Kai Havertz: From Champions League Agony to World Cup Redemption

Kai Havertz can still feel the whiplash.

Three and a half weeks ago in Budapest, he had given Arsenal a Champions League final lead that seemed destined to define his career. For almost an hour, his early strike against Paris Saint-Germain looked like the goal that would crown a season of redemption. Then came the collapse, the agony, the hollow walk past the trophy.

And the next day, the bus.

At 2pm, less than 24 hours after losing the biggest club game in Europe, Havertz and his teammates were scheduled to roll through Islington, Premier League trophy on display, a million people ready to roar. The contrast felt brutal.

“To be honest, it was tough,” he says now. “After the match, I initially thought we would call the whole thing off.” The idea of waving from an open-top bus while the Champions League final still burned in his mind felt wrong.

By the morning, the picture had shifted. Sleep, perspective and the weight of history did their work. Arsenal had ended a 22-year wait for a league title. The parade went ahead. It had to.

“We had a huge season behind us,” Havertz says. “The club had gone 22 years without a league title so that had to be celebrated properly with the fans.” The scenes on the streets of north London left their mark. “I have to say I’ve never experienced anything like it. So many people on the streets, so many supporting us. It ranks among my top three experiences as a professional.”

From Budapest to Winston

Havertz is speaking at Germany’s World Cup base in Winston, North Carolina, where the mood is quietly changing. The scars of 2018 and 2022 have not vanished, but they no longer dominate the room. Group-stage exits in back-to-back tournaments had turned the shirt heavy; this time Germany are already through as winners of Group E.

He knows the other side of this story. In Qatar, he scored twice against Costa Rica and still watched his country go home early. “Qatar was anything but successful for us as a team and for me personally,” he says. The failure lingered. So did the scrutiny.

Now? “There’s a different energy in our squad now. I was quickly convinced that things would go better this year. We knew we had a duty not to fail early on again. We are Germany. But now the tournament is really just beginning.”

Nobody at the Graylyn Estate is getting carried away by a demolition of Curaçao and a late win over Côte d’Ivoire. The surroundings may be castle-like, but there is no sense of a team hiding behind walls. They have fired 42 shots in two games, and Havertz talks about something that had been missing from German football for too long.

“We radiate a real joy in playing,” he says. “We move a lot, play offensively and create scoring chances. And we bounce back after conceding goals.” The fun, he insists, is back.

He has helped put it there. Two goals against Curaçao – a penalty and a delicate late dink – underlined his importance to Julian Nagelsmann. At 27, with 24 goals in 60 caps, he is the starting centre-forward, the reference point. Deniz Undav’s decisive brace off the bench against Côte d’Ivoire has sparked calls for a change, but Havertz knows this debate. It has followed him for years.

The ghost in the penalty area

In Germany, the conversation around Havertz often feels oddly muted for a player who has scored in a Champions League final, led Arsenal’s title charge and become a fixture in the national team. He suspects geography plays a part.

“Probably because I don’t play in the Bundesliga,” he says. “It was the same at times with Toni Kroos and Ilkay Gündogan, who were abroad for years. It is often said about me: ‘Havertz didn’t score again, he’s useless!’. And when I do score, they say: ‘Well, he’s supposed to, it’s about time!’ I don’t hold it against anyone; that’s perfectly normal.”

The numbers say one thing. The eye test says another. Havertz has never been the centre-forward who thumps his chest and demands the spotlight. His game is angles, timing, space. A striker who appears, vanishes, then appears again in the one place defenders hate.

“Defenders should never know where I am, where I’m going, what I’m planning, or where I’ll be at any given moment,” he says in an interview arranged with Die Zeit. “That’s the worst for them. I try to be like a ghost to defenders.”

He drifts, drops, sprints, doubles back. He makes runs that look pointless to the untrained eye, then opens a lane for a teammate. “I can’t just wait around in the penalty area, I need to be involved,” he says. “I also make runs which I know sometimes look pointless, but I’m creating space for the players coming up behind me.”

Managers love that. Mikel Arteta rarely misses a chance to praise his intelligence and willingness to sacrifice his own numbers. Nagelsmann has used him almost everywhere. Havertz started as a winger, then spent years as a midfielder at Bayer Leverkusen before Peter Bosz pushed him up front. In 2023, Nagelsmann even threw him in at left-back in a friendly against Turkey. Havertz scored after five minutes.

“If he were to ask me to do it again, I would,” he says. No fuss, no drama, just another job.

Misread body language, real nerves

That easygoing exterior has always been a double-edged sword. To some, his calm looks like indifference. Miss a chance, drop a level, and the criticism follows a familiar script: too laid back, wrong body language, not enough fire.

“I’m aware of the debates that I’m too laid back or my body language is wrong,” he says. “That always comes up when I’m not playing well. But I’m not the sort of person who dwells on it too much. It used to be different. I don’t brood on things any more.”

Inside, it is different. “I know it doesn’t show from the outside, but I feel it,” he says. “Before a Champions League final, or at a World Cup. Or before penalties. I need that tension to stay focused.”

That tension may be what Germany lean on if this tournament tightens into the kind of knife-edge knockout they have repeatedly lost since 2014. The build-up to this World Cup was riddled with doubts, and a potential last-16 clash with France looms. Yet Havertz is fit, sharp and carrying the rhythm of a season that almost broke him.

“The last year and a half has gone badly for me,” he says. Knee surgery disrupted the early months of his campaign. A hamstring injury in 2024-25 threatened to derail it again. That he still delivered for Arsenal, shouldering responsibility in a title run, only sharpens his sense that this summer can be different.

He has already felt the surge of a home tournament. At Euro 2024, he was part of a Germany side that rode a wave of host-country emotion before falling narrowly to Spain in the quarter-finals. North America, he says, is louder still.

“The atmosphere is amazing. I was really excited before the Euros in Germany, too. A World Cup is even bigger. There’s incredible energy in the stadiums.”

Lessons in seeing things through

This World Cup has come with its own quirks. Fifa’s hydration breaks, for one. Havertz shrugs. Germany have not suffered in extreme heat yet, playing in Toronto and an air-conditioned arena in Houston. He has not found himself gasping for water in the 23rd minute. The stoppages, to him, are more irritation than relief.

“They’re usually annoying, especially when you’ve just had two or three good situations and feel your flow is being interrupted,” he says. “But others decide that.”

What he can decide is how this tournament shapes his story. He thinks back to being 17 at Leverkusen, on the verge of a professional breakthrough and ready to drop out of school, ditch the Abitur and focus entirely on football. One staff member at the club stepped in and told him no. This was a test, not of talent but of resolve.

“At 17, you don’t think you need school any more,” he says. “At that age, you also don’t think about injuries or how things can suddenly take a completely different turn. It was a life lesson for me: seeing things through to the end instead of just quitting.”

The message has stayed with him. He carried it through the heartbreak in Budapest and onto that bus in Islington. He carries it now, into a World Cup where Germany have already shaken off one burden but have not yet touched the weight that really matters.

Perhaps that is the real challenge in front of him: not just to haunt defenders like a ghost, but to stay present long enough to turn a career of almosts and agonising near-misses into the kind of finish no one can argue with.