Real Madrid already have three fine players capable of starring in the No. 10 role in Jude Bellingham, Arda Guler, and Brahim Diaz. All showed their qualities last season, with Jude posting the best season of any player in La Liga with 19 goals from the midfield.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Bayer Leverkusen superstar Florian Wirtz from being linked frequently to Real Madrid, as the Merengue club continue to show a commitment for going after the world’s very best players under the leadership of Florentino Perez.
There is quietly concern that with so many mouths to feed in the attack and an unbalanced squad defensively, Perez’s vision for the Galacticos 2.0 is doomed to fail just as badly as it did the first time around.
Nevertheless, Real Madrid are players in the Wirtz sweepstakes, joining eternal rivals Barcelona and fellow Champions League powerhouses Bayern Munich and Liverpool as the favorites to land one of the two most talented players in the German Bundesliga.
A lot of recent reports that indicated that Real Madrid are actually the favorites over German giants Bayern Munich to sign Wirtz, and while some of that has been due to speculation that the playmaker would prefer to join Xabi Alonso in the Spanish capital, there may be a simpler reason why.
According to a report from Sky Sports Germany’s top reporter Florian Plettenberg, Bayer Leverkusen would prefer to sell Florian Wirtz to Real Madrid rather than to direct title rivals Bayern Munich.
That would explain why Los Blancos are the preliminary favorites to sign Wirtz. Leverkusen just won the Bundesliga with an undefeated season and are still in a title race with Bayern in 2024/25, and Wirtz is easily their most important player.
Selling him directly to Bayern would basically doom Die Werkself to lose the league for the next decade, even if they invested that 100 million euros (or more) wisely.
Real Madrid have, per Plettenberg, been pushing very hard to sign the 20-year-old attacking midfielder as of late. As the Wirtz transfer rumors heat up, we’ll see if there is a concomitant rise in the rumors linking Guler away from the Santiago Bernabeu.
