‘He’s one in a million’ – Manchester United’s ‘most sensible’ option in race for new Florian Wirtz
Cologne will feel justice has been served when Premier League clubs line up for their homegrown superstar for a second straight summer.
‘The Billy Goats’ boast the Bundesliga‘s biggest breakout star this season in Said El Mala, who will right the wrongs of Florian Wirtz.
Cologne, aka FC Koln, were left smarting when Wirtz joined Liverpool in a then British transfer record deal worth £116.5million in June.
The 22-year-old was nurtured in their academy before Bayer Leverkusen swooped to sign him for a paltry £265,000 five years ago.
Cologne believe their Rhine rivals broke a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ around their respective youth stars in poaching Wirtz.
It proved an especially hard pill to swallow when Germany‘s current player of the year was later sold for over 400 times his original value.
However, Cologne now stand to make a massive profit on Wirtz’s compatriot El Mala, who has taken the Bundesliga by storm this year.
Who is Said El Mala?
The club signed the teenager and his older brother, Malek, from city rivals Viktoria Koln in 2024, but a transfer ban meant the pair were loaned back to the German third-tier side last season.
Having scored 13 goals and registered five assists for Viktoria, El Mala arrived at Cologne this summer to sign a deal until 2030.
The 19-year-old has made light work of the two division jump, scoring a last-gasp equaliser in a 1-1 draw with Werder Bremen on Saturday.
It means that the 6ft 2in winger has already netted five goals and laid on another three assists across 12 Bundesliga outings in just 501 minutes.
European football expert Andy Brassell told talkSPORT.com: “There’s no doubt who the star of the team is. And it’s El Mala.
“Someone relatively young, who has relatively little first-team experience, but someone who dares to dribble.
“He’s quick, the ball’s glued to his feet. He wants to take on players the whole time. It’s for that reason that he’s been called up to the German squad so quickly.
“He is quite an authentic winger, which I guess you get less and less of, which is why he’s so exciting to see, because there is something quite reassuringly old-fashioned about him.
“His balance and his technique are really terrific.
“He got called up for Germany for the first time in November, and [Julian] Nagelsmann has clearly got a plan for him, because he had him with the squad for the first game, but for the second game, he let him go back to the under-21s to help with them.”
Said El Mala is ‘one in a million’
Nagelsmann’s decision to include El Mala in Germany’s squad last month drew criticism from Oliver Kahn and Didi Hamann.
The latter claimed the call-up was too early, and yet following the youngster’s heroics on Sunday, he was singing a different tune.
Brassell added: “El Mala needs to be encouraged and protected in equal measure. Didi Hamann said on Sky Germany that he thought people were getting way too excited about El Mala too quickly.
He said it’s way too soon. There’s too much hype.
“Now, a couple of performances later, he’s like, he’s great. He’s special.
He’s one in a million. So he’s one of those players.
“It’s so easy for him to win you over because he’s such a natural, because he’s got such confidence.
“You look at him stepping up in the clutch moments. Cologne were staring down the barrel of their third successive Bundesliga defeat at the weekend at Werder Bremen, and he really dragged them back into the game single-handedly in the closing stages.”
El Mala transfer
“El Mala is the one that makes Köln think, ‘OK, this is a guy who’s going to be massive’,” Brassell added to talkSPORT. “And at least for the moment, he’s ours.”
“A lot of Köln fans look at Florian Wirtz and think he should have been our superstar and are still pretty upset about that, particularly with how brilliant and what a major player Wirtz has become in the meantime.
“But I think a lot of them look at El Mala and think this could be our guy, kind of the homegrown superstar that Wirtz was meant to be.”
But for how long?
Southampton and Brighton were both linked with El Mala last summer, but interest in his services has since been taken up a level.
Bayern Munich sporting director Christoph Freund has talked him up, while Pep Guardiola is a huge fan, as per reports in Germany.
According to reports in Spain, Manchester United are also admirers of El Mala, with Liverpool and Chelsea among his other potential suitors.
“I always tend to err on the side that players would be better to stick around for a year,” Brassell continued. “But when you’re offered a big move, I mean, there’s normally only one response.
“With the confidence that El Mala has got, with the way he steps up to every level and looks like he’s ready for it, I wouldn’t be surprised if he went at the end of the season, to be honest. Which would be an enormous shame for FC Köln and their supporters.
“If he continues to play the way he’s playing, some offers that they won’t be able to refuse will turn up and then the inevitable will happen.
“But I think rather than Wirtz, who got taken away before he even got a chance to get into the Köln first team, this will be different.
“I think if you ask most Köln fans intellectually, they know how good Said El Mala is.
“They know that he will eventually end up playing for a more elite team. And that’s fine. That’s a fulfilment of his talent.
“But it’s just about enjoying it now. And the football culture of Köln is relentlessly optimistic, is relentlessly about the here and now, is about this game. And we’ve won this game, so we’re going places. And I think he kind of taps into that.
“Someone who’s just an instant thrill, really. So he feels like not just a great player of the future, but their sort of player. And I think they’ll just enjoy him while they’ve got him.”
Man United ‘most sensible’ option
“You don’t really look at Manchester United and say there is a great place for a young player to develop. But if you’re looking at where he would fit logically, United is the most sensible one out of those, I think.
“Liverpool are obviously in a state of flux at the moment, and you wonder how much football he would actually play there.
“[Man] City have wide players absolutely to die for at the moment.
So you wonder how much he would play there.
“United is maybe the obvious one.
“You look at their successes of late, United, and really, you look at someone like Amad [Diallo], and he is someone who feels quite old school United.
“A player who is not scared of stepping up despite the pressure, despite the situation, despite this sort of heaviness that seems to be around United all the time.
“He still wants to get on the ball and make stuff happen. You could definitely imagine El Mala doing that as well, from the other side.”
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