Ibrahim Maza likes to joke he is still waiting for his big thank you from his Bayer Leverkusen colleagues. That’s for the huge favour he did them more than two years ago as a 17-year-old making his first ripples in the deep pool of senior football.
Maza, the Algerian prodigy who two months ago signed for Leverkusen, was partly responsible for the provincial German club’s best season in history, the 2023-24 epic that featured a domestic double and a final in a major European competition.
His part in all that is a detail, a coincidence, but he likes to remind his new teammates of it. But for Maza scoring the first goal of his top-flight career, for Hertha Berlin in the second half of the last match of the 2022-23 Bundesliga campaign and so helping turn a 1-0 deficit to Wolfsburg into a 2-1 Hertha victory, Wolfsburg and not Leverkusen would have qualified, by final league placing, for the Europa League.
“The lads here haven't thanked me yet,” grinned Maza when he was introduced to reporters after his €12m move from Hertha, adding, with irony: “How ungrateful of them!”
Hertha were relegated that year. Leverkusen meanwhile went on to reach the Europa League final, part of an astonishing adventure: that season, they became the only club to have interrupted Bayern Munich’s monopoly on the Bundesliga title in the last 12 years.
They were the sole Bundesliga champions in history to have claimed the title with an unbeaten record, their 51-match run of invincibility extending across competitions lasting all the way to their European final – won by Atalanta, Leverkusen’s only loss in 53 competitive fixtures. And all achieved under a head coach, Xabi Alonso, in his first full season in top-division management.
If Maza, by way of an anecdote, was indeed the distant catalyst for some of that fairytale, the task before him now is to write fresh stories, to be headliner at Leverkusen not a footnote, and to allow fans there to park their glorious souvenirs of the greatest year of the club’s 120-year existence. He’s the face of a major transition. And a heavy responsibility it is for a teenager still three months shy of his 20th birthday.
The Leverkusen miracle, that indomitable double campaign, has lost most of its leading actors. Coach Xabi has been headhunted to coach Real Madrid, his esteem undiminished by having guided Leverkusen to second, behind Bayern, in the Bundesliga last May.
Premier League champions Liverpool have swooped in for dynamic stars Florian Wirtz and Jeremie Frimpong, bringing a combined €165m into the Leverkusen treasury. Jonathan Tah, the Germany international defender, is on his way to Bayern. Granit Xhaka, midfield governor, has joined Sunderland.
In their places, many unknowns. The burden of matching the high standards set by Xabi falls on Erik ten Hag, a coach of distinction and experience but only recently shown the exit door at Manchester United, where in each of two full seasons in charge he won a domestic Cup. But ten Hag could not put a significant brake on the steady decline in Premier League status that has damned United managers before him and after him.
He will relaunch his career with a Leverkusen reshaped with younger players. For Tah’s authority at the back, enter Jarell Quansah, the highly-rated 22-year-old, signed from Liverpool. Malik Tillman, the German-born US international, 23, has joined from PSV Eindhoven to provide creativity in attacking midfield.
And then there’s Maza, around whom expectation has been building since he was a schoolboy footballer in Berlin, his birthplace, and around whom there was, even in his teens, a determined tug-of-war over his senior international status – between Algeria, where his father comes from, and his native Germany, who capped him at junior levels.
The German Football Federation reluctantly acknowledged, when Maza gladly accepted his first call-up for the Desert Foxes last October, that the starlet’s World Cup ambitions were set in North Africa.
Algeria felt like the logical choice, he has said. His idol, growing up, was Riyad Mahrez, whom a 13-year-old Maza watched guiding Algeria to triumph at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and who remains a role model now that they are international colleagues.
Mahrez might usefully give advice on aspects of Maza’s specific challenge at Leverkusen. Almost a decade ago Mahrez inspired one of elite football’s most famous miracles, when his unsung Leicester City won the English Premier League title.
Leverkusen’s upstart triumph of 2023-24 is of a similar order. And the follow-up to such against-the-odds successes is seldom straightforward. Mahrez was among the Leicester players lured away – to Manchester City – after Leicester’s surprise success and, once he and others had left, the club’s momentum proved hard to maintain.
Maza, restricted to second-tier football with Hertha these last two seasons, embraces that challenge. He described Leverkusen as “a great fit” for this pivotal stage in his career and hopes, in Friday's pre-season warm-up against world club champions Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, to build on the encouraging showings in his friendly outings so far.
He was a proactive contributor to Leverkusen’s 3-0 friendly win over Pisa on Tuesday, covering a range of positions in midfield, confident in his one-on-one duelling – one of his fortes – and his long-range shooting.
The comparisons with the brilliant Wirtz are already being made. “Those sorts of comparisons are always difficult,” said Maza. “Flo – I hope I can call him ‘Flo’! – is an incredible player, the most expensive transfer in Premier League history [he cost Liverpool around €125m] and what he has done here is fantastic. I just hope that I can be at his level someday. I'm not there yet, but hopefully I can be in the future.”
Ten Hag will not weigh down Maza with the mantle of 'The New Wirtz' but he is ready to stimulate Maza by likening him to former Leverkusen prodigies. “It's impossible to replace a player like Florian Wirtz,” said Ten Hag, “but what Leverkusen have done well in the past is developing young footballers. The club has always shown them how to progress. We will find out who the next Kai Havertz [ex of Leverkusen] or Wirtz can be. Maybe it could be Ibrahim Maza. It’s about seizing opportunities.”
