Floridependencia
Florian Wirtz went down injured and Leverkusen's season collapsed. How reliant are they on him?
‘Messidependencia’ is the idea that Barcelona as a team from ~2018 (when Neymar left) through 2021 couldn’t function without Lionel Messi dipping his hand in every pie from goal kicks to goals scored. That, without him, Barcelona’s offense was nothing and they moved like headless chickens on the pitch.
It’s the idea that a player has so much gravity, so much heliocentrism (a very basketbally term) that the opposition can stop them to stop the whole team. Without that key player, the team is nothing.
That brings us to Florian Wirtz.
In 2023, Wirtz was at the center of a Leverkusen side that romped the Bundesliga en route to an invincible Meisterschale. When you think of that team, you don’t necessarily think of it as heavily reliant on Wirtz for offense. In fact, Wirtz came off the bench for several games in the latter half of the season as Leverkusen turned their focus towards winning on multiple fronts with the Europa League and DFB-Pokal.
But, this season, when Wirtz has sat, Leverkusen have struggled—particularly in the Champions League games against Bayern Munich. So, does Leverkusen have some form of ‘Floridependencia’ this season? Or is this just an illusory correlation? Or, even, has this been going on for a while and it’s only now become noticeable?
Obviously, a player as good as Wirtz will be incredibly influential for his team, but I want to clarify how much of a hand Wirtz has in the Leverkusen pie.
To take a look at exactly that, I tried picking out players are responsible for ending their team’s possessions most often.
Thus is born Usage and Usage Rate.
Basketballification
Usage Rate is a basketball term through and through. According to NBAstuffer,
Usage rate, aka NBA usage percentage, is an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while he was on the floor. Usage rate can be calculated with how a possession ends: field-goal or free-throw attempt, or a turnover.
The formula they provide is as follows:
100*((Player’s Field Goal Attempts)+0.44*(Player’s Free Throw Attempts)+(Player’s Turnovers))*(Team’s Total Minutes)
/
((Team’s Total Field Goal Attempts)+0.44*(Team’s Total Free Throw Attempts)+Team’s Total Turnovers))*5*(Player’s Minutes)My formula is a little different. I don’t look at percentage of possessions that end up with an end-of-possession. Rather, I look at simple end-of-possessions (‘Usages’) on a per 100-team-sequences basis, estimating how many sequences the team played while the player was on the pitch.
My formula comes down to this:
[Dispossessions (Dispossessed Carries & Tackled Take-Ons) +
Incomplete Passes +
Shots Created (basically, assists) + Shots Taken +
Fouls Won] / 100 Team Sequences While on PitchSo what Usage Rate provides in a real-world sense is, given every 100 times a team plays the ball around, this is how many times that player gives up the ball by ending the sequence, whether by losing the ball or ending the play in some other way (goal, shot out of play, et cetera). All this is also only for when the player is on the pitch themself. Meaning, if a player plays a few minutes but gets to be the main guy when he’s playing, his usage rate will be sky high (that’s why filtering for minutes is important).
With the nitty-gritty out of the way, here’s what Usage Rate looks like for the 2024/25 season:
Florian Wirtz has the third highest usage rate in the top 5 leagues. Meaning, Leverkusen are running their offense through him. (We already knew that.)
His role has been increasing ever since he came onto the scene. Even when he came back from his ACL tear in 2022/23, Leverkusen were more than happy to give him a commanding role right off the bat. This year, his season-to-season jump has been the the biggest since that injury.
It is a little alarming that Leverkusen won a title and spent in the transfer window to bring in talent and then began relying on Wirtz even more than before.
Obviously, though, their reliance on him to this level this season is not completely new. Last year, he was the Usage Rate leader, as well.
Ignore BuendÃa, he only has 117 minutes on record this season at Leverkusen before being shipped to Villa. Also, note: the black dashed line represents the average of the players shown and will vary from graph to graph.
However, the gulf between him and everyone else has only widened this year, and that’s point for concern.
Messidependencia
Every single Messi year since 2017 was in the 99th percentile for Usage Rate.
That’s remarkable.
To be able to bail out an offense day-in day-out for years on end just adds to his grandeur. The matter is, however, that this is unsustainable. You'd think good teams ought to spread the load more evenly.
The year Liverpool bested Barcelona en route to a Champions League final, they had a much more evenly spread team—from full backs to attackers.
That’s the issue with Florian Wirtz being so clear of his teammates in influence. He needs a bit more help. When your premier creative hub goes down injured before a Champions League second leg against Bayern Munich, it shouldn’t necessarily cause you to accrue your fifth lowest expected goals total at home in the past 2 years. That means the offense without Wirtz is unsustainable.
In terms of overall Usage contributions, Wirtz has hit the highest proportion at Leverkusen since himself last year and Julian Brandt in that great 2018/19 UCL-qualifying campaign.
