Almost two years ago, Florian Wirtz (18) moved from the youth team of 1. FC Köln to Bayer Leverkusen. Afterwards, Steffen Baumgart also criticises the transfer.
That Florian Wirtz would become so good so quickly was something even Rudi Völler probably didn’t foresee, although he had already told kicker in January 2020: “Not getting him would have been negligent.” At the time, Bayer signed the 16-year-old top talent from 1. FC Köln, although there was an agreement between the western clubs not to poach youth players from each other.
Sports director Simon Rolfes defended the transfer by saying that Wirtz, whose contract would have expired in Cologne, had received a professional contract directly in Leverkusen and that the situation was therefore different. Especially since FC received a training compensation. “He was trained very, very well in our Cologne junior training centre over a long period of time,” Cologne coach Steffen Baumgart now told the “Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” before the duel with Leverkusen, referring to what he saw as a broken “agreement between Cologne, Leverkusen and Mönchengladbach. That was cancelled. That shows us what kind of business we are in.”
While FC was annoyed by the loss of the teenager and obviously still is, he quickly made them forget about Kai Havertz in Leverkusen and became a senior international.
“1. FC Köln may not have reacted quickly enough at one point or another, but on the other hand, we have to say that a lot of money has flowed there,” Baumgart said. “We are simply not in a position to keep up. That’s a fact. After all, the club there is part of the business. Cologne and Leverkusen work under different conditions that have a big influence on how something like that runs. “