It was into the second half of Kai Havertz’s 10th official appearance for Arsenal and he had still to register a goal or an assist. The pressure was building and a £65million transfer tag ($84.8m at the current exchange rate) seemed to be inhibiting his attempts to make an impact with his new club.
His fortunes did not look like they were about to change as he ambled around Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium that late September afternoon last year but in the 53rd minute he received an olive branch from his captain, Martin Odegaard.
The Norwegian selflessly gave up penalty-kick duty and handed his team-mate the ball instead. Havertz duly converted the spot kick and, at full time, Odegaard championed him once more, pushing the German front and centre, quite literally, so he could be serenaded by the travelling support, who could at last sing their ‘Waka Waka’ chant with gusto.
Havertz was the obvious choice for post-match media duties but opted to keep his thoughts to himself. He did not want to risk giving an impression of comfort when he knew much more was required before he began to repay Mikel Arteta’s faith in him following that move across London from Chelsea.
Many players would have crumbled under the kind of brutal public mocking he experienced at the time, when he was a figure of fun on social media. Not Havertz.
He is set to return to Bournemouth on Saturday as a player reborn, having amassed 27 more Arsenal goals and assists in the little over 12 months since that previous visit.
That penalty was not an overnight remedy. It was another few months before he truly found his feet in an Arsenal shirt, but Odegaard’s gesture meant a lot to Havertz. It was the start of a blossoming friendship — the duo holidayed together with their wives this summer — that those close to them believe will be lifelong rather than fleeting.
That afternoon had broader significance, too. The way Havertz was celebrated by the entire team, and staff, proved to him the family environment Arteta had promised him in north London was more than just words.
It convinced the now 25-year-old forward that, if afforded the time to flourish in such an environment, he would eventually become the all-rounder Arteta believed was within him.
Some 90 minutes change the course of a footballer’s whole career. Most of them tend to occur on a pitch but for Havertz, the crossroads moment occurred on an hour-and-a-half-long video call.
He was holidaying in Greece last summer when Arteta got in touch to try to convince him that Arsenal should be his next home. Having endured a mixed three years at Chelsea, Havertz knew the next move had to be right.
Virtually all clubs do an initial presentation to their big targets nowadays, so Havertz had heard the same vows before from clubs who swore they were all one big family, only to discover a revolving door of instability. But Arteta has sought to make the first meeting a differentiator for Arsenal in the transfer market by taking something which can be formulaic and making it bespoke.
Within minutes of their conversation starting, Havertz realised this was not just an analysis of him as a footballer. It was an analysis of him as a human being and what makes him feel complete.
Slide after slide built a picture of life inside the Arsenal bubble and how it was going to cater exactly to him. Words from family and previous coaches along with pictures of his dogs — Arsenal have a club dog, called Win, at the training ground — were used to show Havertz that they had spent time finding out about his true character, which had often been misconstrued in England due to his languid style.
The message was that he was not being pursued with the short term in mind. Arsenal had a clear vision of what a fully-confident Havertz looked like and how that manifested itself in their team, but it was a wider pitch than that. Arteta explained how he would build the jigsaw so all the components of a caring and nurturing environment were there for the Germany international to express himself.
It had been the main thing missing from his time at Stamford Bridge. Havertz had nine different managers at Bayer Leverkusen and Chelsea, including caretakers, between 2016 and 2023. He craved stability, and an environment that would make him feel loved.
The first six months of Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea tenure had provided him with that warmth, culminating in his Champions League-winning goal in 2021. Peter Bosz had been like a father figure to him at Leverkusen and helped him rediscover the joy in playing after a difficult spell, but Havertz is someone whose form can fluctuate if he does not feel cherished or doesn’t have a strong support network around him.
To understand how Arteta has unlocked this dominant version of Havertz, it is necessary to understand why a support network is so important to him.
Many players are ferociously driven to become footballers because it is their way out of poverty. Havertz did not face that financial obstacle, so had to rely on a different kind of fire.
He grew up in Aachen — a city of around 250,000 people close to the border tri-point of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands — in a middle-class family with a father who was a policeman for 40 years and a mother who was a lawyer either side of her years raising him and his older brother.
There is only one family connection to sport, in the form of his grandfather, Richard. He played in Germany’s top division during the 1950s — an era before the game there had professionalised — but had to retire because of a head injury sustained in his twenties. He never got to realise his dream but he did start Havertz’s footballing journey by lobbying for him to be accepted into local club Alemannia Mariadorf despite the entry age being five and his being only three at the time. It helped that his grandpa was club president, although by this point he was seriously ill.
Richard died when Havertz was just five years old and it hit their small, tight-knit family hard. It is a big reason why Havertz needs a similar environment to thrive in football and why Arteta has been such a powerful force in shaping him over the past year.