Comparing his raw Usage Rate to every other season that’s in the top 50% since 2017/18 for Usage Rate, Wirtz has steadily progressed towards having one of the biggest overall offensive loads in Europe.
Leverkusen have a reliance problem. They’re gonna have to fix it.
Here’s Barcelona’s chart, by the way:
Nearly one-fifth of a team’s entire Usage coming from one player . . .
The Blue Moon & its Stars
Having a high Usage Rate doesn’t always mean a heavily-skewed offense.
Kevin De Bruyne’s Usage Rate is a little weird to think about. Remember how I mentioned the Rate only accounts for times when the player was on the pitch? There’s been a couple KDB seasons in the past few years where he doesn’t spend that much time on the pitch. But when he does, he’s incredible.
His production, even at 33 years old while people are beginning to question his place in the lineup, is right up there with some of his best seasons.
He’s still a remarkable passing threat and it makes sense why City would run their attack through him whenever they can. Nevertheless, you’d think this would be a problem just like Leverkusen’s reliance on Wirtz and Barcelona’s reliance on Messi, right?
The difference between Leverkusen/Barcelona and City is that De Bruyne is not left to pull the weight all on his own like Wirtz/Messi.
Doku and Sávio both contribute immensely to City’s offense. Marmoush’s Usage Rate was around 21 on Frankfurt, so I do expect him to bounce back to that soon (especially if Grealish can get so much Usage), and he’ll help split the load even more.
City are looking at Wirtz as their potential KDB replacement and I couldn’t imagine a better fit. Both are comfortable playing wide or inside, both have wands for right feet, and both know what shouldering the offensive burden feels like. The nice thing for Wirtz is that he wouldn’t be alone in carrying that burden.
Does It Matter?
Florian Wirtz is incredibly important to how Leverkusen function as a team. You can see it with your eyes and you can confirm it with the data. If Leverkusen want to take the next step towards becoming a sustainable powerhouse, they need to support him somehow.
You look at somewhere like Bayern where the spread is much narrower and you can see why they've dominated the Bundesliga this year.
Yet what comes out as strange (but honestly understandable) is that the best teams tend to skew their usage towards their best players more than worse teams.
This graph shows the difference between the highest and second-highest usage rate by team sorted into where they finished in the league. I use that as a measure of equal share because typically if a team doesn’t have an outright number one, everyone else is fairly evenly divided. A smaller difference represents a more equal divide of responsibility.
It’s surprising to see how the best teams favor their best player quite a bit. This could be because worse teams don’t have a player who’s good enough to dictate the offense like the Messis or De Bruynes or even Kostics of the world. When you have someone who completely outclasses the rest—see BuendÃa at Norwich or Stöger at Bochum—they do take over and control games.
There is, of course, a little rise near 10th and 11th. You can draw a couple theories from this but one that I think has solidity is that those teams rely more on one talented player while the teams who finish in the Europa League or Conference League spots need a more cohesive unit to maintain better consistency. Having to defend only one person makes it much easier to shut down a team.
Good teams can still have even spread, though. In fact, here are the teams who’ve finished first with a difference of less than or equal to 1.0:
Manchester City, 2019, Leroy Sané (0.058 Difference)Milan, 2022, Rafael Leão (0.110)Bayern Munich, 2021, Thomas Müller (0.180)Bayern Munich, 2022, Thomas Müller (0.419)Juventus, 2019, Alex Sandro (0.686)Inter, 2021, Nicolò Barella (0.760)Real Madrid, 2020, Dani Carvajal (0.843)Napoli, 2023, Mário Rui (0.892)Juventus, 2018, Paulo Dybala (0.944)
Those are good, good teams. That Napoli title-winning side had a very even spread, which is remarkable considering they had Kvicha Kvaratskhelia on their side. Yet it makes sense. They were able to win games because everyone on the team could create. Their fluidity and rotations all across the pitch made them incredible to watch.
Bayern won 11 titles in a row while distributing their offensive load incredibly evenly. I think sustainable success comes from having a team that can share the load pretty evenly.
Furthermore, a team that splits its offense more equally tends to play what we’d consider ‘prettier’ football. Having players from all across the pitch contribute in the attacking phase means you're initially involving them in build-up and you’re moving forward as a cohesive unit. Here’s this season’s teams by current position and difference in top-2 usage rate:
First place doesn’t look to rely on any one player too much.
Of course, there’s always nuance. A team with a good player should build around him. Leverkusen have built around Florian Wirtz. Yet it shouldn’t be to such an extent that everything crumbles when he’s not playing. It shouldn’t be like the Messi years at Barcelona.
Building a team is hard, but there’s quite a few ways to go about doing it. We’ll just have to wait and see how Leverkusen continue to build around Wirtz.
Or even if they’ll have him around long enough to do that.