Calm Kai Havertz stands detached from celebrity culture
Kai Havertz of Arsenal celebrates with the Premier League trophy, with teammates David Raya, Viktor Gyokeres, Riccardo Calafiori, William Saliba and Gabriel. Pic: Michael Regan/Getty Images
There are elite footballers who cultivate mystery, some who cultivate celebrity and others who build brands so polished they barely resemble real people anymore.
Then there is Kai Havertz, Arsenal’s quietly fascinating German forward, whose life away from football revolves less around supercars and nightlife than rescue donkeys, piano practice and dogs wearing Arsenal shirts.
On Saturday night in Budapest, Havertz could become the unlikely symbol of the most important evening in Arsenal’s modern history.
Already Premier League champions after finally dethroning Manchester City, Arsenal now stand one game away from winning the Champions League for the first time as they face Paris Saint-Germain. For Havertz, it is familiar territory. Four years ago he scored the winning goal for Chelsea against Manchester City in Porto to secure Europe’s biggest prize.
Now he has the chance to do it again in Arsenal colours.
“For me, there are obviously positive emotions,” Havertz said this week. “I cannot wait to play that game and bring the trophy home to North London.”
There is a calmness to Havertz that can easily be mistaken for indifference.
Arsenal supporters did not immediately know what to make of him when Mikel Arteta pushed to sign him from Chelsea in 2023 for nearly €70million. He arrived carrying baggage from Stamford Bridge, where flashes of brilliance often competed with confusion about his best position.
At Arsenal, though, Arteta saw something different.
“A very, very big impact,” Havertz said of the manager. “He was the one who brought me to the club and he taught me so much stuff on the pitch and off the pitch as well.
“I am very thankful for that time, how he helped me a lot when I had difficult moments. That is also very important.”
Those difficult moments have been plentiful. Havertz finished last season as Arsenal’s top scorer despite missing the closing months with a serious hamstring injury. Then came a knee injury on the opening day of this campaign, followed by smaller muscle problems and two operations that delayed his return until the New Year.
He has started only eight matches since returning, although Arteta’s heavy use of “finishers” from the bench means the statistic is less alarming than it initially sounds. His importance remains significant heading into the final, even if uncertainty surrounds whether Arteta starts him, Viktor Gyokeres or perhaps both against PSG.
“It feels amazing,” Havertz said of reaching another final after such a difficult year physically.
“To be fair, I just thought about it the other day because obviously I was in a bad place when I was injured. It’s not nice to be injured, especially because it came after a big injury.
“But all the players and staff, they helped me believe in myself and to get back to my best.”
The darkest part of recovery, he explained, was the isolation.
“I had two surgeries and was in a brace for weeks. You are just inside a building. You cannot go out. You cannot walk; you do nothing.
“For me, things shifted when I went out on the pitch for the first time. Then you can feel the grass again, you can put your boots on again.”
That understated resilience perhaps reflects his upbringing.
Havertz was born in Aachen near Germany’s border with the Netherlands. His father, Ralf, is a policeman with Dutch roots. His mother Anne is a lawyer whose own father played professional football.
Long before elite academies and Champions League finals, the young Havertz was obsessed with football games at home with his older brother, who always assigned their created players the number 29 - the reason Havertz still wears it today.
As a boy he idolised Toni Kroos and drew inspiration from Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane, Andres Iniesta and Kaká. Yet despite his extraordinary talent, there was always something unusually grounded about him.
During his breakthrough season at Bayer Leverkusen, Havertz even missed a Champions League tie against Atletico Madrid because he stayed in Germany to complete his school exams. Eat your heart out, Max Dowman!
Even now, aged 26, married and recently becoming a father for the first time, he retains the aura of someone slightly detached from modern football celebrity culture.
To escape football, he taught himself piano and remains determined to master both classical and modern compositions. His deeper passion, though, is animals.
Growing up, the family home included dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, a horse and rescue donkeys. Havertz now helps support a donkey sanctuary near his childhood home and has become heavily involved in animal welfare projects through the Kai Havertz Stiftung, the charitable foundation he launched following devastating flooding in Germany in 2021.
“Through my charity work, I want to draw attention to this project,” Havertz explained previously.
“The fate of the animals and the dedication with which the donkey park is run moved me from the very beginning.
“I would like to contribute to giving people in need the opportunity to experience animal therapy and to discover for themselves what effect animals have on us humans.”
His love of donkeys became so well known that The Donkey Sanctuary in Devon named a rescue foal “Kai” in his honour in 2023.
There is something refreshingly unmanufactured about all of it.
At Arsenal’s training ground, staff even discovered that the bottoms cut from football socks, set to be discarded because players modify them for comfort, could actually help protect donkeys’ lower legs from skin irritation. Old Arsenal socks subsequently found their way to sanctuaries including Havertz’s own project.
That humanity behind the footballer partly explains why the abuse directed towards his wife Sophia last season felt particularly disturbing. Following Arsenal’s FA Cup defeat to Manchester United, Sophia publicly shared vile online messages threatening their unborn child. The incident shocked many inside the club.
Through it all, Havertz simply carried on.
Perhaps that emotional resilience explains why pressure seems to affect him differently from many elite forwards.
“For me personally, as a kid I could have never dreamt that I would score a goal in the final and win that game,” he said of Chelsea’s Champions League triumph in 2021.
“It is a moment I will never forget. I will always be proud of it. I just try to take that feeling to Saturday and hopefully I will get that feeling again.”
Arsenal themselves arrive in Budapest transformed psychologically by finally winning the Premier League after years of near misses under Arteta.
“We have finally won the Premier League,” Havertz said. “I think that gives us a big boost as well.”
Asked whether Arsenal should fear PSG after the French side’s dominance in Europe over the last two seasons, Havertz shrugged off the discussion around favourites and underdogs.
“We are going to see anyway,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you are an underdog or whatever.
“We are going to go on the pitch and give everything to beat them.”
That confidence might once have sounded surprising coming from Havertz. Earlier in his career, German media nicknamed him “Alleskönner” - roughly translated as the man who can do everything - because of his unusual tactical versatility. Yet for years, there remained a lingering sense that nobody quite knew what Havertz actually was.
A midfielder? A false nine? A second striker? A wide forward?
Under Arteta, the uncertainty has become a strength rather than a weakness.
Now, as Arsenal chase the biggest night in their history, Havertz once again finds himself standing at the centre of it all - the quietly brilliant footballer who keeps delivering when the stakes are highest.
If Arsenal finally become champions of Europe this weekend, there would be something fitting if Havertz played the decisive role again.
After all, he has done it before.
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