Florian Wirtz's Leverkusen link-up which outdid Firmino and Salah

Florian Wirtz has over twice as many assists for Patrick Schick as anyone else. Can Liverpool replicate this powerful partnership for the German international?

Sports fans can be obsessed by records. Facts, trivia, stats. Who scored the most goals this season? Who provided the most assists? Why does every OptaJoe tweet need to include the phrase “only Mohamed Salah”?

As interesting as these nuggets can be, it can be more insightful to see how players combine. No team relies solely on their superstar, even if it happens to be only Salah. It’s partly why the previous edition of this newsletter looked at Liverpool’s top combinations for creating chances in the league this season:

The Vital Connection Was Made. Some Will Be Broken.

A poster on Reddit recently shared a table of the leading pairings for creating goals in Europe’s big five leagues since 2009/10. It’s littered with players you’d expect to see, though not even Lionel Messi features in both the scorer and assister columns.

Liverpool’s best combos in this period topped out at six. Sadio Mané providing this many goals for Salah in 2017/18 feels obvious, Luis Suárez doing likewise for Raheem Sterling four years earlier rather less so.

The top divisions across England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain saw two pairings deliver seven goals in 2024/25. Jacob Murphy teed up Alexander Isak for a septet of strikes, as did Florian Wirtz for Patrik Schick.

Sorry. Did you say Florian Wirtz? Oh, cool. Now I’m interested.

Digging around on FBRef thickens the plot nicely. The likely Liverpool new boy has set up Schick for 18 of the 69 assists he has in their database. Wirtz doesn’t have more than seven for anyone else.

The Czech forward is his number one guy. They are ready for the floor.

The only duo with more than 18 for the Reds since the start of the Jürgen Klopp era is Roberto Firmino to Salah, with 21 of Bobby’s 71 assists feeding the Egyptian.

Nobody needs reminding about how well that two-thirds of Liverpool’s legendary front three linked up. For Wirtz to be in touching distance of the assist total despite only playing a shade over a third as many minutes with Schick as Firmino did with Salah makes their relationship worthy of further investigation.

So, here it is. There’s a clip of each goal, with the YouTube videos set to show you only the move in question (you will need to double click on the videos on the website to then be able to play them). Who is going to become Wirtz’s new Schick at Anfield?

We’ll begin with the most pertinent example for Liverpool, as the pre-assist was provided by Jeremie Frimpong. He crossed, Wirtz pulled back, Schick fired home from just inside the box (versus Freiburg in December 2024).

This was unique in the manner in which Wirtz set up his most frequent chance converter. As you would expect with a 6’ 3” target man, there were examples of crosses which Schick headed home. Wirtz has delivered him an assist from either side of the box in this way (Stuttgart, October 2020 & Freiburg, December 2024).