The £60m midfield dream that Chelsea won’t want to wake up from

Mauricio Pochettino has not had much luck getting his forwards going this season – Nicolas Jackson is misfiring, Cole Palmer is inexperienced, Mykhaylo Mudryk is fine one game and awful the next, Armando Broja is injured, and so on and so forth. Even Conor Gallagher got to try out life as a centre-forward during the game against Arsenal, when he rotated the role with Palmer to relatively little avail. Chelsea need to try something new, and that probably means some more signings.

Christopher Nkunku will be back soon enough but there’s plenty of evidence that the Blues still need more firepower than the former RB Leipzig forward is likely to provide on his own – and a few media outlets reckon that they’ve identified German attacking midfielder Florian Wirtz as a potential transfer target. If that’s the case, Chelsea fans have every cause to get rather excitable about it.

Regular readers of our weekly Wonderkid Power Rankings will be more than familiar with the name – aged just 20, he’s already one of the best players in the Bundesliga and an unceasing joy to watch. He’s elegant, technically outstanding, a brilliant dribbler, has an impressive passing range and knows exactly where the goal is. His club, Bayer Leverkusen, are top of the table and Wirtz is a pretty substantial part of the reason why, and he’s rapidly establishing himself as a regular in the national team as well.

This past week alone, he registered two goals and set another four up – bagging a hat-trick of assists against Qarabağ in the Europa League before scoring a stunning goal against Freiburg which saw his weave a mazy path through a pair of defenders, sitting one down on his backside in the process, before slotting in from a narrow angle. He’s an incredible player.

He doesn’t just pass the eye test, either, and the raw numbers prove that his output – 41 goal contributions in the Bundesliga since establishing himself as a first-teamer back in 2020 – is no fluke, and likely even undersells his ability. He beats opponents on the ground around 3.65 times per game (hugely impressive), completes more than seven progressive passes per game (remarkable) and is responsible for six shot-creating actions per game (genuinely extraordinary). He’s got the complete skillset for a number ten, with no meaningful weaknesses except for a relative lack of experience.

He’s also racked up all those goals and assists despite a lengthy lay-off enforced by an anterior cruciate ligament injury which saw him miss most of 2022. If such a serious injury at such a young age had a major impact on him, it isn’t very visible – he’s slotted right back into the team and has been scoring and setting goals up every bit as efficiently as he was before.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that if Chelsea want to boost their goal output, he’s certainly the man for the job. He’s an exceptional creator who thrives in and around the box, playing quick passes into dangerous areas, using his ball-carrying skills to beat defenders and taking shots on himself, often with unerring accuracy. There are very few teams in world football who wouldn’t find a place for him – and as such, there are several other teams who are rumoured to be in the mix as well.

Chelsea are reported to be ahead of the chasing pack, at least in terms of how substantial their interest is – but Newcastle United, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Bayern Munich and Barcelona have all been mentioned as well. Some of those teams make more sense than others – it would certainly be interesting to see how Barcelona raise the cash, for instance, or whether Spurs would really try to find a way to play both Wirtz and James Maddison at the same time – but Chelsea will not have a clear path to his signing if they do go down that road.

There’s also a cautionary tale from Chelsea’s own recent past, and it’s one which would come up a lot if Wirtz did make his way to west London – his early career is remarkably similar to that of Kai Havertz. Like Havertz, he’s a Leverkusen academy graduate who broke records when he burst into the first team at an exceptionally young age, and like Havertz he’s an attacking midfielder who has quickly worked his way up to wonderkid status.

There are differences in playing style – Havertz is a more direct player than Wirtz and his ball-carrying was never on the same level – but the comparison is immediate and obvious, and serves as a warning to Chelsea about how not to handle a player like Wirtz going forward. Chelsea were guilty of plucking the wings off a butterfly with Havertz, playing him out of position and not playing to his strengths. Let’s just say that Wirtz probably wouldn’t cut it as a centre-forward.

Over the summer, Wirtz’s transfer fee was mooted as being in the region of £60m – no deal came to fruition, of course, and that number may be less than reliable, but if there was any grain of truth in that valuation then it’s fair to assume that it’s only gone up. Wirtz will not come cheap, but at least spending money hasn’t been Chelsea’s problem of late…

Of course, having a superlative creative player dropping in behind the main striker doesn’t achieve much if the striker in question isn’t scoring. Whether it’s Nkunku or Broja when they’re fit, or Jackson when he’s got his confidence back, Wirtz still needs someone to feed – and it’s also worth noting that having Wirtz in the team could easily stunt Palmer’s development, although the former Manchester City midfielder can at least play out wide as well. There are cases against signing Wirtz if you care to make them – but they’re rather thin.

The ultimate fact is that Wirtz is a magisterial player, and looks set to develop into one of the best in the world. When a club opens up the bidding process, others will follow them in – the chance to get hold of Wirtz is simply too good to pass up. Whether Chelsea can win that race may depend on whether they can offer the semblance of a functioning side, and look more like a team that will be challenging for the top four going forward. That looks fairly distant at present, but they’ll likely have until the summer to sort things out, at least, as Wirtz is highly unlikely to be for sale in January if Leverkusen’s title challenge is still on track. If Chelsea can make it happen, however, then it would be a transfer worth getting very excited about.