It is easy to forget Kai Havertz is only 22 years old; that he is just six months older than Callum Hudson-Odoi and five months younger than Mason Mount.
The £62 million ($81m) price tag and the fact Havertz had four seasons under his belt when he arrived from Bayer Leverkusen might well distort perceptions of his age, but it ought to be taken into consideration when contemplating the difficulties he has had since moving to Chelsea – and the potential for what is to come.
His two goals in a 4-0 Premier League win over Burnley on Saturday made it four in five games. It is his best run of goalscoring form as a Chelsea player and, perhaps more crucially, the first time Havertz has looked like the young talent fans saw light up the Bundesliga.
There are many reasons why it has taken Havertz a long time to settle, the most significant being that he arrived in September 2020 - in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Havertz soon caught coronavirus, which he described as hitting him “very hard”, and was regularly deployed as a No.8 by Frank Lampard. Then Chelsea broke their transfer record to sign Romelu Lukaku.
Hindsight is 20/20, but buying Lukaku increasingly looks like a mistake. It certainly conformed to the perception that Chelsea did not quite understand Havertz, who was at his best at Leverkusen as the team’s No.9.
This is his best position. He is not an inside forward, where Thomas Tuchel has often crowbarred him into the team to accommodate Lukaku or Timo Werner, and he is certainly not a central midfielder.
Havertz is an ideal Tuchel No.9
Havertz is described as 'a false nine' because he loves to drop off the front line, ghosting intelligently into pockets of space to link the play with sharp one-touch football.
It is his speed of thought and movement – his reading of the game – that makes Havertz such a rare talent.
This is why he has so often been deployed in deeper areas of the pitch. The assumption is that more time on the ball in deeper areas will allow Havertz to exert a greater influence.
Getty ImagesCounterintuitively, he is better roaming in and out of the game, doing his work in very tight spaces in the final third of the pitch; here, the almost-unique subtlety of his passing and movement will create more room for others and confuse opposition defenders.
It is only a surprise it has taken Tuchel so long to realise Havertz is his best option up front.
The Germany international’s ability to hold onto the ball even under pressure - he scores a 94 on Smarter Scout for ‘ball retention’ among Premier League strikers - coupled with the speed and incisiveness of his interplay with others makes him ideal for Tuchel’s tactics.
The premise under Tuchel is to play very quickly in the transition, hitting vertical passes through the lines and in behind the defence to take advantage of the opponent’s unsettled shape after they have lost the ball.
Havertz’s awareness of when to drop and when to spin behind, of how to accelerate the move with a simple lay-off or a sharp through ball, makes him far more nimble and versatile than Lukaku for such an intricate strategy.
“He uses his body more and more, he loves to create overloads in half-spaces and this is what he gives,” as Tuchel put it after the Burnley game.
Goalscoring false nine?
Yet Havertz is also a genuine goalscorer, netting 17 goals in 34 Bundesliga matches while still a teenager in the 2018-19 season.
In the following campaign, having got off to a slow start with two goals in 14 games, he scored eight in the final 15.
Such is Havertz’s tendency to come short, it is tempting to think of him as a goalscoring false nine, although that is perhaps a contradiction in terms. Perhaps it is best to see him simply as a modern striker; an all-rounder, in the way Karim Benzema and Harry Kane are not considered ‘false’ just because they link so well with the midfielders.
And indeed all of Havertz’s goals in this recent run have been traditional strikers’ finishes; two excellent headers, a penalty, and a tap-in at the far post. To be frank, such is his positional intelligence that Havertz finds the poaching bit easy, while at 6’2 he is a strong aerial threat.
Yet Havertz is more renowned for his bursting runs from deep, arriving late – and therefore unmarked – in the penalty area to finish a move. This might explain why Lampard, who did something similar as a player, thought Havertz would work as an eight.
But in the modern game this is how an all-action striker must operate.
Hard pressing style suits Tuchel
“The effort is immense. His work rate is immense,” Tuchel said of Havertz after the 2-0 Champions League last-16 first-leg victory over Lille. “The volume and the areas of the pitch that he covers for us are very, very good. He was incisive, created chances, and was never shy of defending.”
It was clear that what most impressed Tuchel was Havertz’s pressing, and it is this diligent hard work that completes the picture; that makes it clear Havertz is the ideal Tuchel centre-forward.
Havertz averages 8.08 pressures in the final third per 90, the second most in the Chelsea squad behind Mount, and significantly more than Lukaku’s 5.11 per match.
He also scores a 96 on Smarter Scout for ‘disrupting moves’ among Premier League strikers, while Havertz completes 1.76 tackles and interceptions per 90 – more than seven times as many as Lukaku’s 0.23.
In typical Germanic style, Tuchel’s football requires a very high intensity of pressing from the front in order to win the ball back and make use of those attacking transitions. It should be no surprise Havertz, trained at Leverkusen, has exactly the qualities the Chelsea manager wants.
When Tuchel was first appointed it looked like a deliberate strategy by the Chelsea board to pair their new German-trained signings Werner, Havertz, and Christian Pulisic with a manager who would know what to do with them.
So far we have only seen flashes of understanding between Tuchel and Havertz and flashes of quality from the young forward. But with time, and with an extended run as the team’s No.9, he can be everything Tuchel needs to mount a title challenge next season - and everything Lukaku is not.