist, no goals since a league game back in April, and a recent habit of giving the ball away in positions where Liverpool can least afford it.

The Jurgen Klopp factor made this harder to explain away. Klopp, now in charge of Germany, worked with Wirtz over the international break, and the assumption inside Anfield was that time with a coach who knows him intimately might reset something. It did not. Wirtz was anonymous again on his return, his touch letting him down repeatedly against Manchester City, and whatever spark Klopp hoped to find clearly didn't survive the flight back to Merseyside.

Why the role isn't the fix

The deeper issue with Wirtz is not effort or application, it's fit. He was signed as a free-roaming creator who thrives on space between the lines, the kind of player who punishes teams for not pressing him properly. Liverpool's system under Arne Slot asks a No 10 to combine quickly in tight areas and contribute defensively when possession is lost, which is a different skill set to the one that made Wirtz devastating for Leverkusen. Handing him the shirt number and the nominal position hasn't solved that: you can give a player the role he wants and still be asking him to play a version of football that doesn't suit him. A year in, that mismatch looks less like early-season rust and more like a structural problem Liverpool will have to either coach around or accept.

Barcola's excuse is simpler

Bradley Barcola's struggles are easier to explain and easier to forgive for now. He's a fresh arrival from Paris Saint-Germain, still adjusting to a new league, a new manager and a Premier League that moves at a different tempo to Ligue 1. Wingers who relied on PSG's control of possession to create one-on-ones don't automatically translate that into a division where they'll see the ball less and have to defend more. Barcola deserves the runway that every big-money attacker gets in year one, and nobody serious is writing him off after a handful of months.

Why the comparison still matters

The two cases get lumped together because Liverpool needed both to click at the same time, and neither has. But treating them as the same story understates how much worse the Wirtz situation actually is. Barcola has an obvious get-out clause: time. Wirtz doesn't, not anymore. He's a season and a half into English football, he has been given the exact role he was bought to play, and the numbers, one assist from seven starts and no goal since the spring, are not a slow starter's numbers. They're a player whose fundamental profile doesn't match the job description. Until Liverpool either find a system that plays to his actual strengths or accept the fee was a mismatch from day one, Wirtz will keep looking like the more serious problem of the two.