Kai Havertz is the most unusual player in the Bundesliga

There's basically no one in the Bundesliga like Kai Havertz. The 20-year-old smarterscout young prospect has a style that leaves us searching for words. Kaleidoscopic? Chameleonic? From season to season, he seems to be able to do whatever he puts his mind to. And he's probably outgrown Bayer Leverkusen.

Let's start with his overall numbers. What's not good about him? Hardly anything. His attacking output is well above average for the Bundesliga, his defending is excellent, his ball retention is outstanding, he's great in ground duels both ways, he's an excellent finisher, he's above average in aerial duels from dead balls:

Okay, despite standing 1.88m tall, he's mediocre on aerial duels in open play. It hardly matters. But how does Havertz generate that attacking output? Most young players with that kind of output are getting into the box and shooting a lot, with a fast-and-loose style (see: Jarrod Bowen). But not Havertz. That super-high ball retention rating should be a hint. Just check out his smartermap:

You can see that when he's playing CAM, Havertz is drifting over to the right side a lot. He's a left-footed player, so he's playing inverted a la Arjen Robben. But he's not doing it to turn defenders and shoot. In fact, he's barely getting into the box at all, and when he does it's often to pass. Because passing is what he's been doing. A lot. And really well.

That's right, a lot of Havertz's attacking output has been coming from passes that are often short but often very telling as well. Yet he wasn't always like this. Last season he shot a lot more, and he scored a bunch of goals. So hey, why not do something different this season? It's as though a top rapper decided to put out an opera album, and it was actually fantastic.

When we use our "Search by similar player" feature to find the players with styles close to Havertz's this season, we don't have a single Bundesliga player in the 200 closest matches from our database at CAM. The top name is Jack Grealish in 2016-17, when he only had about 300' at CAM. And Grealish matches again in 2017-18. Back then, Grealish was more likely to assist than score. So were Manuel Lanzini and Borja Valero, two more of the closest matches from Europe's top five leagues, in a couple of recent seasons:

All three players do a ton of link-up passing and have high ball retention. But Valero and Lanzini couldn't match Havertz's attacking output (all three are at rated a Bundesliga standard here). That's because Havertz's passes are more likely to make attacks more dangerous. And by the way, when Havertz has put his boot through the ball this season, he's taken extremely high-quality shots, with an average estimated chance of scoring around 18%, and he's finished them at an even higher rate.

On the other side of the ball, you may also have noticed that Havertz gets a ton of recoveries, and that's not all. His overall defending quantity is high because he hassles opposing players trying to bring the ball out of the back and through midfield. (It hardly needs mentioning that turnovers in the final third are the most valuable turnovers.) You may have noticed, too, that Havertz uses his dribbling skill with roughly average frequency for his position, and gets up for aerials at a normal rate as well. But this is basically core Havertz: he scoops up the ball and then puts it somewhere useful, again and again.

Havertz has so much to offer that for us the only question is how much Leverkusen can offer him. He's been with them for almost a decade – that's right, since he was 11 years old – so he clearly owes a lot to the club. Yet this Golden Boy finalist is the kind of talent who should be playing Champions League football soon, and Leverkusen sit five points away from fourth place in the Bundesliga at the time of this writing. Now, maybe the best thing he can do for the club is to command a fee that will pave the way for players like him for years to come.

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[Photo: Steffen Proessdorf]