Florian Wirtz Panini Obsidian Black Color Blast PSA 9: Liverpool's Record Signing on a Case-Hit Insert

When Liverpool wired a club-record fee to Bayer Leverkusen in June 2025, they didn't just buy a midfielder — they reset the price of attacking talent in English football. This is the card that ties that moment to one of Panini Obsidian's hardest pulls: the 2024-25 Black Color Blast of Florian Wirtz, slabbed PSA 9 and listed now through Hobby Syndicate.

What you're actually looking at

Color Blast is one of the most recognizable inserts in the modern hobby — a hand-painted, splatter-art portrait that bleeds off the edges of the card in a wash of color. The Black Color Blast is the darkest, most dramatic version of that design, where the artwork sits against a deep black ground that makes the paint pop like neon under glass. In Panini Obsidian, these are short-printed case-hits: cards that fall roughly one per sealed case, not one per box. You don't open your way into a stack of them.

This particular copy is the #7 Florian Wirtz, graded PSA 9 Mint under certification number 133825463, with Wirtz pictured in Bayer Leverkusen's black-and-red. It's the same premium Panini Obsidian line that produced Cole Palmer's 1/1 Electric Etch Finite — a product built around scarcity rather than volume.

The population report says "scarce" out loud

Scarcity claims are cheap in the hobby; pop reports are not. According to the PSA data attached to this listing, the Wirtz Black Color Blast has been graded just 22 times across all grades, with only 10 copies in PSA 9. That is a genuinely thin population for a player of this profile, and it's the kind of number that matters when demand spikes — because there simply isn't a deep shelf of copies to absorb new buyers. Before you commit four figures to any slab, though, it's worth knowing how to spot a fake PSA slab first; the case and label are part of what you're paying for.

The player: Liverpool's £116m bet

In June 2025, Liverpool agreed a deal worth up to £116 million for Wirtz — £100m guaranteed plus £16m in add-ons — making him the most expensive signing in Liverpool's history, eclipsing the Darwin Núñez fee from 2022. The add-ons are structured to reward sustained success: reporting indicates they only trigger if Liverpool win the Premier League or Champions League multiple times over the life of the deal, so the headline number is as much a statement of ambition as a price tag.

For a stretch, that £116m made Wirtz the headline of the summer window — until Liverpool then broke the British transfer record outright for Alexander Isak at a reported £125m. Two record-class signings in one window tells you exactly how Liverpool see this squad: built to win now, with Wirtz as the creative engine behind it.

From Leverkusen's invincibles to Anfield

Wirtz didn't arrive at Anfield as a prospect. He arrived as the creative heartbeat of the Bayer Leverkusen side that won the club's first-ever Bundesliga title in 2023-24, going unbeaten across the league season under Xabi Alonso — a team that earned the "invincibles" tag in German football. A long-term anterior cruciate ligament injury earlier in his career could have derailed him; instead he came back as one of the most complete young playmakers in Europe and a fixture for the German national team.

His Liverpool start was understated but telling. He made his competitive debut in the Community Shield at Wembley and produced an assist inside the opening minutes, threading a pass for fellow debutant Hugo Ekitiké. Across his first Premier League campaign in 2025-26 he registered roughly five league goals and three assists while logging heavy minutes — modest counting numbers for a £100m playmaker, but the underlying creation and the eye test pointed at a player settling into a new league rather than struggling in it.

Why the parallel matters more than the base

Here's the part collectors sometimes skip past. A base Wirtz card is a commodity — printed in volume, available at any time, priced like a commodity. A Black Color Blast case-hit is the opposite: a single-digit-per-case pull, in a PSA 9 population of ten. When a player's stock rises, the base cards barely move because supply is effectively unlimited. It's the genuinely scarce parallels — the Color Blasts, the low-numbered refractors, the one-of-ones — that respond, because there's a hard ceiling on how many exist.

That dynamic is the entire reason this card is worth writing about rather than a $5 base rookie. You're not betting on Wirtz being good — that's already priced in by a £116m transfer. You're betting on a thin population of a flagship insert meeting future demand if his Liverpool career delivers silverware.

PSA 9 vs PSA 10 on a painted card

It's worth understanding why this copy is a 9 and not a 10, because on Color Blast inserts the distinction is its own conversation. These cards are printed with heavy ink coverage and a glossy, splatter-painted surface that runs to the edges. That finish is gorgeous, but it's unforgiving under a loupe: the slightest print line, a hair of off-centering, or a faint surface tick is enough to keep a card out of the PSA 10 tier. As a result, gem-mint 10s on Color Blasts are genuinely scarce, and clean PSA 9s do a lot of the heavy lifting in the market.

For a buyer, that has a practical upside. A PSA 9 typically carries a meaningful discount to a 10 while still being a high-grade, slabbed, authenticated copy with no raw-card condition risk. On a card with a total population of 22, the gap between "the one PSA 10 that exists" and "a clean PSA 9 you can actually buy" is often the difference between a museum piece and an ownable asset. The 9 is the grade where a lot of serious collecting on these inserts actually happens.

Where Wirtz fits in the soccer card landscape

The modern soccer card market has organized itself around a small group of blue-chip names — World Cup captains, Ballon d'Or contenders, and record-fee transfers. Wirtz sits squarely in the third bucket, and the company is telling. The same Hobby Syndicate shelves that carry this card carry flagship slabs of Kylian Mbappé and Liverpool teammate Alexander Isak — players whose cards trade on the same logic: elite club, elite price tag, scarce premium parallels.

What separates a Wirtz Black Color Blast from the broader pile of his cardboard is that it's not tied to a single tournament or a single season's hype. Color Blast is a recurring, recognizable, collector-favorite design, and the black variant is the most coveted finish within it. That gives the card staying power independent of week-to-week form. If Wirtz delivers the trophies Liverpool paid for, this is one of the cards collectors will point back to as the early, scarce, on-card chapter of his Anfield era.

The listing

The card is listed and available now: 2024-25 Panini Obsidian #7 Florian Wirtz, Black Color Blast, slabbed PSA 9 Mint, cert 133825463. It ships through eBay's Authenticity Guarantee program, which routes graded cards over a set threshold through an independent authentication center before delivery — an extra layer of protection on a four-figure slab.

Where this data comes from

Hobby Syndicate operates as All Star Card Store on eBay. Transfer figures and season statistics current as of June 2026 from major outlets including Sky Sports, Al Jazeera and the official Premier League site; population figures are drawn from the PSA data shown on the live listing. Where sources differed on Wirtz's debut-season tallies, we used the more conservative reading.