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Having signed for Leverkusen at age 11, commuting an hour each way, four times a week, was a wrench for him but moving in with a guest family on a permanent basis proved even tougher. While experiencing an extreme growth spurt which caused prolonged issues, he was homesick and wanted to leave.
Instead, his brother Jan decided to move a short distance from Cologne, where he was studying, to share a flat with Havertz, seven years his junior. It helped transform his fortunes and highlights the closeness of the family. A year later, father Ralf also moved to be with him to provide the close support he required.
Football was not the be-all and end-all for Havertz — in March 2017, his parents made him sit out Leverkusen’s Champions League last-16 trip to Atletico Madrid so the 17-year-old could complete a maths exam.
He has a sense of perspective and an ability to compartmentalise football. Even he, however, has not always been able to prevent the game becoming all-consuming.
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The move to Chelsea in summer 2020 was not an easy one for a player who likes to have people around him. He swapped Germany for London during the Covid-19 lockdown, where the isolation in a new city took its toll as he got off to a slow start. Bad performances would sometimes eat away at him into the small hours but his close circle would act as a sounding board, helping him deal with his thoughts.
At Arsenal, he has embraced a culture that can at times appear twee to the outside world but which places connection and camaraderie at its heart. There is a tree the players need to help grow, Win, who they look after as a group, regular barbecues with families and a policy of people having no set places to sit in the cafe.
That culture has brought the calm and sense of belonging he desired, while his home life is as stripped-back as it gets for a footballer. Living outside London itself, it is all about his wife Sophia, as well as their three dogs and horse. He has calm.
Kai Havertz’s performances meant Arsenal were relaxed about entering this season without signing a new striker (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
As a kid, Havertz was obsessed with Barcelona’s treble-winning team of 2005-06, watching video recordings of their matches so often he could tell you the next 10 passes from any point of any game.
He was transfixed by the artistry of the football but in his own career there had always been a tension between the creative freedom he believed in and the complex, structured nature of the modern game at the elite level.
In those early months at Arsenal, the social media trolling was unrelenting. Arteta’s initial idea had been for Havertz to play as a left-sided No 8 with the freedom to ghost forward as a second striker. In practice, the left side of the team became stunted. It was clear that receiving the ball deep and facing forward was not Havertz’s strongest suit.
The beauty of him as a player, though, is that he has many different strengths. This was one of the attractions for Arteta, who did not see that hefty price tag as an investment in a single position but as a sum which could be split across numerous areas of the Arsenal side.
Debate over Havertz’s best position had dominated his entire career and the theme continued for the first six months at the Emirates Stadium. Even then, though, the player sensed Arteta was the first manager to see his versatility as a strength rather than a weakness.
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Havertz sees talk about rigid positions as outdated in a game that is increasingly fluid. Just as Arteta said last September that 4-3-3 does not accurately portray his team, stating they deployed 36 different formations against Fulham and 43 against Manchester City, there is no such thing as a pure No 9 in the German’s book.
There is a deep understanding with Arteta, which is perhaps why Havertz looks so at home as the connector of Arsenal’s attacks. He interprets space so well and intuitively knows when dropping deep, running in behind, staying central or drifting wide will best create overloads.
The centre-forward version of Havertz of the past nine months is a different animal to the player who was on the periphery in midfield in his early days at the club. At 6ft 4in (193cm), he is now an aerial force to be reckoned with, bullying opposition defenders and giving Arsenal a different dynamic in attack.
The improvement in that part of his game has been dramatic and also unlikely, given he was not a huge fan of contesting headers before joining Arsenal. He was a laid-back player who could look meek despite possessing such an imposing frame.
Arteta is a huge proponent of the power of positive body language and the focus on that, allied with making Havertz a force in the air, has helped round out his game.
When Arteta outlined his vision for Havertz at Arsenal, these were some of the small incremental changes that it was said would bring him rewards. Gaining buy-in from the player himself was not a problem, especially as he scored his first goal, in pre-season, from a back-post cross — an unusual run for the old Havertz to make but one that had been sold to him in those early conversations.
In those early months, Havertz’s improvements in his duels helped build his belief that he was an important part of the team, even if the goals and assists numbers did not immediately suggest so. Even when things were not coming together on the ball for him in midfield, he was satisfying Arteta with his commitment to preserving the team shape and his competitiveness.
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That work ethic has not changed but the numbers everyone is looking at now are his goals and assists rather than his duels and distance covered. That is the way it should be for a player of his talent, but this is the first time Havertz has got so many goals in the opening part of a season.
He usually takes a while to get his rhythm, but having scored six times already across three competitions, the memory of his jittery penalty to open his account feels like a lifetime ago.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
