ONE of the advantages to the staggered return of top level football during the coronavirus lockdown is that we can all indulge our amateur scouting instincts. And the fact that the Bundesliga has been the first to return to the field means that not only is Bayer Leverkusen’s Kai Havertz even more in the shop window than he was in 2019, he’s now illuminated like one of those displays at Christmas, neon lighting tempting a host of European suitors ever closer with their cheques and fax machines.
Havertz has inevitably been compared to Mesut Ozil and Thomas Muller but the truth is he’s the latest example of the functional hybridisation of attacking players in contemporary football. Line him and Erling Haaland up against a brick wall and ask someone who had never heard of them to slot the pair into a team and they’d announce “there’s my central defence” before you could open YouTube on your phone. Havertz is six foot two, as tall as John Terry and Sol Campbell, yet the German is no big man with a good touch; he’s just a normal-sized creator in a tall world.
The numbers illustrate how quickly Havertz has made an impact on the European scene. Of all players born in 1999 or later, only Jadon Sancho has provided more goals/assists than Havertz in any of the German, English, Spanish, Italian and French leagues. Sancho is on 61, Havertz is on 55 and then there is a monumental drop off to Moussa Diaby in third on 17. Even more stark is the fact that of all goals and assists provided by players born in 1999 or later in any of the top five leagues, Sancho and Havertz have provided 18% of them. That stampede you can hear is either Erling Haaland charging through on goal again or big clubs running to buy Sancho and Havertz.
If Sancho seems nailed on to return to England, and Havertz is surely high on Bayern’s wish list (#derwishlist), Liverpool have also been consistently linked with him and it would make sense from Jurgen Klopp’s viewpoint, given Havertz can mirror much of the creativity that Trent Alexander-Arnold provides and a lot of the attacking threat of Roberto Firmino. You can see from the Expected Assist and Expected Goals maps here just how much of a Trent/Firmino Venn Diagram Havertz would occupy. A Liverpool team with Havertz operating in some sort of triangulation with Alexander-Arnold, Mohamed Salah and/or Firmino would undoubtedly be an upgrade for the champions-elect.
For all of Timo Werner’s considerable qualities, the supposedly Liverpool-bound striker does not tick as many boxes as Havertz, yet a deal for the Leipzig man seems more likely. Nevertheless, as clubs across the continent deal with the sheer oddness of 2020, and as squad rebuilding adapts to the new Covid-paradigm, players who provide a round peg in a number of round holes are set to become incredibly highly prized.
And the output Havertz is producing so early in his career suggest that he is going to be one of the poster boys for that genre in the 2020s. Some elements of the UK media once questioned the Liverpool transfer committee for spending £29m on Roberto Firmino but only the most anti-air conditioning zealot would raise an eyebrow if the same group sanctioned a deal for Havertz.
