LEVERKUSEN, Germany (AP) — Bayer Leverkusen has moved to replace Florian Wirtz by signing United States international Malik Tillman from PSV Eindhoven for a club-record fee.
The 23-year-old attacking midfielder signed a contract through June 2030, the Bundesliga club said Saturday.
Kicker magazine reported Leverkusen was paying PSV a fixed sum of 35 million euros ($41 million) for the player, making him the club’s most expensive incoming transfer.
“We’ve gained another strong and very dangerous attacking player,” Leverkusen sporting director Simon Rolfes said “He can play in both the number 10 and the number 8 positions in midfield. Malik is an absolute top signing for us.”
Tillman, who was born in Nuremberg, Germany to a German mother and American father, played through Bayern Munich’s youth teams after switching from Bavarian rival Greuther Fürth in 2015. He was unable to establish himself in the senior team and made just seven appearances for Bayern before joining Glasgow Rangers on loan in 2022-23. He joined PSV on loan with an option to buy the next season, before PSV activated the buy option last year.
Tillman scored 16 goals and set up five more in 34 competitive games for PSV last season, helping it to the Dutch league title.
Leverkusen is rebuilding this offseason amid star player Wirtz’ departure for Liverpool for a Bundesliga-record fee.
Rolfes’ busy summer comes after the team was unable to repeat its unprecedented unbeaten German league and cup double the season before. Coach Xabi Alonso left to join Real Madrid, captain Jonathan Tah switched to Bayern, and Jeremie Frimpong joined Liverpool before Wirtz also followed.
Former Manchester United coach Erik ten Hag was appointed as Alonso’s replacement, and Leverkusen has signed a host of promising young players.
On Friday, the club announced the signing of 18-year-old Cameroonian forward Christian Kofane from Spanish second-division team Albacete.
English defender Jarell Quansah previously arrived from Liverpool. That came after the signings of Netherlands goalkeeper Mark Flekken from Brentford, France youth international Axel Tape from Paris Saint-Germain, attacking midfielder Ibrahim Maza from Hertha Berlin, and other players who are being loaned out for experience.
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United States forward Malik Leon Tillman celebrates after scoring during a penalty kick shootout of a CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinals soccer match against Costa Rica, Sunday, June 29, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
The Pentagon said Thursday that it is changing the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes so it concentrates on “reporting for our warfighters” and no longer includes “woke distractions.”
That message, in a social media post from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's spokesman, is short on specifics and does not mention the news outlet's legacy of independence from government and military leadership. It comes a day after The Washington Post reported that applicants for jobs at Stars and Stripes were being asked what they would do to support President Donald Trump's policies.
Stars and Stripes traces its lineage to the Civil War and has reported news about the military either in its newspaper or online steadily since World War II, largely to an audience of service members stationed overseas. Roughly half of its budget comes from the Pentagon and its staff members are considered Defense Department employees.
The outlet's mission statement emphasizes that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command” and that it is unique among news organizations tied to the Defense Department in being “governed by the principles of the First Amendment.”
Congress established that independence in the 1990s after instances of military leadership getting involved in editorial decisions. During Trump's first term in 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to eliminate government funding for Stars and Stripes — to effectively shut it down — before he was overruled by the president.
Hegseth's spokesman, Sean Parnell, said on X Thursday that the Pentagon “is returning Stars and Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters.” He said the department will “refocus its content away from woke distractions.”
“Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters,” Parnell wrote. “It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
Parnell did not return a message seeking details. The Daily Wire reported, after speaking a Pentagon spokeswoman, that the plan is to have all Stars and Stripes content written by active-duty service members. Currently, Congress has mandated that the publication's publisher and top editor be civilians, said Max Lederer, its publisher.
The Pentagon also said that half of the outlet's content would be generated by the Defense Department, and that it would no longer publish material from The Associated Press or Reuters news services.
Also Thursday, the Pentagon issued a statement in the Federal Register that it would eliminate some 1990s era directives that governed how Stars and Stripes operates. Lederer said it's not clear what that would mean for the outlet's operations, or whether the Defense Department has the authority to do so without congressional authorization.
The publisher said he believes that Stars and Stripes is valued by the military community precisely because of its independence as a news organization. He said no one at the Pentagon has communicated to him what it wants from Stars and Stripes; he first learned of its intentions from reading Parnell's social media post.
“This will either destroy the value of the organization or significantly reduce its value,” Lederer said.
Jacqueline Smith, the outlet's ombudsman, said Stars and Stripes reports on matters important to service members and their families — not just weapons systems or war strategy — and she's detected nothing “woke” about its reporting.
“I think it's very important that Stars and Stripes maintains its editorial independence, which is the basis of its credibility,” Smith said. A longtime newspaper editor in Connecticut, Smith's role was created by Congress three decades ago and she reports to the House Armed Services Committee.
It's the latest move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on journalists. Most reporters from legacy news outlets have left the Pentagon rather than to agree to new rules imposed by Hegseth that they feel would give him too much control over what they report and write. The New York Times has sued to overturn the regulations.
Trump has also sought to shut down government-funded outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that report independent news about the world in countries overseas.
Also this week, the administration raided the home of a Washington Post journalist as part of an investigation into a contractor accused of stealing government secrets, a move many journalists interpreted as a form of intimidation.
The Post reported that applicants to Stars and Stripes were being asked how they would advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities in the role. They were asked to identify one or two orders or initiatives that were significant to them. That raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a journalist to be given what is, in effect, a loyalty test.
Smith said it was the government's Office of Personnel Management — not the newspaper — that was responsible for the question on job applications and said it was consistent with what was being asked of applicants for other government jobs.
But she said it was not something that should be asked of journalists. “The loyalty is to the truth, not the administration,” she said.
David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
US soldier Sgt. John Hubbuch of Versailles, Ky., one of the members of NATO led-peacekeeping forces in Bosnia reads Stars and Stripes newspaper on Sunday Feb. 14, 1999. (AP Photo/Amel Emric, File)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a welcome ceremony for Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi at the Pentagon, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf/)
FILE - A GI with the U.S. 25th division reads Stars and Stripes newspaper at Cu Chi, South Vietnam on Sept. 10, 1969. (AP Photo/Mark Godfrey)
