Kai Havertz, the Arsenal forward without a position who scores in finals

Kai Havertz

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 11, 1999 Aachen
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Champions League 2020 · Super Cup 2021 · Club World Cup 2021 · Premier League 2025
Individual awards	Bundesliga Team of the Season · FA Community Shield · Fritz Walter Medal U19 Gold

For most of his career the argument about Kai Havertz has been an argument about where to put him. German football has a word for the kind of player he looked like as a teenager, Alleskönner, the one who can do everything, and for years it sounded less like praise than like a diagnosis. Coaches have tried him as a playmaker, a false nine, a left-sided midfielder and a centre forward who wins headers, and every answer drew a complaint. And on the nights that end up in the record books, the ball has kept finding him anyway.

He is the most prolific German in the history of the Premier League, the man whose header put Arsenal within touching distance of their first league title in a generation, and the only German to score in two Champions League finals. Yet the biggest nights of his last season ended with someone else celebrating, once in Budapest and once in Boston. What remains open is whether the player who keeps scoring the decisive goal can also be the striker who carries a whole season.

Havertz was born in Aachen on 11 June 1999 and grew up in Mariadorf, a district of Alsdorf near the Dutch border. His father, Ralf, is a police officer with Dutch roots on his mother’s side, and his mother, Anne, is a lawyer. Football ran through her family: her father, Richard, had played professionally and later chaired Alemannia Mariadorf, the amateur club where his grandson started at the age of four. A year in the academy of Alemannia Aachen followed in 2009, and at 11 he moved to Bayer Leverkusen.

He made his Bundesliga debut in October 2016, at 17, as a substitute against Werder Bremen, the youngest debutant in Leverkusen’s history until Florian Wirtz took the record four years later. A few months on he missed a Champions League return leg against Atlético Madrid because it clashed with his school exams. He was the youngest player to reach 50 and then 100 Bundesliga appearances, and his 17 league goals in 2018-19 were the most ever scored by a teenager in a single Bundesliga season. Marco Reus beat him to German Footballer of the Year by 37 votes. The comparisons ran from Mesut Özil to Toni Kroos, the player he had idolised as a boy.

Chelsea paid an initial £62 million for him in September 2020. On 29 May 2021 in Porto he ran through on Manchester City’s goal and scored the only goal of the Champions League final. In February 2022 he added the winner in the Club World Cup final against Palmeiras, a penalty in the 117th minute. Even so, he moved between positions, his league numbers looked modest for the fee, and in June 2023 Chelsea sold him across London to Arsenal for a reported £65 million.

The move was met with open scepticism. Mikel Arteta first used him on the left of midfield before pushing him forward, where his link play and presence in the air made more sense. He finished his first season with 13 league goals and seven assists. Then his body interrupted. A torn hamstring in Dubai ended his 2024-25 season in February, and a knee injury picked up in the opening game of 2025-26, at Manchester United, required surgery and kept him out until January.

The case against Havertz was never only about money. It is about long quiet spells between the big moments, and about the spot. He missed in the shootout that won Chelsea the 2021 Super Cup, and again when Arsenal went out of the FA Cup to Manchester United in January 2025. That second miss had an ugly aftermath: his wife, Sophia, published messages she had received that included threats against their unborn child, Arsenal passed the case to the police, and Arteta said such abuse had to be eradicated from the game. His defenders argue that much of his work, the pressing and the movement that opens space for others, never appears in a goal column. His critics answer that a forward at his price should not need that defence. Both have a point.

Last season went a long way towards resolving it for Arsenal. Back from surgery, he scored a 97th-minute winner against Chelsea to send Arsenal into the League Cup final, which they lost to Manchester City. On 18 May his header beat Burnley 1-0, and the next night City’s draw at Bournemouth handed Arsenal their first league title in 22 years. Twelve days later, in the Champions League final in Budapest, he put Arsenal ahead against Paris Saint-Germain after six minutes. Ousmane Dembélé equalised from the penalty spot, and PSG won the shootout 4-3. Havertz became the first German to score in two Champions League finals, and only the third player, after Cristiano Ronaldo and Mario Mandžukić, to do so for two different clubs.

The World Cup repeated the pattern. He scored twice in Germany’s 7-1 win over Curaçao and was named player of the match, a result that took Germany past Brazil as the highest-scoring nation in World Cup history. In the round of 32 in Boston he equalised against Paraguay, then took the first penalty of the shootout and saw Orlando Gill save it. Germany lost 4-3, their first shootout defeat at a World Cup, and Havertz apologised to the fans. Julian Nagelsmann stepped down and Jürgen Klopp took over. In Klopp’s first match, in Amsterdam in September, Havertz limped off with a hamstring problem after half an hour.

He was back within weeks. The season had already brought a goal in the Community Shield win over City and the first Premier League goal of the campaign, and on 1 November, days after Arsenal had been knocked out of the League Cup by fourth-tier Fleetwood Town, he met a low cross from Declan Rice at the back post at Anfield. The 1-0 win was Arsenal’s first there since 2012, took them top of the table and gave Havertz his 46th Premier League goal, one more than İlkay Gündoğan. “It took time, but achieving it is special nonetheless,” he said afterwards. Away from the pitch, he married Sophia Weber, his partner since 2018, in July 2024, and their son was born in March 2025.

Arsenal’s next stop is Slavia Prague in the Champions League on 4 November, with the title they won in May to defend and the final they lost in Budapest still in the air. Havertz turns 28 next summer with a German record that is his alone, and a national team rebuilding under Klopp around the question that has followed him since Leverkusen: what, exactly, is he for. His biggest nights keep giving the same reply: he is the one who scores.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Arsenal, chelsea, Mikel Arteta, Declan Rice, Germany national football team, Bayer Leverkusen, Kai Havertz