The New Ballack? How Kai Havertz becomes the key player in Leverkusen

19-year-old Bayer Leverkusen’s midfielder Kai Havertz becomes a key figure in the team, turning into a new kind of Michael Ballack.

Yesterday Bayer Leverkusen played the first match of Europa League’s group stage on the road against Ludogorets. The duel was extremely difficult for Heiko Herrlich’s side and it’s believed that after such an energy-consuming game, Bayer could once again break into a big problems in Bundesliga on weekend. But now it’s not about that. Bayer was 0-2 down but managed to take away a strong-willed 3:2 victory. The main star of the match was 19-year-old midfielder Kai Havertz, who scored the double.

A couple of weeks before yesterday’s events, Havertz got a Walter Fritz medal – an annual prize in Germany, given to the best young player of the season. And it must be said, this award is well deserved. Kai’s last year statistics is what Leverkusen fans must be very happy about.
⠀⠀⠀
Havertz became the best assistant for Bayer  in the Bundesliga making 8 assists in 30 games. According to A / 90 (assists per 90 minutes), which was 0.34, Kai was on the fourth place in the league, after Thomas Mueller (0.63), James Rodriguez (0.60) and Philip Max (0.35 ) respectively. Thus, the expected assists per match – A / 90 was 0.19, while the average for the league was 0.15.
⠀⠀⠀
The average key passes per match index – KP / 90 was at 1.31 for Havertz while the average index for the league was 1.52. Such a  small deviation. But adding something in this aspect is still necessary for him.
⠀⠀⠀
Kai didn’t have a lot of goals scored last season – 3. For his position (more than half of the minutes he spent on the field was on clear number 10 position), it is perhaps not enough. From that, the G / 90 (0,13) and xG / 90 (0,15) indicators sagged against the background of the league averages – 0,23 and 0,22 respectively.
⠀⠀⠀
The small effectiveness is directly related to the number of strikes being made by Havertz on the opponent’s goal – this index is also below the average and here’s another thing he also needs to add something to – Sh / 90 is 1.56, while the average for the league is 2.00.



At the same time, it is obvious that one of the main goals of Havertz in Bayer’s modern football is to go deep more usual and to take more part in building team’s attacks, trying himself on the role of a deep playmaker. Definitely, Herrlich likes Kai in this role. This is displayed on the player’s involvement in team attacks – xGChain / 90. This figure is 0.73 for him, while the average for the league is 0.44. Such a cosmic difference, isn’t it! This shows that already now, at the age of 19, Kai Havertz becomes one of the key figures of Bayer Leverkusen the same as for Die Mannschaft.



There are 7 of Havertz’s goals during the last two seasons in the Bundesliga. You can clearly see when Kai is mostly dangerous for an opponent – all of the goals, in fact, were scored from the same zone.

In general, we really want you to monitor this guy closely.  Actually, he may be counted as a direct substitute for Mesut Ozil in German national team. By the way, Havertz has already been called up by Joachim Low for the last Nations League games.