Kai Havertz Reflects on Triumph and Trials
Kai Havertz remembers the bus.
Not the Champions League final in Budapest, not the moment his early goal against Paris Saint-Germain seemed to be carrying Arsenal towards immortality, not even the gutting way it all slipped away. What lingers is the ride that followed.
Less than 24 hours after that defeat, he was back in London, climbing aboard an open-top bus for a Premier League trophy parade around Islington. The city was ready to roar for a title 22 years in the making. He was still processing a final lost in the cruellest fashion.
“To be honest, it was tough,” he says now. “After the match, I initially thought we would call the whole thing off.”
The instinct was human: hide, regroup, grieve. By morning, the picture had changed. The club went ahead, the players went out, and north London erupted.
“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. 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.”
One wound, one parade, one season that had to be honoured. And now, in another corner of the world, he is chasing a new entry in that top three.
A different Germany, a different Havertz
Havertz is talking at Germany’s World Cup base in Winston, North Carolina, where the mood feels lighter than it has in years. Not euphoric, not complacent, but unburdened.
Germany have already won Group E. That matters. Group stage exits in 2018 and 2022 left scars, and the weight of those failures travelled with this squad into North America. Havertz lived both of them. In Qatar, he scored twice against Costa Rica and still watched Germany go out.
“Qatar was anything but successful for us as a team and for me personally,” he says. “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.”
No one is doing laps of honour around the Graylyn Estate, the stately, castle-like base where Julian Nagelsmann has parked his squad. A demolition of Curaçao and a late, hard-fought win over Côte d’Ivoire have settled nerves, not sparked arrogance. Yet 42 shots in those two games tell their own story.
“We radiate a real joy in playing,” Havertz says. “We move a lot, play offensively and create scoring chances. And we bounce back after conceding goals.”
That last line matters. This is not the brittle, hesitant Germany of recent tournaments. It is a side that looks like it enjoys the ball again.
The ‘ghost’ at centre-forward
Havertz is at the heart of it. Two goals against Curaçao – one from the spot, one a late, deft dink – pushed him to 24 in 60 caps, a formidable return for a player who has never been a classic No 9 in the German imagination.
He is Nagelsmann’s starting centre-forward, the reference point around which everything else spins, even if Deniz Undav’s brace off the bench against Côte d’Ivoire has triggered calls for a change against Ecuador on Thursday.
The noise is familiar. In Germany, Havertz has often felt like a player people see best when he is not there.
“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.”
What they sometimes miss is that he is not built to be easily defined. Havertz is a strange, elegant hybrid: part playmaker, part striker, part pressing trigger. He glides into space, appears late, vanishes again.
“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.”
That ghost does a lot of unseen work. It is why managers trust him. Mikel Arteta has been one of his fiercest public defenders, repeatedly highlighting the intelligence of his movement and the sacrifice in his running.
“I can’t just wait around in the penalty area, I need to be involved,” Havertz says. “I also make runs which I know sometimes look pointless, but I’m creating space for the players coming up behind me.”
He has always been like this. A winger at first, then a midfielder, he only became a full-time spearhead when Peter Bosz pushed him higher at Bayer Leverkusen. Nagelsmann went even further in 2023, starting him 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 role to inhabit.
Misread body language, very real tension
That unfussy demeanour has been both shield and stick. When things go wrong, the criticism is predictable: too laid back, wrong body language, not emotional enough. Havertz knows the lines by heart.
“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.”
He does feel it, though. The calm exterior hides a tight coil of nerves.
“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 instinct, that ability to live with the knot in the stomach and still make the right run, the right finish, may be what Germany lean on if they are to win a first World Cup since 2014. The path is hardly smooth. A last-16 meeting with France looms as a real possibility. The buildup was full of doubts, from form to fitness to identity.
Havertz himself has had to climb out of his own hole. Knee surgery wrecked the early part of his season. A hamstring problem in 2024-25 followed. The numbers he produced for Arsenal came against that backdrop.
“The last year and a half has gone badly for me,” he says. The fact he arrived at this World Cup fit, sharp and central to both club and country plans is no small feat.
Lessons from Leverkusen, energy in North America
He has been here before, in a different way. At Euro 2024, in front of a home crowd desperate for release, Havertz and Germany ran into Spain in the quarter-finals and fell just short. That tournament felt like a turning point; this one feels like an escalation.
“The atmosphere is amazing,” he says of the World Cup in North America. “I was really excited before the Euros in Germany, too. A World Cup is even bigger. There’s incredible energy in the stadiums.”
The climate, so far, has been kind. Germany have played in Toronto and in the air-conditioned bowl of Houston, spared the worst of the heat. Havertz has not yet hit the 23rd minute gasping for water. He could live without Fifa’s hydration breaks altogether.
“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 him, and how he shapes it.
When he was 17 at Leverkusen, on the cusp of the first team and the big time, he wanted to quit school and skip the Abitur, Germany’s university entrance exam. Football was already his world. Why bother with the rest?
“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.”
That lesson sits beneath everything now: the parade after heartbreak, the grind back from injury, the willingness to play left-back if asked, the acceptance of criticism without letting it define him.
Germany’s campaign will not be judged on group-stage catharsis. It will be measured in knockout games, in moments when the ball drops in the box and someone has to decide the story. Havertz has already lived both sides of that.
The question now is whether the player who wants to be a ghost to defenders can become something else this summer: the figure everyone remembers when they talk about where this World Cup was won.
