Liverpool’s £116 million Florian Wirtz deal so big it’s on Bayer AG’s balance sheet
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Liverpool new signing Florian Wirtz during a pre-season friendly against Athletic Bilbao.
PHOTO: EPA
Follow topic:
LONDON – Bayer AG received an unexpected boost this summer – the high-profile transfer of football star Florian Wirtz to Liverpool for a reported £116 million (S$199 million).
Ordinarily, Bayer’s ownership of the Bayer Leverkusen football team does not factor much into its financial results. But that was a bright spot in the second-quarter earnings published on Aug 6 amid challenges the German conglomerate faces with its traditional business.
“If we have these transfers, we need to compare the book value with the prices that we get and that can lead to an extraordinary result on several players,” chief financial officer Wolfgang Nickl said.
The surprise disclosure prompted at least one investor to question why Bayer failed to mention the football-fuelled boost when it released preliminary results last week.
The company merely stated that in reconciliation, the business portion that includes the financial performance of the football programme, adjusted earnings had “improved to minus €13 million (S$19 million)”.
That statement suggested Bayer’s performance has improved to a greater extent than it has, according to Markus Manns, a portfolio manager at Union Investment in Frankfurt.
“Bayer scored an own goal with last week’s statement,” Manns said in an e-mail. “Something like this should not happen in capital market communications.”
Bayer shares fell as much as 7.5 per cent in Frankfurt, the biggest intraday decline in almost three months. The company said it raised its full-year forecast in last week’s statement because of strong demand for its pharmaceuticals.
Bayer’s football programme built up plenty of corporate pride in the 2023-24 season when it became the first team ever to go undefeated in Germany’s top-tier Bundesliga. Wirtz, an attacking midfielder, earned Player of the Year honours that season.
In June, 22-year-old Wirtz left for Liverpool, where he will help the club to defend their Premier League crown.
Back in Leverkusen, Bayer served up a mixed bag of results, citing strong demand for new cancer and kidney medicines and sluggish sales of the weedkiller Roundup.
Those troubles, however, are typically far removed from the ups and downs of the football programme. In the past, Bayer’s leaders have said they have no intention to sell off the sports team in a bid to shore up cash for the main business.
Nickl noted that Wirtz is not the only player who factored into that effect, as Liverpool also paid for Leverkusen’s star defender Jeremie Frimpong.
It is also not the first time Bayer has seen an earnings boost from losing a top football talent. In 2020, Chelsea signed former Leverkusen striker Kai Havertz. BLOOMBERG
